Media Manager for Android - They all Suck

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garfnodie

Senior Member
Apr 2, 2008
449
52
Columbia, TN, USA
:confused: So my father and step mother recently got new Android phone, they both got Evo 4G's. My father has been working non stop to get his wife's music and audio books setup so that it's really easy to make playlist, sync them, play them back, etc. He has used WMP, had issues with that, so I suggested DoubleTwist. He messed with it and didn't like the interface, felt that it wasn't that intuitive. I decided that I would actually mess with dT myself so that I could see if it was worth suggesting to others. I found it pretty easy to make playlist and sync them and stuff, but there is one major problem with it, it ignores track numbers. I can't get it to show me track numbers at all, and can't get it to organize track in an album by track number, and if I drag a whole album into it's own playlist, it organized in alphabetical order, I can't get it to play by track number.

Next, I decided to mess with Motorola Media Link. I never even got to the point of seeing if it will work with my N1 cause I couldn't get it to sort by album, or artist or whatever when I clicked on the column header like would happen in Windows explorer. I can accept Motorola Media Link opening in artist mode first, but I should then be able to click a song, then go and hit the album column header and it will keep the fist song selected and resort the song by album showing the other songs in the same album above and below the original selected song, but that did not happen.

I'm not even going to mess with WMP anymore as I feel that is utter s**t when it comes UI. Doubletwist makes making playlist easy, but ignores track numbers, Motorola Media link doesn't sort things properly. Are there no other truly intuitive, easy to use, fully featured media player/manager for Android devices. I feel that this is going to make it difficult for Android devices to truly win over the hearts of iPhone users, who phone's just work. As much as I hate Apple's communist control over their platform and hardware, you have to give them credit for making a phone that even the technologically inept can use and work without problems :mad:
 

RogerPodacter

Senior Member
Apr 12, 2010
5,654
425
Los Angeles, CA
What's wrong with just drag and drop your files? I think that's the easiest way. Don't even need any software, just plug in the cable, it pops up as mass storage, drag over your files to a folder, done:)
 

sosquidtaste

Senior Member
Jun 28, 2010
406
130
Los Angeles
I made the iPhone to N1 jump recently myself and had some similar growing pains in the media management side of things. Although I only really care about music (not podcasts or audiobooks) and have some real anal retentive requirements for playlist management, I've found bTunes as my media player and iSyncr for media management to be a great combination.

bTunes copies the navigation of the iOS iPod app perfectly, but adds in on-the-fly playlist creation and editing under the hood.

iSyncr lets me copy over playlists directly from my iTunes account, and updates playcounts and everything when I run the program.

I'm not sure if those things will apply to your parents' needs as elegantly as they have to my own. But hopefully it might help!
 

garfnodie

Senior Member
Apr 2, 2008
449
52
Columbia, TN, USA
What's wrong with just drag and drop your files? I think that's the easiest way. Don't even need any software, just plug in the cable, it pops up as mass storage, drag over your files to a folder, done:)

That's what my father and I do for ourselves, but that's not a good solution for my step mother who's not good with that kind of stuff and really doesn't have any desire to learn that. The ultimate goal of all this is to make it as easy as possible for her so that she can do it all without having to ask my father how or have him do.

I made the iPhone to N1 jump recently myself and had some similar growing pains in the media management side of things. Although I only really care about music (not podcasts or audiobooks) and have some real anal retentive requirements for playlist management, I've found bTunes as my media player and iSyncr for media management to be a great combination.

bTunes copies the navigation of the iOS iPod app perfectly, but adds in on-the-fly playlist creation and editing under the hood.

iSyncr lets me copy over playlists directly from my iTunes account, and updates playcounts and everything when I run the program.

I'm not sure if those things will apply to your parents' needs as elegantly as they have to my own. But hopefully it might help!

Thanks, I'll send the info to my father and see if that works for him. He's still trying to find a solution for the audio books though. He's does some reading on the Audible Android app that's in beta and it appears to be having issues, so he's leery of installing it. But hopefully the music aspect will work for him.
 

jim.pulliam

New member
Jul 8, 2010
1
0
Playlists and WMP

I am the father.
The biggest issue being able to easily have the playlists show upon the phone.
It can be accomplished with WMP by manually saving the play list as an M3u, then drag and drop that to root of the music folder on the phone, then you have to delete the auto generated WPl list from the pc in order to not have the play list show up twice in the play list list. This has to be repeated each time a change is made to the list.

Wish for WMP:
Allow you to set default play list file type.
For WMP to sync the list to the phone.

Thanks for any future help or advice.:(
 

Kobro

Senior Member
Nov 21, 2013
581
95
I am the father.
The biggest issue being able to easily have the playlists show upon the phone.
It can be accomplished with WMP by manually saving the play list as an M3u, then drag and drop that to root of the music folder on the phone, then you have to delete the auto generated WPl list from the pc in order to not have the play list show up twice in the play list list. This has to be repeated each time a change is made to the list.

Wish for WMP:
Allow you to set default play list file type.
For WMP to sync the list to the phone.

Thanks for any future help or advice.:(

i use fusion media player, excellent for making/viewing/playing playlists.
i dont know what format playlists are saved as, but the playlist i made in fusion works in other media players as well, like google play music, es media player, and stock gingerbread music player app.
i never even touched the playlist files, not move them, not edit or anything, idk where the file even is and my playlists work on all above mentioned players. enjoy!