Tune up II - transferring music using iTuneMyWalkman
After being tipped off by Sälli, I managed to take his iTuneMyWalkman application for a spin, and I have to admit that I am completely sold. Basically, iTMW can be used quite similarly to SyncTunes, but I particularly appreciate the clean user interface (slightly ahead of SyncTunes there), the supplied scripts for syncing automatically upon USB connection as well as the scripts installed directly to iTunes. Particularly the automatic syncing makes the whole process awfully close to ease of the ever-evasive iPod experience.
In order to start using iTMW with an S60 phone, you need a 3rd edition phone that supports the USB mass storage mode. Follow the instructions in the HOWTO for getting things working smoothly with USB. Next, download iTuneMyWalkman and install it by dragging it to your Applications folder.
When your phone is connected, fire up iTMW:
Before proceeding to the actual synchronisation, pay a visit to the Preferences pane and at least the General tab and set the path to the correct volume (the mounted memory card of your handset). Mine looks like this:
As far as I know, this is the only option you really need to specify at this stage. You can experiment with others later.
I dove right in and installed the scripts for iTunes as well as the folder actions from the main window. Based on brief testing, they work as advertised. The end effect is that once I plug my phone in, my playlist in iTunes is synchronised with the S60 phone completely transparently, without any further effort from my part.
Of course, the second best thing about iTMW is its unbeatable price (free), and the best thing is that it is open source, which means that if you do not like the way it works, you can improve it yourself. The application is built using AppleScript (which I consider to be the only read-only programming language in the world – doh!).
Comments
synctunes 2.0
SyncTunes has been updated to 2.0.
It now looks much better and the synching works now very quck and stable.
A great tool - and still free (charity donation appreciated).
I am sure this will be my music managing app for the N95 - at least until Nokia comes up with their announced media application for Mac.
Maybe this is a topic for a new blog entry of it's own?
Viele Grüße,
:-) Dirk
Turning playlists to track lists
Any idea how to automatically turn playlists that are transferred into tracklists on the Nokia phone? I've got itunemywalkman working, and synctunes too, and the result is that all the tracks are trasferred, but to then get back the playylist structure these have to be re-created on the phone. With classical music especially this is hopeless, as the various movements of a piece all get transferred as spearate songs. Help!
no playlists in iTMW :-(
I am not sure whether I got you right. But 1. iTMW does not copy playlists onto the mobile device and 2. SyncTunes does (but has a much slower way of transferring big file lists than iTMW).
Wo what I do is:
I have iTMW mantain my music list - the music I want on my N95 that does not have to be in playlists because I search via artist or album or genre - or don't search at all but just use shuffle mode.
For my playlists (especially my daily commuting list of podcasts), I use syncTunes.
Caution: For each of the programs, you must create different folders on the device because they clean each other's files away, otherwise.
And Caution II: a special trick is necessary on the Nokia N95 because the s60 player needs the volume label ('E:') ahead of the file path of the songs in the m3u playlist. Paul Nesfield from SyncTunes told me how to care for that easily. So I could share this information if you need it.
Viele Grüße,
:-) Dirk
Volume label
Thanks, Dirk
I think the lack of volume label explains why I wasn't getting playlists transferred under SyncTunes (only the individual songs). If you could share how fix that, I'd be very grateful!
cheers
david
Volume label
Hi,
here's what the author of the Software, Paul Nesfield, wrote to me (I'm sure I'm allowed to share this):
_______
In the application bundle open folder Contents (via right click, D.S.) then folder Resources. Use a text editor like TextWrangler from Bare Bones to open the PERL script file 'post-process_playlist.pl'. I put a line in there that makes it easy to add the prefix. Search for the lines:
#Prefix to path - USE TO ADD ANYTHING TO FRONT OF EVERY FILE PATH
$PrefixPath="";
Now change them to:
#Prefix to path - USE TO ADD ANYTHING TO FRONT OF EVERY FILE PATH
$PrefixPath="e:";
Save the file.
_________
This worked perfectly with my syncTunes.
Only problem: this is not permanent. When upgrading to the next version of synctunes, the procedure must be repeated.
Viele Grüße,
:-) Dirk Speder
How do you know it's transfering?
I'm using a Nokia E70-2. I love your site! It's very encouraging/helpful to those of us with s60 devices and Macs. =)
I can see the phone mount in the Finder and iTMW seems to see the phone when I connect (asking what I want to do). I choose sync and then confirm I want to sync, but I don't see anything mount in iTunes and it doesn't look like anything transfered into the phone.
Also, how do I stop iPhoto from launching when I connect my phone? I don't see anything in the iPhoto preferences.
Playlist and path to the volume
The application is not supposed to show up in iTunes, but handle the sync separately.
Have you set the correct path to your E70 memory card mounted volume in the iTMW preferences? Also, have you created a playlist in iTunes and indicated in iTMW that you want to sync that particular playlist?
In order to define what happens when you connect a camera (which I think your Mac thinks your E70 memory card is), start Image Capture, open its preferences and select None (or something similar).
i am getting a descriptor
i am getting a descriptor type mismatch when trying to do this on my n95 8gb th error code is -10001.
i have set it too use the correct folder and also too use a playlist and everything else id standard but i still get the error and then it says it is syncing but nothing visible happens.
is this correct or i screwed up something.
please help