Friday 22 April 2011

Wireless Sync Music between Ubuntu PC and Android Phone

PC: Linux - Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick
Phone: HTC Wildfire with HTC Sense for Android 2.2 Froyo

I have been looking for a good way to wirelessly sync music to my phone for ages. I tried various android apps that failed to meet my needs in one way or another:

-Winamp - need winamp client on PC - no version for linux
-DoubleTwist (AirSync) - only for iTunes
-Android Sync Manager WiFi - PC client requires winXP or above
-Dropbox - must upload all music to internet first (when dropbox syncs on PC), which takes AGES, AND cannot auto-download anything - have to select each song and long press>download (BUT could work with additional app "Sync Folder with Dropbox")
-SugarSync - no Linux client
-ZumoDrive - same as dropbox in that have to upload everything to the cloud first, and cannot auto sync a particular folder on android, so would have to manually download all songs

And then I found Syncness. It doesn't require a PC client as it connects straight to network shares over your WiFi. Requires minimal setup (see below), and then you can have a directory of music on your PC automatically syncing to your phone every night (or just manually whenever you want). It costs about £1, but is well worth it.


SETUP

Put some music in a dir on your PC, and share it: R click > Sharing Options (then it might ask you for permissions to install some sharing libs). Now open Syncness on your phone and create a new profile and give it a name e.g. Music. Click the "Share" folder icon, and let it scan your network for shares, and then select your share from the list. Next click the "Local" folder icon and select your Music dir (if you don't already have one, you may need to connect your phone to your PC and create it first). Set "Sync Type" to "Push To / Pull From Remote", check "Active" (so it appears in your "Active profiles" list), and also check "Allow file deletions", so it can wipe old music you don't want any more. Then enter your Ubuntu name/pass (I left Domain blank), and do Menu > Save. Then you can setup a sync schedule if you want, but I don't change my music that often, so I just do it manually by pressing the big blue SYNCHRONIZE button on the home-screen.

5 comments:

  1. How does this handle playlists?

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  2. Syncness only handles files, whereas playlists are stored in the database, according to this: http://goo.gl/37r4P.

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  3. Thanks for this post. I had been looking for a solution for the same thing, and I'd ruled out the same other services. Well worth a quid.

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  4. an alternativ is wifi syncr (it's free)

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  5. Thanks for the post. I have now installed and configured Syncness between our two HTC Desire Android phones and our Ubuntu desktop. It is configured to sync Instagram and phone pics to the desktop once a day and working perfectly.
     

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