Like me, you’re probably constantly on a quest to find the best way to sync music from your computer to your S60-powered phone. Sadly, with Nokia’s tremendous emphasis on music, I haven’t found a really good way to do this – until now. I’ve been testing Salling Media Sync lately, which is available for both Macs and Windows-based computer (sorry, Linux, you’re still left out, for now). Salling Media Sync is able to sync your S60-powered phone with iTunes, but how well does it really work?
To start out, let me say that I’m a die-hard Winamp fan, and have been for years. It’s by far the best desktop digital media player, and it works great. Unfortunately, the feature that syncs with portable devices is awful. Just, completely useless, in my experience. Plus, its autoplaylist feature isn’t the best, either. The Nokia PC Music Client is making improvements, but it still doesn’t offer what I want. I’ve listed it out before, but here’s what I’m looking for in a true mobile+desktop music experience:
I have 11,000+ MP3s on my computer. With that size of a collection, it’s easy to see how some songs might get lost in the fray, and I’d never hear them. Thus, for my mobile music experience, I want to be able to create an autoplaylist that helps me ‘discover’ these less-heard tracks. iTunes is, sadly, the only platform that I’ve found that does this right. I can choose to exclude certain genres, and I can set a maximum size for the playlist – either by number of tracks, or by overall size, such as 6GB. I can set this playlist to include any track that I haven’t played in the past month, for example, and that’s a great way to keep my music collection fresh.
This is where Salling Media Sync comes in. Salling Media Sync, available in a Lite and Full version, is able to sync my S60-powered phone with my iTunes collection, including any playlists I may have. It’s true, there is already an app that does this, called iTunes Agent, but it’s not been updated since March. On the other hand, Salling Media Sync has been updated twice since I’ve been checking it out, and they have a rather active forum, which the developer consistently monitors.
So, how does it work? Decently. It’s very much a work in progress, by my experience, but progress is being made. Basically, when you connect your phone to your computer in Media Transfer/Music Player mode, Salling Media Sync pops up, and checks out what’s on your phone. You can set the application to automatically begin syncing your phone if you wish, or you can have it completely manual.
You can choose for Salling Media Sync to copy *all* of your iTunes music to your phone, or you can specify a number of playlists. Podcasts can also be synced, and you can filter these by how recent the episode is, as well. As mentioned before, there are 2 different versions of Salling Media Sync – the freeware Lite version, or the premium Full version.
The Lite version maintains the sync capabilities, but cannot do a two-way sync. This means that, after your first sync, when you reconnect your phone to get a fresh load of music, Salling Media Sync must first erase all the music from your phone before loading the new tracks – even if some of those tracks are the same. This is obviously a rather slow method, but works fine if you only have a couple GB’s of music. The transfer speed is also limited in this free mode.
The Full version, which costs only $22, unlocks the real magic, specifically for phones like the N95 8GB or N96, which is what I tested it with. In this version, after your first sync, the application checks to see what tracks are currently loaded on the phone, and then checks that against the tracks that it needs to load. If the same track is in both lists, then it stays. The end result is a much faster transfer process. Also, the transfer speed is unbridled, so you’ll have a much quicker experience overall.
To be completely honest, I’ve had quite a bit of trouble with Salling Media Sync. It’s no secret that my experience with .NET-applications is really terrible, and Salling Media Sync is no exception. Jonas, the developer, assures me this is not the norm, though. If you can get past any .NET issues, I’ve found that Salling Media Sync works really well.
Though I’m not overly concerned with Album Art, the tracks that have it were synced fully with Salling Media Sync, so that playing music through the default music player on my N96 showed the correct album art, without me jumping through any hoops. Most importantly, with Salling Media Sync, there is no need to refresh your library after a sync. Everything is already there, ready to go.
You can download the free version of Salling Media Sync here, and can buy the premium version there, too. I would highly recommend you try the free version first, to see how the application handles on your computer. Based on my experience, while it’s not a fool-proof solution, it gets the job done better than any other combination I’ve tried thus far for a good experience on BOTH the mobile and desktop.
What do you use? Have you found a better way?
