Holy crap, syncing with WP8 is a trainwreck.

[pdskep]

I certainly hope someone at MS is paying attention to this. If I was using my phone as an MP3 player like I was a year ago I would dump my entire MS ecosystem and move to Apple as much as I hate Apple, this catastrophe would make the switch necessary. As someone who just upgraded my computer to W8, upgraded my Focus to a 920 and bought a Surface, I am pissed off. The Xbox music app is an abomination. They've gone 3 steps backwards and quite honestly I don't give a crap about cloud music as data plans are not cheap. I want to be able to manage music effectively on my computer and easily sync to my phone. Like I said, since I don't use my phone as a music player as much the positives of the phone outweighs this HUGE negative and I'm able to find some workarounds, but I shouldn't have to. Someone should be fired for this!

 

[badMojo69]

You assume they don't know exactly what they're doing.

 

[Workshop2]

Been banging my head against a wall today. This thing keeps splitting albums up due to different artist names.....zune didn't have this problem

 

[kantFTW]

I use Media Monkey. It works perfectly. Also, it'll add in album artwork to my songs embedded so that it appears on my phone.

 

[pdskep]

Zune worked PERFECTLY. Why abandon it other than the name?

 

[jasqid]

Zune worked PERFECTLY. Why abandon it other than the name?

I was really expecting them to just rebrand the Zune app to Xbox. Wasn't expecting it to turn into what it is... And for wireless sync to be removed for a nonworking cloud.

 

[invertme]

I don't use the new WP8 toll for Win 7. I just use the file manager option. Drag and drop. No issues whatsoever. Makes pulling pictures off a **** of a lot easier than it was with Zune. "Plug in phone>Run Zune Software>(pictures sync to PC)>go to folder..." It got old, and annoying. I don't sync pictures to SkyDrive because I like having them on my local PC. So, the drag and drop method is so awesome now.

This is what I do too and it couldn't been any easier for me - well unless someone else did it for me...

 

[dvdhills]

I have had to start using itunes to manage my music and podcasts. Everything ran so smoothly just a week ago. I remember the efforts made to make sure the 30gb Zune was compatible when zune upgraded to podcasts. The Zune/WP ecosystem is what has given MS this new metro advantage. I picked WP8 because I have chosen to operate in that ecosystem. Why make me work with Itunes to get podcasts on my phone. What good is the charging pad for the Nokia 920 if there is not wireless sync. To sync my new Lumia I have to plug the phone in. Wait for the Sync program to recognize it (several minutes). Wait for the sync program to populate the libraries, which it has to open Itunes to do. Wait for the sync button to appear in black. Click sync and hope it works. This is a several minute interactive process.
A week ago I could plug my phone in and everything would be taken care of.
I am curious why Microsoft would create a process that gives more exposure to iTunes.

 

[aalex]

I have had to start using itunes to manage my music and podcasts. Everything ran so smoothly just a week ago. I remember the efforts made to make sure the 30gb Zune was compatible when zune upgraded to podcasts. The Zune/WP ecosystem is what has given MS this new metro advantage. I picked WP8 because I have chosen to operate in that ecosystem. Why make me work with Itunes to get podcasts on my phone. What good is the charging pad for the Nokia 920 if there is not wireless sync. To sync my new Lumia I have to plug the phone in. Wait for the Sync program to recognize it (several minutes). Wait for the sync program to populate the libraries, which it has to open Itunes to do. Wait for the sync button to appear in black. Click sync and hope it works. This is a several minute interactive process.
A week ago I could plug my phone in and everything would be taken care of.
I am curious why Microsoft would create a process that gives more exposure to iTunes.

You have to be a great programmer, but a social moron to work at Microsoft it seems. I have a hard time understanding how any company can be this clueless. It just makes me nod my head in absolute disgust. Let's get our flag ship product out the door and let's not tell anyone it's broken. They are either too stupid to know it is, which is worse, or they are so stupid they didn't think they should get ahead of this and warn us and reassure us that the feature is coming soon. Either way you're looking at clueless idiots. It just makes me want to throw a chair at someone over there. I just want to sit down with someone there and talk some good ol common sense into them. Nothing pisses me off more than IDIOTS.

 

[Auric Jarrel]

Pretty bummed with how much of a step back from Zune this has been. My Zune collection was organized PERFECTLY. All my music was neatly labeled and tagged, and when I moved it to my HD7 it kept the same tags, album covers, and even recognized the artists by showing their pictures in the background during playback. With the 8x, I had to uninstall Zune, load up Windows Media Player (which I haven't used in nearly 3 years), and then re-tag ALL of my albums so they were organized properly. Syncing is a nightmare, but it's less nightmarish on WMP. Now I'm having problems with Xbox Music on my phone recognizing album artists properly. What the **** were you thinking, Microsoft?

 

[jasqid]

This is right up there with Apple iOS 6 MAPS fail. Clous sync is one thing... but NOBODY is going to use it with metered data plans. And for Gods' sake please bring back WiFi Sync

 

[vedichymn]

This is right up there with Apple iOS 6 MAPS fail. Clous sync is one thing... but NOBODY is going to use it with metered data plans. And for Gods' sake please bring back WiFi Sync

I think it's personally worse than that (as someone who upgraded my wife's phone to iOS 6), and there's almost no mention of it.

I still don't understand why I didn't see ANY reviews mention this. Either they didn't get a copy of the sync software (possible), or they didn't actually use it the way a real person would.

 

[GSOgymrat]

At least you guys can at least get your phones to connect to your computer. I can't get my Lumia 920 to connect to ANY computer or my Surface. I can't get past square one.

 

[dudedud]

They probably DIDNT use it. Most reviews say "These are the specs this is it compared to the iPhone it looks nice, it's fast. *end*" and then they touch on things that were hyped about.
I'm currently cleaning my music folder up and letting XBOX music re download all my Zune pass downloaded music, then im gonna have to delete all the Zune music
I'm thinking the file explorer in windows 8 will work well for organizing the music once it's all said and done.
I guess they did this to appeal to the android nerds who said that WP7 sucks because there is no drag and drop.

---------- Post Merged at 04:58 AM ----------

At least you guys can at least get your phones to connect to your computer. I can't get my Lumia 920 to connect to ANY computer or my Surface. I can't get past square one.

That sounds like a hardware issue.

 

[OptimusDims]

Is there a way you can get Xbox Music to download all your Zune pass content with kicking everything off manually?

 

[killer rin]

This works a lot better than that crappy WP8 app...Welcome to 2003 we missed you!
The Best Way to Sync Windows Phone 8; Not What You’d Expect | Pocketnow

It really is a shame :\

What I don't understand is why are they telling us to use Itunes instead of telling a random programmer on his lunch break to spend 20 minutes coding in support. It's only free advertising for Apple. If they are using Itunes, they see the Istore which is constantly throwing in their face "Look at all of the apps we have" or "Buy music/videos here". It's a terrible business move, especially since they are trying to break through the Itunes Store Monopoly with Xbox Music.

 

[AaHaa]

Alright, I'll just use WMP to sync my collection until Microsoft comes up with a solution. I've noticed that, if I organize and tag an album in Zune and then drag and drop it in WMP, everything looks good. I've just got one question to Windows Phone 8 owners: WMP seems to compress the high-res album artwork I add... How does artwork look after it's synchronized to the phone?

 

[laramid94]

for starters podcast media suctrying to transfur several podcasts that are not in the MS Store, and there is not way to do this. the drag and drop is nice, but not for a lot of media, and movies and all that other junk. i do not want to be forced to the cloud... its laggie, sucks, and what if i do not have a connection for several days. junk

 

[bear_lx]

first of all we need to understand a few things, this is a brand new, completely re-imagined OS. therefor, there is going to be a learning curve, and thus some of our everyday computing needs to be polished a bit more. so although it may be a trainwreck right now, i can assure you these issues will be addressed. MS didnt switch a perfectly functional windows 7 to windows 8 just for the sake of metro, this is the future. as for xbox music, this is basically a music app and streaming service for the time being, good for listening to music and nothing more. so for the time being, and all of those running windows 8, switch to classic mode, and downloand .NET Framework runtime 2.0.( just bing .NET framework if windows doesnt automatically find it and download it ) and then download the zune software. it still works perfectly and an efficient way to manage your library. if all else fails, media monkey is a great alternative, i actually used this instead of itunes for my wifes iphone because i prefered it over itunes. it is great software that gets the job done.

so moral of the story is, use zune for now, and be patient. we all know this is the future and will certainly only get better! i still get frustrated daily , but it is a learning experience,and once we get used to it, it will be so much faster and efficient at delivering content.

 

[vedichymn]

so moral of the story is, use zune for now, and be patient. we all know this is the future and will certainly only get better! i still get frustrated daily , but it is a learning experience,and once we get used to it, it will be so much faster and efficient at delivering content.

But even that doesn't work. All I actually want to do is sync 1 smart playlist and my podcasts between my phone and my pc, and the only way to accomplish that was to migrate everything to iTunes. The desktop software crashes when copying that playlist to my phone, and podcasts don't actually "sync" at all, just get copied to the phone/deleted when you finish them on the PC.

Microsoft ripped out a ton of functionality when they moved away from Zune, and didn't do anything to replace it (I'm assuming due to lack of time).