Syncing music with desktop

[Scott Leonard]

My CD collection is ripped in WMA lossless. This produces high quality but very large file sizes. Great on a home network media server but not for a phone with much more limited space. My previous phone (7.x) used Zune for syncing and while I didn't care for Zune itself it did allow me to compress the files to a lower bitrate and get smaller file sizes. WP 8.1 now uses the Windows Phone app for desktop to sync music but doesn't seem to have any resize options for music. It is basically just a straight file copy to the phone. (Strangely it does have options for resizing pictures but not for music!) Anyway, is there any other program that I can use to sync music to my phone that allows resizing? Windows Media Player has this feature but does not recognize the phone as a device it can sync to.

 

[Kevin Rush]

You didn't care for Zune, but you found it useful. Good, good, great thinking.

 

[Scott Leonard]

You didn't care for Zune, but you found it useful. Good, good, great thinking.

Seriously?

 

[Scott Leonard]

Does anybody sync their music to their phone? How well does it work for you?

I really want to know how to compress music on the fly when syncing to the phone. Lossless files are way to big for even a 128G SDXC card.

 

[anon(123856)]

I just drag and drop them to the phone. But I don't need to compress my files as you do. Although I seem to remember Windows Media Player offering to down convert my files prior to syncing. Have you tried Windows Media Player yet?

 

[Scott Leonard]

I have tried it and would much rather use it but WMP does not recognize Windows Phones. Big step backward from Windows Mobile.

 

[anon(123856)]

That's strange because it recognized both my Lumias and I was able to sync to both. I had a few issues with it and just settled for drag and drop.

 

[Scott Leonard]

Success! First I tried reinstalling the drivers per another post here and that didn't work so I just uninstalled the "Windows Phone app for Desktop", rebooted and then Windows Media Player recognized the phone as a media device. I Synced a few albums and tested. Sounds great in the car over BT and the file sizes on the phone (128 kb/s) are 1/10th of the lossless originals.

I'm now a happy camper and busy syncing my favorite music to my phone.

 

[anon(123856)]

That's good to hear. Glad you got it working.