Music management purgatory!

[Matthew Blair]

Hey everyone!

I made the switch a month ago from ios to WP and have been happy so far....mostly.

The problems I am having focus mainly around putting my music files (drm free mp3's) onto my Lumia 920. I am used to just plugging in my old iphone and checking a few boxes and letting iTunes do all the heavy lifting. I'm finding out the hard way it's no where near as easy now.

I have used the Windows Phone Desktop App to do the transferring through iTunes, but it's very clunky and buggy to use and has no option for audiobooks...unless you screw around with the metadata on each file and turn them into podcasts. Needless to say, I HATE this method.

I recently did a factory restore on my Windows 8 machine and had to reinstall all my music files and I'm here to ask you all what is the best way to go from here. Do I go through itunes yet again and do that half$#@ method or is there another way? I don't want to invest all the time into redoing the iTunes library if there is a better more "Windows" centered way.

HELP!!!!

 

[Laura Knotek]

Hi and welcome to WPCentral.

Have you seen this thread? Perhaps it will help you with music.

 

[PB_H]

Hi and welcome to WPCentral.

Have you seen this thread? Perhaps it will help you with music.

Or maybe looking at what's involved there purgatory might seem the better option. :wink:

Drag and drop if you have a lot of music files in your laptop's library doesn't mess up if you have the time.

 

[t3b4n]

Hello!

I have a very large ALAC music collection, originally managed with iTunes. Now that I have a Windows Phone, I've faced a similar problem: WP doesn't support ALAC, so I needed to find a way to convert my music before load it to the phone. I ended up using "MusicBee", a desktop music player that can be used to sync content to a MTP player. If all your music collection is in MP?, it would be a lot easyer for you. You coul use my opction, or you can use Windows Media Player, the Windows Phone application for Windows 8, MediaMonkey or Songbird. All of these have similar capabilities :winktongue:

 

[Matthew Blair]

Honestly....as smart as MS is, why is this process so archaic and difficult?

 

[Matthew Blair]

Or maybe looking at what's involved there purgatory might seem the better option. :wink:

Drag and drop if you have a lot of music files in your laptop's library doesn't mess up if you have the time.

I spent WEEKS getting iTunes dialed in with artwork, names, tags, etc....I'm going to explode if I have to do that again.

 

[jmshub]

I spent WEEKS getting iTunes dialed in with artwork, names, tags, etc....I'm going to explode if I have to do that again.

I remember switching from an iPod/itunes to a Zune. It was a nightmare as I was a little OCD with tagging and whatnot, but perfect in itunes didn't equate to perfect in Zune and vice-versa. This process, I'm afraid, is just as bad now as it was a few years ago.

 

[squire777]

The Zune software was actually not bad for tagging in my experience. XBox music is terrible though and messed up much of my collection.

Some songs get automatically changed to something completely different as soon as I drag them on to the phone.

 

[Boggy79]

The poor music management is the one thing stopping me from binning my old iPod Touch. The desktop app is supposed to only transfer songs that can be played on the 920 but I moved 400+ songs over last night and more than half couldn't be played. Converted them all to WMA Lossless and tried again only to find that the volume was so low that even turned up to 30 it couldn't be heard over normal conversation.

Really can't see why MS haven't put more effort into improving this side of WP. A huge part of the iPhone's initial success was the simplicity of how it deals with music due to the foundations of the iPod.

 

[Pete]

Absolutely agree. Both the PC and WP8 sides of music/player just don't fill be me joy.

I ended up getting an iPod Classic and storing all of my music on there and keep my phone almost empty. Yes, I need to carry around two devices if I need music, but it gives me so much more flexibility. My phone has more space, and I can use my iPod with a large variety of hardware (car/dock speaker, etc).