Constant choices – getting music on my phone

Last updated on August 30th, 2019 at 07:31 am

I’ve had my new Android phone for over a week now, and I haven’t done too much with it. I’ve used a grand total of 6-minutes of airtime, and it seems that I use very little data, since most of the time I’m connected by Wireless. What I do use a lot is text messaging. I think that is largely because of the novelty factor – it is so easy for me to text on this phone that I am having fun with it. I decided that I should try and put some music on the phone, so that when I go out for a run, I can use the phone to both track my distance (using the GPS in the phone and an App) and list to music. With an iPhone, getting music onto the phone is pretty simple, you launch iTunes, plug in the phone and sync. When I tried plugging in my phone with the Media Player setting, I had not luck. My Mac didn’t even notice that something had been plugged in. So, off to Google I went in search of a solution. The challenge I’m finding is that there is a lot of choice with my phone. There isn’t just one way to transfer music onto the phone, I now have to choose which applications and which techniques I want to use. I can see the benefit in the flexibility of choice, but on the other hand, it means that every new task with this phone becomes a research challenge. The fact that I have a Mac makes things a little more complicated, as many of the techniques I find only work on PCs. I need to figure out what all my choices are, then decide which one I want to use. In so many cases, I just want a single choice that works! In the end – after about an hour of research – I discovered a simple solution:

1. Install DoubleTwist on the Mac.
2. Launch DoubleTwist and configure a playlist or two.
3. Install the DoubleTwist Player on the Android phone.
4. Configure the DoubleTwist Player to give your device a name. I also setup the Auto USB drive to make connecting easier.
5. Connect the phone to the Mac using the USB Cable. If the phone prompts, select Mass Storage, not Media Player!

Now DoubleTwist will try to sell you their airsync solution, which sounds pretty cool, but isn’t a free app. If you are likely to want to download music or podcasts on a regular basis and don’t want to go hunting for your cable every time, then it would be worthwhile $5 purchase. This seems to have worked for me. I now have an application on my phone that will nicely playback my music, and it only took 2-hours to figure out (uggg).