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[park]

The HTC Desire HD comes out in Japan in November, and I'm seriously considering ditching my iphone to get one. Before I jump I just want to check a few things though.

Is syncing from MC a smooth experience? It's 99% of the reason I'll be changing from the iphone, so this one is important.
1.  Can you sync a playlist, and files not in that list get deleted from the device (this is how MC used to work with my old ipod a few years ago)
2.  Can you sync photos easily, and does android have a good photo browser?
3.  Are MC Genre, Artist, and Album tags all picked up properly, and are any other fields read by the android music player?
4.  Do playlists / smartlists sync, and do they work well on Android?
5. Is the built in music player on android good enough?

If the answer to any of these questions is no, your workarounds would be appreciated?

[zxsix]

The HTC Desire HD comes out in Japan in November, and I'm seriously considering ditching my iphone to get one. Before I jump I just want to check a few things though.

Is syncing from MC a smooth experience? It's 99% of the reason I'll be changing from the iphone, so this one is important.
1.  Can you sync a playlist, and files not in that list get deleted from the device (this is how MC used to work with my old ipod a few years ago)

yes.

3.  Are MC Genre, Artist, and Album tags all picked up properly, and are any other fields read by the android music player?

yes.  though the built-in music player in android doesn't use genre for browsing.  3rd party players do.

4.  Do playlists / smartlists sync, and do they work well on Android?

yes perfectly.

5. Is the built in music player on android good enough?

yes for most things.  I either play by playlist or by shuffle, so I don't really miss the lack of genre browsing.  As already stated, you can use a 3rd party player to gain that.
The one glaring omission is no way to change ratings on android, and therefore no way to sync them back to MC.

[park]

Thanks a lot for all the replies. Can you recommend a good third party music player?

Do you sync photos from MC too? How does it deal with photos taken by the phone? Can it tell which ones are new?

[zxsix]

Thanks a lot for all the replies. Can you recommend a good third party music player?

Do you sync photos from MC too? How does it deal with photos taken by the phone? Can it tell which ones are new?

I don't sync photos but don't see any reason it won't work.  You specify a destination folder in the settings and sync them by selecting playlists just like audio.

3rd party player would be btunes since it copies iPhone player.  Mixzing if you must have genre browsing.  Otherwise just run the stock player.

[park]

Again, thanks for all the great info. I'd just like to clarify one last thing.

So you can set up a folder as a handheld device directly on the android device then? And then sync photos to that.

The reason I ask is because I attempted the same thing with my jailbroken iphone. I used an app from the cydia store to allow the iphone to show up as a usb device in windows. But even though it showed in explorer, it didnt show up in the drives list in MC and so I wasnt able to sync to it from MC. I couldnt even drag files from MC into the it's folders in explorer.

[zxsix]

Sdcard in Droid phone shows up as a drive letter in MC.  In MC device settings you tell MC what folder to put audio and image files in.   Droid will scan sdcard and display files in appropriate apps.

[marko]

zxsix, seeing as you're on a roll here so far, do you know...

do [last played] and [number plays] get synced back to MC from the android device?

[park]

Got my HTC Desire HD this weekend. It's great. The HTC sense music player knows to sort by Disc # before Track # (something even the ipod/iphone never did). It also deals with long name tracks really well. So playing classical music on the phone is great.

Gizmo works ok, but I was expecting much more. Basically it's the same as the Browser based experience on the iphone. It even uses the phones browser instead of just doing everything in-app. It took me a while to figure out that it opens playing now as a new browser window, and how to flick back and forward between the library and playing now.
I was hoping that because it's a dedicated app, you might be able to sort tracks in playing now, or maybe pre-load an album while you are listening to a song. Long track names also get truncated.

Syncing was great, though very slow. I left it in the "preparing handheld" mode (it had been like that for over half an hour) thinking MC had crashed, but was pleasantly surprised in the morning to see the sync had finished successfully. Havent tried photos or video yet.

Using the dlna feature of the HTC Desire HD was also a pleasant surprise. It worked straight away. I was playing music from my server before I'd even copied any on to the phone or installed Gizmo.

[zxsix]

zxsix, seeing as you're on a roll here so far, do you know...

do [last played] and [number plays] get synced back to MC from the android device?

Just tested.
Sync'd device.
Checked song in MC showing 0 plays and 'never played' for both last played and last skipped fields.
Played song on droid from start to finish.
Sync'd device again.
No change to those 3 fields in MC.
Appears that sync is 1-way street at the moment.  Not like you can rate songs on android anyway, so nothing else to sync besides the last played info.

[marko]

Thanks for the feedback. I have yet to sync anything to the phone, and am wondering if I ever will... so far, gizmo has been brilliant and gives me access to a whole heap more than might fit on my 16Gb SD card!!

-marko.

[zxsix]

You must not use air transportation much ;-)

[marko]

I fall firmly into the "I ain't gittin' on no plane, fool" category (if you remember BA?)

I did do a 40 minute hop to Dublin a few years ago... never again!!

[park]

Just want to follow up on my initial feedback and say that with the recent changes gizmo feels so much better. Now flicking between playing now and the library is smooth. Cover art is quick to appear in the lists, and on the whole the navigation feels less like html and more app like.

Would love to see some kind of seek bar or skip x seconds type command. Would also be great for my commutes on the subway if gizmo would use its available bandwidth to pre‐load all the queued up files in playing now instead of just the current file. Great work so far though！