hmm ok so zune sees it. That means that Microsoft is hiding it from its own explorer?! Even my iphone is recognized in win explorer.
If it is showing as device in Explorer it would be possible to develop external syncing IF apple didn't change their stuff so often -- I know that you could sync a windows phone with media monkey two months ago, but now its broke again and you can't. If MS actually hides its phone from its own OS they are not just omitting something they are doing it on purpose IMHO. Would you develop and support a program that you know in advance is going to break in 3 to six months? Both Apple and Microsoft should be publicly hung
Anyways, I read your detailed post in Hydrogen audio (if they can't find an app that does it doubt anypace else will ...). You made the right choice by flac ... good compression totally lossless, no generational degrading if you change formats, and especially substantial metadata handling. I read that you do not want to have a duplicate of your collection (well that's your business but you only have 90gb not 9 terabytes - the mp3 at the highest/best compression rate in VBR would take up very little space you could probably stick it on a 32gb flash drive.)
Don't you need to have the format you are going to sync to your phone somewhere on the PC you are syncing to? Unless you have a lot of space on your phone you probably won't use flac, I presume. JRiver can convert on the fly so you wouldn't have to convert all your collection (keeping its flac files -- you can also set up a separate library in lame Mp3 just for your phone). OK what does suck is that you still have to have zune installed. But look at it another way you have the best player anywhere for audiophile playback that is playing and organzing your flac files. And if Zune can import playlists like mpl which I think it can you can just make a playlist in jriver, convert it and import the playlist into Zune. Not to mention that all your tagging will be automatically duplicated (if supported by Mp3 that is).
Oh well just frustrating to hear yet another case of these giants do everything to push anti-trust laws to their max grey areas. Just read about ebooks anti trust and apple this week ..... grotesque.