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Syncing Music From Macos to Android

2020-11-15T22:35

Never before, have I had a portable copy of my music collection. There have been a few close shaves; an iTunes library on a portable HDD (I couldn't play it unless I was on a computer), an iPod classic (with a lot, but not all of my music), and streaming through pCloud (but that needed a network connection).

My Oneplus 6T has more storage space (by at least a factor of four) than any phone I've owned before. This means that I can finally keep my entire music collection on my phone.

A shift in my habits over the past few years has also contributed in making this possible. I've stopped choosing FLAC over MP3. I don't know if this is because my ears are aging, that my hi-fi isn't plugged in, or perhaps that I care less about technical superiority. Whatever the case, MP3 files are 5x smaller than FLAC. I've also culled a lot of shit from my library. Most of music wasn't mine anymore; it belonged to another version of me, now long gone. Overall, I reduced the size of the collection from 200GB to 30GB.

I mostly listen to music while I'm working my day-job. I do this through my computer and will continue to do so. I see my phone being used when I play music anywhere else. I listen to music (or more often old radio dramas) while I'm working in my shed, my kid likes to hear rock-and-roll while driving in the car, and I'll sometimes listen to something while eating/cooking in the kitchen. (I had kept my iPod plugged into a portable speaker in the kitchen until I bricked it trying to install Rockbock a few months ago.)

Most recently, I've been using pCloud on my iPhone to stream my music or play from an offline cache. Without the space to store all my music on the device, I cherry-picked the best files to store offline. This forced me to use pCloud in-built music player. It's a crappy music player, but it worked.

So this time 'round, my goal is to have all my music stored on my new phone and to use a decent app to play the music -- probably Poweramp.

I don't know why, but I was surprised that this wasn't easy. It should be, right? I wait for 30GB of music to transfer across USB and periodically perform a one-way sync to keep the library fresh.

But nope. It seems that syncing a ton of data between macOS and Android using MTP just doesn't work. It stalls after a handful of files. Also, because the app also performs the actual file transfer rather than exposing a block device, I can't choose the right tool to sync the files. I also have my doubts that any of those apps will even do the one-way sync properly -- but that's irrelevant if I can't get the data onto the phone in the first place.

So I'm looking at an Android rsync client called Syncopoli. I've managed to get it syncing files from my Linux VM, but I haven't copied everything across yet. So far it does seem to be a *lot* more stable than MTP, and because it uses the rsync protocol, I have no concerns about its abilities.

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