Android support? When?

[Sebastian78]

I want native Android support, no "workaround" or .ini file editing. Can we please have this, as soon as possible please. Pretty please?

DoubleTwist already has this, so you need to keep up with whats happening in the device market.

Oh, wont be long before Android powered pmp's and mp3 player come to the market.

[nohitter151]

Maybe you should give some details about what exactly doesn't work, and what changes are necessary. As I understand MM should already support Android devices.

[Sebastian78]

Maybe you should give some details about what exactly doesn't work, and what changes are necessary. As I understand MM should already support Android devices.

Playlists.......it's a hassle with 16GB of memory on a phone and not being able to use playlists.

[nohitter151]

So android can't read .m3u playlists?

[RandomEngy]

I'm trying to get MediaMonkey syncing to my Droid. The music goes but it doesn't pick up the playlists. I see them on the SD card in the Playlists folder, but the music app doesn't refresh and recognize them. Everything would probably be fine if I could get that working.

Scratch that... they just now popped up. I'm not sure what triggered the refresh.

[saheemg]

TTT - I just got the motorola droid....

[jpdhonda]

This is a detailed list of steps I took in order to get music installed on my Droid phone using MediaMonkey (henceforth referred to as “MM”). The operating system I am using is Windows7 64bit and the version of MM I am using is 3.1.1.1261 which is the latest non-beta version as of this writing on 11/14/2009. I don’t see why this wouldn’t work with other versions of the Windows operating system and other recent versions of MM, but I giving you the details where things worked for me.

The first thing you must do is get your phone physically connected to your computer. To do this, use the micro-USB cable that came with the phone. As soon as both ends of the cable are connected, you should hear your computer make the sound to indicate that a USB device has been connected and your phone should also make a noise (in my case it actually plays a sound that says “Droid” which is cool).

Now you need to make your internal SD memory card available to your computer so the computer can manipulate the contents. To do this, drag down the notification area of your phone so you can see notifications. I find the best way to do this is to hold your finger at the top of your phone and do nothing until you see a horizontal gray bar appear, and then drag downwards with your finger – sometimes this takes a few seconds and I often find myself dragging before the phone is ready so now I just wait until I see this bar. You should see an “Ongoing” notification called “USB connected” which you should touch to bring up a dialog. When the dialog appears, choose the “Mount” option. After a moment, you might get an “AutoPlay” dialog or other default behavior from your computer indicating it is now aware of the phone and considers it a “Removable Disk” (mine is “G:”). At the root of this drive, I used Windows Explorer to create two new folders, one called “Music” and another called “Playlists” (this will come into play later when we configure the device in MM).

Now it’s time to get MM involved so launch the application (if MM was already running prior to mounting the SD card, quit and relaunch so that MM becomes aware of the phone, I don’t know if there is a “Refresh” mechanism to simplify this but I know that quitting and launching does work). Before I changed my configuration, the phone was detected and recognized and you could copy music to the device, but it didn’t work as I wanted, it would copy all my MP3 files to the root of the phone instead of the Music folder I had created, even when it seemed I have properly configured MM and my device to put the files here. This may be where some folks are having difficulty.

Choose the “Tools” menu and the “Options…” menu item to display the MM options dialog. From here, click on “Portable/Audio Devices”. This should display a list box with several installed drivers (I have 4) all of which are active due to the checked checkbox next to their name. If you hover your mouse over this list box you should see a lengthy tooltip that explains how these drivers work which was how I changed things and got MM to work with my Droid. The tooltip explains that if your target device appears in Windows Explorer as a drive letter (which is what happens with the Droid so I figured this was useful information) it says you should use the “Generic Plug-in for USB Mass Storage Devices” which is the driver named “d_USBMass1.dll”. When I tried to configure how my device would sync originally, it was using the “d_WMDM.dll” driver and that was the problem. In this list box, I unchecked all drivers except for the one called “d_USBMass1.dll” and then I selected this item and clicked the “Configure” button.

At this point you should see the dialog called “Device Profile” which has a number of tabs across the top, one of which is called “Device Configuration” which you should click on. In the middle of this dialog you should see a textbox called “Device Name” which is where I entered “Droid”. Beneath this you should see a place to specify the drive letter which you should choose from the drop down list (I chose “G:” since that was what Windows Explorer assigned to my phone when I mounted it). I then entered “Droid” as the “Drive Label” which seems unnecessary and could be optional and I did NOT enter any value for the “USB Device ID” (I clicked the “Find Device” button and it listed a bunch of things that I think are other USB hubs in my machine and nothing that looked like it was related to the Droid phone so I just left that blank).

While still on this “Device Profile” dialog, I clicked the “Configure” button which causes yet another dialog to display (it is located in the upper right area of the dialog). I entered “\Music\” for the “Main Directory” textbox. You should fill out the rest of the dialog as you see fit and click OK to dismiss this dialog. Next I clicked the “Options…” button located next to the checkbox called “Copy playlists” which is near the top. When the dialog appeared, I made sure that “\Playlists\” was entered for the “Destination directory” textbox.

At this point you should be able to properly copy music to your Droid. Select one or more songs, right click and choose “Send To -> Droid (Synchronize)”. The menu command will say "Droid" only if you entered "Droid" as I did in the previous configuration otherwise it should display whatever you entered. When synchronization is complete, you can use Windows Explorer to look at drive G: (or whatever yours is called) to make sure the proper files are installed in the proper folders (Music and Playlists in this case) and that the playlist file itself properly references the files using Notepad if you like. You can then select a playlist and use the same right click menu to synchronize an entire playlist of songs. If the files look good, continue onward to disconnect the Droid from your computer.

Once all your files are copied, you need to “Safely Remove Hardware and Eject Media”. This option is done on my Windows7 machine by clicking down in the taskbar on the little white arrow pointing up located near the clock. If you choose this, you will be shown various USB devices that can be dismounted including one called “Eject Motorola A855” (which has “Removable Disk (G:)” in gray beneath it) which you should select. All Windows operating systems should have a similar mechanism to remove USB devices. The next step is to connect your Droid back to the drive now that Windows no longer controls it and this is done by using the notification area at the top of the phone (dragging downwards once the gray bar appears) and touching the “Turn off USB storage” notification and then choosing the “Turn Off” button from the dialog. When this happens the Droid operating system when then analyze the SD card and process the contents you copied there. I copied about 700 MP3 files and it took a good 5 minutes before I could use the “Music” application to see my playlists and make use of the data. You will see a spinning “wait indicator” near the top of the Music application while it does this so you’ll know when it’s done. Hopefully, at this point your music should be available and it should play as you would expect.

I want to mention that it is now advisable to disconnect the USB cord from either your computer or the phone which will cause your computer to play the sound that indicates it has lost connectivity with a USB device. While experimenting with this solution I found that if I told the Droid phone to mount, my computer would not detect that a new USB device was available and thus would not mount it as drive G: and thus MM could not see it and manipulate it. By removing the connection to the Droid, I could then connect the cable the next time, and my computer would successfully detect the Droid again.

I hope this solution works for others and that you get to enjoy the Droid phone in all its glory.

If anyone discovers a good music playing application for the Droid, reply here. Coming from an iPod touch I guess I am expecting a lot. The variable speed “scrubbing” of the iPod is missing, as well as a volume slider for discrete volume changes (the only way I discovered to change volume is using the hardware button on the side of the phone), and the 0.5x, 1x and 2x speeds for playing stuff is really missed when playing podcasts. Anyhow, best of luck to everyone!

[Guest]

This is a detailed list of steps I took in order to get music installed on my Droid phone using MediaMonkey (henceforth referred to as “MM”). The operating system I am using is Windows7 64bit and the version of MM I am using is 3.1.1.1261 which is the latest non-beta version as of this writing on 11/14/2009. I don’t see why this wouldn’t work with other versions of the Windows operating system and other recent versions of MM, but I giving you the details where things worked for me.

Nice post ... the step in switching over to the USB mass storage driver was very helpful.

[saheemg]

I am able to sync to droid.

[NexusMan]

Brilliant. I was having this same issue with my Nexus One and your solution worked perfectly for me. Many thanks

[wormywyrm]

Awesome. This totally worked for me. The problem was it automatically assigned the WDMD.dll to my droid, like you said, it needs the generic USB storage one.

[Mark Ruys]

I did manage to use d_WMDM.dll to mount my Nexus One, but I had to add a ini setting as described in http://www.mediamonkey.com/support/index.php?_m=knowledgebase&_a=viewarticle&kbarticleid=16&nav=0 "Sync to Zen device is incomplete and uses wrong mask".

Tip: if you need gapless playback on a Nexus, don't use MP3 but Ogg.

[udenr]

THANKS! this worked fixed the problem!!

[vkelman]

When you sync to Android phone using MediaMonkey, as you described, does it put all the mp3 files into the same Music folder?
Having hundreds of mp3 files in tens of subfolders on my Windows machine, I'd like to keep them organized in the same folder structure on a phone.

[nohitter151]

When you sync to Android phone using MediaMonkey, as you described, does it put all the mp3 files into the same Music folder?
Having hundreds of mp3 files in tens of subfolders on my Windows machine, I'd like to keep them organized in the same folder structure on a phone.

You have full control over that in the device configuration options.