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Comment by jrochkind1 | Hacker News Reader

Sync'ing from laptop to devices, via anything but iCloud, has gotten so much worse than it used to be. It used to be pretty good -- for it's time anyway.

The ecology just isn't built for actual owned media anymore. And so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.

I think this is probably true on Android too.

I don't know about the Watch, or what the documented ways are to get media files on it.

But for iPhone, I think there are probably better ways than Apple Music, even for audio files. That's just not what Apple Music is about anymore, it's mostly about purchased music.

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210598

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> I think this is probably true on Android too.

Eh - it's not really the same. Android certainly still mostly pushes you at cloud based services (ex: Youtube Music/Amazon Music/Spotify/ETC)

But there's not really a "Standard" music player for the ecosystem, so the expectation is that you pick a 3rd party app you like and use that. And for the vast majority of those - the simple "you have a filesystem - play files from it" approach works just fine (ex: I use VLC for local content, and JellyFin for self-hosted music).

Personally - having my library hosted on my own JellyFin server is basically miles better than anything else I've found (And using either the native app or a specific music client for jellyfin).

The downside is the cost of entry is much higher, and it takes more time and effort to get setup the first time.

Also - your results will vary a lot more depending on which app you pick, and what features that company supports.

So... the experience defaults to something that's more complicated and less featurefull but can be significantly better than that available via iMusic/iCloud at the end of the day.

Android in the past was surprisingly terrible at copying data to/from PCs. Anyone saying it works great is using some third-party tool that requires extra setup, or they aren't syncing a lot of stuff (media libraries, and iTunes used to also sync email accounts and some other settings). Aside from the lack of a proper syncing tool like iTunes, the basic Android File Transfer was super unreliable, often failing randomly mid-transfer. In some cases, you even had to enable it with a secret combo like "go to settings and tap the model name exactly 7 times," which was seriously how you did it on some Galaxy phones.

Android was always focused on cloud stuff, which makes sense given that their biggest markets are places where most people don't have PCs, plus Google wants that halo effect from Android. I appreciated that iPhones were designed for my PC too. But iPhones were generally bad at copying any other data ad-hoc. They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.

> They added AirDrop specifically for this, and... Like 90% of the time I don't see my other device, or the transfer fails. I don't even bother anymore.

Oh god! This bugs me so much. I don't understand why it's so hard to get this right. I'm sure it is, but why?

I know that if one of my devices switches from our 5GHz to our 2.4GHz network this can happen, but even when they're on the same network, it happens sometimes. (And why do my devices keep trying to force themselves off of the 5GHz network? WTF?)

And I get that it's called "Airdrop", but I'd really like it to work over ethernet, too, since that's a lot faster!

I read that AirDrop uses Bluetooth to make machines handshake then transfers the actual data over a p2p wifi network. But I vaguely remember it also working over existing networks, even with ethernet, which may have been in an older version. Either way, it's complicated and thus unreliable. I'm guessing Bluetooth is the weakest link there, cause I have a hard time even pairing speakers with that crap.

Check if BT is enabled on both your phones.

I don't know, I can plug my android phone into my computer and tell it to pop up as a drive and drag and drop files from Nautilus... (or I can use Google Drive or SFTP...).

> so many people have only a phone now, so no reason to try to sync.

Wait until the AR glasses come out. I pretty much guarantee that media syncing will be a huge deal, and Apple had better get their iCloud act together by then.

iCloud is a shambles; and I say this as an Apple user for more than thirty years, and has pegged his career to Apple.

We've seen this before, it's a bit like the "no outside food or drink" policy at the movie theater. Apple (and Google, Microsoft, et. al) want to stop you from using your media so you're funneled into buying theirs. If people can easily play local files, it diminishes the value of a streaming/music management tool. Probably explains why Groove Music and Play Music failed, while Apple Music still has a surprisingly devout userbase.

This is one of those things that will hopefully be opened up with more standardization. There's nobody to blame but ourselves for not enforcing this earlier, and hopefully in the future opening an MP3 file won't be harder than it was in 2005.

I spent good money for a ScanDisk double-pronged device (and app) to get around this problem. It does and doesn't work - I have to have it plugged into the iphone to hear my music that I didn't buy on the itunes store. Now I'm paused, not buying more music until the govt steps in. All my digital purchases were from itunes over many years; but that was before I owned any Apple devices, and so everything could work smoothly together.

I don’t think it’s really so much the hardware and software vendors as it is the music industry — and their very powerful lobbyists and lawyers. The tech companies have to play along with what the music industry wants — if they don’t, then they don’t get to have the top artists on their platform — and THAT is why Zune/Groove Music failed, not anyting tech related.

What about iCloud is a shambles? In my experience it works fine, I save files on one device, and then I can access them on another.

It regularly deletes music without warning -especially if I import it from CDs (that’s still a thing, for us boomers. I have even recorded vinyl records), and also regularly restores music that I delete.

I have also had it do that thing, where my (non-DRMed) song, recorded from a CD, is replaced by the DRMed “radio edit” version of the song, from Apple Music.

That’s fun.

Whether or not the sync actually happens, or if the song stays on the original device, seems to be a crapshoot.

Safari bookmark syncing is … not good. It rearranges bookmarks, refuses to delete some, refuses to sync certain ones, according to some internal algorithm. Etc.

Unfortunately, it is also true for android. Especially with the google drive "audit" requirement for software to access your files in google drive, it's actually much worse than iOS.

re: Android, I have syncthing running on a windows, Linux and android phone. I make a change in from my desktop PC and it nearly immediately replicates the changes on my other devices whether I'm on my home network, at work or abroad. works really well.

+1 for this. Not exactly a setup for the average Joe, but if you know your network/filesystem topology and have compatible devices, Syncthing is nothing short of a godsend.

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