iPod/iTunes

HOWTO Sync iTunes Playlist to your Mobile phone ( or non iPod MP3 Player ) - Mac OS X Only !

My new Sony Ericsson K800i, like many new mobile phones, is also a fairly reasonable MP3 player. With the addition of a largish memory card it is quite possible to carry around quite a few albums worth of MP3’s and still leave plenty of room for lots of photos. To transfer music to the phone the standard way requires you to plugin the phone by USB and allow select File Transfer mode. This mounts the camera and the SD memory card as seperate volumes which you can then navigate to using Finder ( or Explorer on Windows ).

By default there is a folder on the camera and also on the SD card ( once initialised ) called Music into which you can then drag your MP3 files from your PC’s hard disc. If you are a Mac iTunes user however there is a much more slick solution that I have come across which uses an Applescript from the popular Dougs Applescripts for iTunes site. The script called “Sync playlist files to folder” is designed to synchronise an iTunes playlist to a folder that is accessible from your Mac. The script has to be very slightly edited then copied into your iTunes script folder, it will then be accessible from within iTunes to run.

To set this up for your phone you should be able to follow this rough guide :-

1. Download and unzip the script from Dougs Applescripts

2. Open Apple script Editor ( start Spotlight and type “Script”, Script Editor will most likely be the top hit )

3. Using Script Editor open the script file called “Sync Playlist Files to Folder” from the unzipped download

4. Edit the USER SETTINGS portion of the script as follows :-

– USER SETTINGS:

– this must be the EXACT name of the playlist–keeping in quotes:
property the_playlist : “K800i”

– this should be a string of the path to the folder you want to use–keeping in quotes:
property path_to_folder : “PHONE CARD:Music:iTunes”

5. In the example above I have called my playlist K800i to match my phone, this playlist will need to be created in iTunes in a moment. The other value for path_to_folder was determined by locating the folder on my camera in Finder then clicking on the folder list icon in the Finder toolbar as below :-

This shows the path to the folder on my phones memory card as PHONE CARD:Music:iTunes.

6. Save the script into your iTunes Script folder. You can find this in your Home folder under Library:iTunes. If the scripts folder doesnt exist create it and save the file there.

7. Startup iTunes, you should see the little script icon in the menu bar. When clicked you should see your script in the drop down list. Don’t run it yet as we havent created the playlist it will use yet.

8. Create a new playlist ( mine is called K800i, you should put whatever you used for the name of the playlist in the script )

9. Add a couple of tracks to the playlist to test.

10. Now select the script. The script should now run and in the background the files you added to the playlist should be copied to your phones memory card. Depending on the size of the files it may take a moment for the files to appear, check the Finder by browsing to your cameras Music folder.

11. Once the script has run and the files have copied you can now test the scrip further by removing those files from the playlist and adding a couple of different tracks. When you run the script again the files copied previously should be removed and the new tracks copied over.

Throughout this guide I have used as my example my K800i mobile phone, however if you have a non iPod music player ( the sort that mounts as a removable drive when plugged into your Mac’s USB port ), then this process will work just the same for you, all that is needed is to subsititute the correct path to the folder in the script file and you will have a working synchronisation script for your MP3 player !

Have fun and let me know if you have any problems with this.

[tags]mobile phones, iTunes, sync, mp3, k800i[/tags]