Sync to Symbian phones from iTunes
Published by Rafe Blandford at 16:22 UTC, September 8th 2008
Salling software has announced the release of Salling Media Sync. The software allows you to sync playlists, songs and podcasts from iTunes to Nokia and Sony Ericsson mobile phones. Salling Media Sync is available for both Mac OS X and Windows PC. The basic version is free, the premium version, which costs 15 EUR, adds sequential intelligent sync (only new or changed files after first sync).
Salling Media Sync does not allow you to transfer DRM protected files to your Symbian phone (they wouldn't work). However an increasing number of iTunes tracks are available DRM free (iTunes plus).
Sync is based on iTunes playlists.
Press release extract:
"There are a lot of frustrated phone owners out there who love iTunes, but can't easily get their tracks onto their non-Apple device," said Salling Software president Jonas Salling. "With Salling Media Sync, they don't have to choose between their phone and iTunes: they can use both, together, seamlessly. And it's free for basic use, with no track limit, no playlist limit, and no expiration—ever."
Salling Media Sync couldn't be easier to use. Once the phone is connected to a USB port, the users simply select the playlists and podcasts they want on the device. Salling Media Sync not only uploads the music tracks and podcast episodes, but also replicates each actual playlist on the device and—on devices that support it—transfers play count metadata for each item to the device, reinforcing the sense of having a piece of iTunes in your pocket. Although Salling Media Sync works miracles with most media in iTunes, it can't bring over DRM-protected content.
You might choose to use the Podcast sync functionality of Salling Media Sync
to save the data costs from downloading via Nokia's Podcasting application.
Categories: Software, Links of Interest
Platforms: S60 3rd Edition, UIQ 3
News Discussion
1/ It's a standalone app, sits in the system menu, much like Nokia Multimedia Transfer.
2/ It works fine, it uses MTP, it creates a MediaSyncDeviceID.txt file in C:/
3/ Unregistered mode makes it useless, since all files deleted first (one by one, via MTP) and only then everything is copied back.
4/ Beautiful User Interface, no issues, very prompt and proper!
5/ But nothing that Nokia could not do...MediaSycn seems faster with polling N95 over MTP (current state)
6/ I was hoping it's a faceless plugin that allows you to sync from within iTunes.
7/ I don't think Apple will break it, he obviously uses published APIs (or parses XML directly) to read playlist, get track paths etc. It's a pretty safe strategy, compared to [completely unsupported] plug-ins/hacks.
All in all - I'm fine with Nokia Multimedia Transfer, just a little envy of the Salling UI.
I am a registered user of Salling Clicker, though...use it on both P910i and N95, with the same Mac.
I use a file explorer to load music on my N82 and it's great.
iTunes is part of the iPod/iPhone eco-system. It is no worse and considerably much better than PC Suite for installing media on a device. To date there is not a real competitor to iTunes when it comes to putting music on an iPod or iPhone. For the most part, it just works.
So, unless someone can tell me how to use Itunes agent to preserve playlists I'm dead excited about this release :-)
EDIT: Oops, spoke too soon. Crashes everytime on Vista for me too :-( Also, I may have been a little over excited about syncing the playlists. Looking at it again I'm not so sure that it doesn't just sync the files associated with the playlist rather than the full playlist itself which is what I need. Oh well :-(
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Originally Posted by PaulyLaw
So, unless someone can tell me how to use Itunes agent to preserve playlists I'm dead excited about this release :-)
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To be really useful, and have at least one indispensable (not done by other software) feature, this MediaSync app ought to MAKE SURE we see all Cover Art on the mobile as it is in iTunes. Some conversion is needed, as I have heard iTunes uses not-so-standard tagging inside MP3. So far, this is not done by any software.
Always (for all files) works only if you use Apple h/w and Apple s/w.