Does Android have a solution for large music library syncing that performs as well as Apple's solution does?

Mobile Tech Phones & Tablets
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My wild guess as to how Apple does it is that they have iTunes produce a database of synced songs and push that database to the phone, which uses the same database. So any form of discovery isn’t needed on either side except when iTunes looks in the folders for songs, but then it just adds them to its database.

I’ve seen people having issues with extremely large music libraries on Android. We’re talking over ten thousand items with many 100+ song playlists.

The goal is to make the process this simple:

  1. Dump music into directory that the library manager program can see.
  2. Create playlists in library manager program of those songs.
  3. Set playlists to sync to phone.

That’s it. No directory management. No file management. No swapping out SD cards.

The problems that have come up when trying to do this on Android are the following:

  1. Sync time when 1 change is made in a 10,000+ item list due to scanning for changes rather than using a database.
  2. Managing the playlist for syncing on Windows in most programs feels like using very old software.
  3. Android having to discover the songs are there by scanning its own music directory.

iTunes fulfills half this process, but solving it for Android’s side is the hard part, both for syncing and discovery, if you do use iTunes.

Does anyone have obvious solutions I’m missing for this?

I’ve found programs that sync iTunes to Android (MusicBee, iSyncr, doubleTwist, etc), but none that make use of a database on the Android side for discovery.

I imagine that’d be more so the music player app, but that’d mean it’d have to be able to utilize the same database the syncing app uses. And that’s where I’m personally stuck.

I had thought that syncing the playlists themselves would work as a database. i.e. I open a playlist. The playlist has 100 songs in it. None of them are ones I’ve opened before so the music app wasn’t aware of until now, but having the playlist tells the music app they’re there.

I doubt that’s bullet proof though.

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I would try Google Music, if have all your music on your computer.

From the desktop app, it can scan a set folder for any audio files and upload it to the Google Music library. As long as your music has labels Google Music can find it on the database

I haven’t checked it, but songs on the local should appear in mobile app

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I jumped the fence to Android a few months ago and I have to say, syncing is not nearly as nice. I guess it helps when one company makes all the software.

Android must already have a database of the songs on the phone, or at least some kind of cache. If you delete a song with the file manager, it takes a while to disappear from your library. If you knew which file it was and how to parse it, you could diff it against the desktop’s library (or the desktop’s library database, rather) on the desktop. Not something I would have the chops to actually write up though.

Transferring the files with adb is much faster for me then MTP, so you could try that. Google has a nice python script on GitHub called mtp-sync. Then again rooting broke MTP on my phone and I don’t really do playlists so maybe not very helpful.

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