more iTunes pain

One unfortunate side-effect of purchasing this phone is that it's made me angry at Apple all over again. At this point we're an Apple-only house (well, not counting the Windows work laptops or the Linux Mac Mini quietly cranking 24/7 in the closet) and so I've been using iTunes for everything. Honestly, I think iTunes is a piece of crap, but there was no other piece of software that was easy to use with our iPods and my wife's iPhone. For a little while, it was possible to forget what a huge racket that whole iPod / iPhone / iTunes proprietary shit is, but throw one unsupported device into the mix and you're reminded that Apply designed everything from day 1 to lock out other devices and software apps. I mean, seriously, think about it. Grrrrr.

Unfortunately, there's no good solution - I tried out doubleTwist (which looked promising) but it turned out to be a memory hog to the point where it's unusable on my lowly Mini with 1G of RAM. I found I was able to drag & drop from iTunes to my phone, but that's not very sexy or easy to use.

The solution I ended up making up was less than optimal, but somewhat functional. I already have an iPod that gets everything synced, and I didn't want to mess with it, so I made a playlist in iTunes called "Android" that contains everything I want on my phone. I wrote a Perl script to parse the iTunes XML file to get the info about songs and playlists, and sync the songs in the Android playlist to the phone, then re-write the other playlists with only the songs that are also in the Android playlists and sync those to the phone as well. Overall, it works pretty well, but the fact that I had to spend a few hours doing it is going to bug me for a while...