How To: Sync iTunes Playlists to Your webOS Device With Salling Media Sync

The following is a guest how-to article by Levi Wallach, a developer from the DC area.

When the Palm Pre first came out, Palm used some trickery to have it work with Apple’s iTunes, which Apple locks down so that normally only iPods are able to sync with it.  After this initial webOS release, a tit-for-tat battle between Palm and Apple took place that was fun to watch for a while, albeit somewhat nervously for us Palm afficianados. No one really thought it would last and it didn’t, either because Palm eventually decided it was silly or dangerous to continue to try to circumvent Apple’s closed iTunes system, or perhaps because Apple sent some signals privately to Palm that further circumvention might result in a real and public suit. In any case, by late last year, if you wanted to keep updating your iTunes to its newest versions, you could no longer use it to sync with your Pre or Pixi.

Dan Ramirez wrote a great piece on webOSroundup about all the available options to sync music to your webOS device. I’ve tried some of these applications and finally settled on Salling Media Sync (SMS) for Windows or Mac to satisfy my perhaps unusual requirements – syncing primarily a list of ever-changing podcast episodes via iTunes smart playlists. I’ll walk you through how to use it, as well as give my impressions about the program.

I’ve been a huge podcast addict since the technology first got started back in 2005.  I’ve pared down my list of podcasts from scores of shows (which I could only barely keep up with a fraction) to just a dozen or two, including — of course – webOS Radio, WOR Devcast, (shameless plug! -Ed) and Precentral’s PalmCast. While you can manage podcasts with a huge variety of applications, iTunes has a pretty nice and reliable interface for downloading and maintaining podcast episodes.  It is the original podcatcher and industry leader, and Apple, of course, isn’t going anywhere.  I may be odd in this regard, but I love using iTunes playlists and in particular “Smart Playlists” to organize my podcasts in various ways.  So I have playslists for each show, as well as ones that give me all the podcasts but in order of length, and another that orders them by how recent they are.  These pre-organized/pre-sorted views of podcasts make it quick and easy for me to listen to the shows I want based on my immediate listening priorities, rather than having to do that organizational piece on the spot in the player I’m using.

Based on my experience, SMS is one of the simplest and most straightforward 3rd party iTunes syncing options.  It doesn’t try to be a separate media manager like Doubletwist or Songbird, nor an all-inclusive media format converter like Media Monkey.  Rather, it’s a simple way to get your audio files and iTunes playlists (as well as photos) onto many non-Apple devices, including the Pre and Pixi.

Because most of us have fairly large collections of media, apps, and data on our phones, it’s fairly easy to run out of storage on the Pre (8GB) and even Pre Plus (16GB). Luckily, Smart Playlists let you limit what you sync by the amount of memory it takes, and unless you are listening to 12 hours of podcasts a day, you probably won’t need more than a measly 1GB to avoid syncing for close to a week if needed. I actually try to sync daily so that I’m listening to news that’s as current as possible, but it’s nice to know that if I don’t sync for several days, I still have plenty of podcasts to listen to.

Okay, now for the how-to:

SMS has worked very well for syncing playlists.  After installation, its dead-simple interface lets you specify what kind of media you want to sync.  For playlists, just go to the Music tab and select “selected playlists” and then choose the playlist(s) you want to sync.  Once you’ve selected a playlist or playlists, just:

1. Connect your Pre to your computer via USB and be sure to put it into USB drive mode – (NOT media mode!)
2. Open Salling Media Sync if it doesn’t open automatically
3. Hit the “sync” button.

When you do this for the first time, it will ask you whether you want to have the sync performed  automatically every time you connect your Pre. Subsequent syncs can take as long as the first, even when you only have a few new podcasts in your playlists.  That’s because the free version of SMS removes all your older files and recopies every one.  For $22, the registered version only copies new files, dramatically speeding up the overall transfer.  For my 1GB, though, a transfer time of a few minutes is perfectly fine.  However, those who pack their devices with tons of audio could easily be waiting 20 minutes or more. For these people, the upgrade is probably worth the price.

The one thing missing from the experience that I used to have on my iPod i star ratings, which I sometimes used to mark a podcast as having been listened to so that I could then remove it from iTunes.  This is an iPod-specific feature, of course, rather than something that’s a standard part of the MP3 file.

Eventually, all of this syncing will become irrelevant, or at least I hope, as a new generation of cloud-based media managers start to appear.  Apple presumably bought LaLa to create something like a cloud-based version of iTunes, and HP’s purchase of Melodeo may reveal similar intentions on their part.  We can only hope! While it’s always nice to have lots of capacity on a device itself, ultimately it makes more sense for the Pre to manage it’s media in the cloud, as it does all of its other data.  I certainly wouldn’t mind a 32GB or even 64GB (with an option to add even another 32GB SDHC memory card) on the Pre 2 (or Hurricane), but given how much audio (and even more memory-intensive video) many of us have amassed over the years, why not keep a small local cache of the stuff on the phone for when we don’t have access to a good 3G or Wifi signal, even with instructions on how to update this content automatically based on a number of criteria, but rely for our overall libraries on secure media servers in the cloud that get backed up daily?  The only thing I see from keeping that vision from coming to fruition is the cost.  Not storage costs of course, when a terabyte of data can now be stored for well under $100, but more costly bandwidth which has promted other cloud storage services like Dropbox, Zumo, and the like to charge relatively large monthly fees for the kind of storage that most of us take for granted on our local machines.

Those music cloud services have yet to become a reality, and even when they do, they may not be affordable for most people to put their entire media collection on.  For those wedded to iTunes as their media manager of choice for their computer, syncing tools like Salling Media Sync will fill a nice gap in helping those of us who would rather use the superior webOS as their choice for mobile listening, rather than what Apple wants to force us to use with iTunes.