Best way to sync music to Galaxy Nexus (MTP)?

Question

The Galaxy Nexus uses MTP which makes general use a bit of a pain. Luckily, Ubuntu comes with some drivers preinstalled so I can access my phones memory easily through nautilus, however Rhythmbox and Banshee don't seem to like it as much. Rhythmbox will crash when I try and sync and on Banshee I get a slew of errors. I am spoiled by the likes of DoubleTwist on Windows with which I could sync my iTunes library with wirelessly. Obviously neither iTunes nor DoubleTwist work on Ubuntu so I would like to find some alternative. Worst case scenario I can manually transfer all my music (trying to completely get rid of Windows here).

Now, I know a lot of my ID3 tags in my music library are not what I like them to be (when I first launched Rhythmbox I had to rename a lot of stuff) and I'm really OCD about all that. When I edit my song information will it edit the ID3 tag? If so then I can manage my musics ID3 tags via Rhythmbox, and then manually transfer it.

Loving Ubuntu and trying to get out of the grip Windows and OS X had on me for the longest time.

Solution

You're right, MTP is a real pain under Linux. (Years ago) I used to update my Creative ZEN Mozaic with Gnomad2 but it was far from perfect.

My personal advice is to root your phone and install Samba Filesharing to have traditional Samba shares on your phone.

If you really don't want to root your phone, you can take a look to this thread. It seems that ASTRO File Manager plus its SMB Module can work even without root access (not tested by me, can't confirm). AirDroid could be another alternative to test.

Comments

[topless]

I own a nexus S and I use google music application to handle all my music operations.

[amanthethy]

Yeah, sign up for Google Music. It's free. Scans your library, uploads your tracks to your google account and makes them accessible from any of your devices. Can stream/download the songs from/to your phone using the Play Music app.