A shift towards Apple?

[aisle9]

Since buying my Mazda3 a few months back, I've been plagued by two things:

 

1. The Android Auto integration leaves much to be desired, whereas the Apple version is pretty well tied in at this point.

2. DoubleTwist, the only reliable way to import albums (not just playlists) from iTunes to an Android phone is a steaming pile of turd that randomly deletes songs from playlists when syncing--especially if I tell it not to.

 

I love my Pixel 2, really, I do, but I'm getting tired as hell of the music library issues. There are workarounds, but they all suck.

 

1. Delete my entire phone's media library and re-sync all 67GB of it in DoubleTwist every time I want to sync. This takes for-f*cking-ever, on the order of hours, and there's still no guarantee that it won't delete songs from playlists in iTunes. It will even f*ck with playlists that I don't sync at all. That sucks.

2. Go back to using iSyncr. iSyncr works perfectly over WiFi, but it can only handle playlists. iSyncr cannot add albums directly to your phone over WiFi, only when connected via USB, and it crashes 100% of the time when I try to use a USB connection directly to the phone. This route, therefore, would require me to create a separate playlist for every album I want on my phone, more or less. For one, that would take, you guessed it, for-f*cking-ever. Two, it would make navigating to custom playlists a long, long operation that I don't have the time or attention for when driving. That sucks.

3. Use a USB thumb drive for all my music. This is actually the route I've taken for the time being. The problem is that the Mazda3 doesn't support gapless playback, even on albums that are designed to play gapless. It also doesn't read FLAC or ALAC at all for me to see if lossless would change that. All putting lossless on the USB does is guarantee that the USB will never load correctly. This doesn't seem like a big idea until you consider that A Night at the Opera, The Wall, The Black Parade, Ziggy Stardust, American Idiot, some of the greatest albums ever made (not to mention every single live album in existence) all use gapless playback. This means that, for example, between Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 1 and The Happiest Days of Our Lives, there's a random skip. Between The Happiest Days of Our Lives and Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2, one of the most famous transitions in all of music, there's a skip between the scream and the first verse. I can avoid this by turning all of my albums into one long MP3 each...see the problem? For-f*cking-ever, and it would add a huge amount to my music library's size.

4. Switch to a new player, which is the solution I'm most open to. The problem is that I can't find one that will let me import and play all of my iTunes library, including the Apple Lossless files, and still work seamlessly with an Android phone. It would have to directly interface with the Android phone itself so that DoubleTwist doesn't have an opening to screw with playlists it's expressly not allowed to.

 

All of that is why I'm considering moving to an iPhone. Those of you who've made the Android to iOS switch...how badly was your world rocked? and if you do know of a way to fix DoubleTwist so it doesn't do this, please let me know.

[Zodiark1593]

I don't even bother with "syncing". Much of my stuff is kind of scattered between different PCs and drives, so to even put forth the effort to set up a synching setup just to end up in the same spot is not worthwhile.. I just mamually copy music over via Windows Explorer into a dedicated folder.

 

I setup my playlists manually in PowerAmp Pro. Tags and album art is also added manually, in the case of songs obtained from CDs (as some portion of my stuff is in no American database). I still have a fair bit of music I need to tag as well at some point in time too.

[PlayStation 2]

I've used Apple CarPlay in a 2019 Chevrolet Malibu (so while it won't be wholly representative of your Mazda3, it will likely help to at least know a bit) and the experience on my iPhone 6 Plus was largely positive even for it being an older phone. Everything played nicely and the integration with the infotainment was fine.

What year is your Mazda3? I've heard the brand new ones (which I'm guessing yours is?) could play FLAC audio files, but if it can't, that's kinda bad.

[aisle9]

2 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

I've used Apple CarPlay in a 2019 Chevrolet Malibu (so while it won't be wholly representative of your Mazda3, it will likely help to at least know a bit) and the experience on my iPhone 6 Plus was largely positive even for it being an older phone. Everything played nicely and the integration with the infotainment was fine.

What year is your Mazda3? I've heard the brand new ones (which I'm guessing yours is?) could play FLAC audio files, but if it can't, that's kinda bad.

Mine's a 2018 GT. It definitely cannot handle FLAC or ALAC or any other kind of lossless file. The 2019s can supposedly handle it, but I'm in the central Florida panhandle. A 2019 would have cost $30k before taxes and fees because the dealers have no competition. It's kind of a miracle I got mine for what I got it for.

[Zodiark1593]

4 hours ago, Dan Castellaneta said:

I've used Apple CarPlay in a 2019 Chevrolet Malibu (so while it won't be wholly representative of your Mazda3, it will likely help to at least know a bit) and the experience on my iPhone 6 Plus was largely positive even for it being an older phone. Everything played nicely and the integration with the infotainment was fine.

What year is your Mazda3? I've heard the brand new ones (which I'm guessing yours is?) could play FLAC audio files, but if it can't, that's kinda bad.

Why on earth would any audio playback device within the past two decades not have support for FLAC? There are no royalties to be paid, and even if the manufacturer doesn't want to fork over for a dedicated decoder, an old ARM11 or Cortex A8 cpu should be plenty to handle it, and every other audio codec you can throw at it. There's no point whatsoever to exclude support for FLAC.

[aisle9]

15 minutes ago, Zodiark1593 said:

Why on earth would any audio playback device within the past two decades not have support for FLAC? There are no royalties to be paid, and even if the manufacturer doesn't want to fork over for a dedicated decoder, an old ARM11 or Cortex A8 cpu should be plenty to handle it, and every other audio codec you can throw at it. There's no point whatsoever to exclude support for FLAC.

Mazda's player is tied in to Gracenote. 'Nuff said.

[aisle9]

5 hours ago, huilun02 said:

Is this about a shift towards iphones or a return to iphones?

I've never owned an iPhone in my life, so it would be a switch to after owning Androids since 2009-ish. I'm also weighing out switching to a MacBook, but that's a different topic for a different day.