Seeking an offline music player that can sync with Windows iTunes and works well (paid or free); I formerly used Rocket Player + iSyncer

[Vic]

Hello, I hope you're well. I am seeking an Android app that I can use as an offline music player. Importantly, I need it to have two-way sync to my Windows iTunes, as I buy mp3 song files regularly and add them to my iTunes on a near-weekly basis. I need two-way sync of my playlists, songs, lyrics, and song count.

I had the paid versions of Rocket Player and iSyncer for years. However, since JRT Studio was sold to Muma Studios in 2022, there have been major new bugs - namely, constant app minimizing and song library scanning.

Thank you and take care.

[Daniel Faigin]

I haven't been able to get two-way. I don't have a reliable way to get information back into iTunes, although I do have some leads to investigate via https://samsoft.org.uk/iTunes/scripts.asp#ExportImport

But for one-way, here's what I'm doing:

1. I set up Syncthing https://syncthing.net/ with my iTunes media library as a SEND ONLY, and the directory on my Android as Receive Only. This moves my music over, and is relatively fast.

2. I switched to Gone Mad Music Player on the Android https://gonemadmusicplayer.blogspot.com/ .

3. I've got perl on my computer. You can use either ActiveState Perl https://www.activestate.com/products/activeperl/downloads/ or Strawberry Perl https://strawberryperl.com/

4. I've got a perl script I've written that can parse a saved iTunes xml and a saved stats file from GMMP, and produce a new stats.xml

5. I've got syncthing set up to sync bidirectionally the directories where GMMP stores its stats.

My process is:

1. Run syncthing to sync music

2. Once music is over, initiate a rescan in GMMP to add the new music and update things.

3. Back up the stats

4. Go to the music directory. Copy the stats.xml to my working directory. Export my itunes library to itunes.xml in that directory. Run my perl script to update the stats, and copy the new stats.xml back to the sync gmmp directory.

5. Restore the stats.xml

Depending on how long it takes syncthing to see things, this normally takes 10 minutes once syncthing has gotten to the point where it will sync (since I start it up each time, about 20 minutes). That total of 30 minutes is FAR FAR less than it took with iSyncr and Rocket Player. Note: I have just under 54,000 songs in my library.

Daniel