Sync your Fairphone or any other Android phone with your GNU/Linux computer
Sunday, May 11th, 2014Some years ago when I had a Mac I was using iTunes. Then Apple introduced the iPhone and I decided not buy one, as there are to many restrictions. Instead I choose Android which is much better for freedom. But Android devices do not sync with iTunes because Apple does not want them to sync with iTunes. This is a clear example for an antifeature in the non-free iTunes software. The iJails won’t play patent- and DRM-free formats like Ogg Vorbis and WEBM. But my music collection is partly in Ogg Vorbis and allmost all Android devices do support Ogg Vorbis. Android also supports M3U playlists which are an Open Standard while the iThings use a proprietery format for playlists. After switching to I wrote some little scripts me to automatically synchronize my Fairphone with my music library. These scripts use adb push so your device does not to be in USB storage mode. Therefore you have to enable USB debugging. You can download the scripts from my Gitorious page. I dont have an M3U editor so I use tools such as grep and find for playlist creation.