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Phun With Phone Phile Transpher
May. 4th, 2013 01:10 pmAndroid phones are little handheld Linux computers, so you'd think it'd be a breeze to move files back and forth between a Linux machine and an Android phone, right?
Ha ha ha ha, silly you.
Well, you'd think at least it would be easy or maybe possible to move them back and forth between an Android phone and a Windows machine, since Windows is only the most popular operating system on the planet?
Ha ha ha ha, silly you again.
I love my new phone, even though it has a couple of minor cosmetic annoyances. It's a second hand phone, and the screen needs to be replaced, but the cosmetic defect is minor enough that it's not normally noticeable when you're using the device unless you know it's there and are looking for it. I can live with that for now. But it should be possible, if not necessarily easy, to move files back and forth between a server or desktop computer and a phone intended to be a media device.
Yet for reasons unknown Linux 13.04 (the latest version, just upgraded today) doesn't properly transfer files from Android. I can connect the phone to my computer, I can see the files, but (for instance) when I go into the media library on my phone and try to copy an MP3 to my desktop, I get a file with a numeric filename (e.g. 174.mp3) of the proper length but no content, no tags, won't play, nothing. Obviously not helpful.
This however is marginally better than on Windows, where the phone won't connect at all. It's apparently a driver issue with 64-bit versions of Windows 7, which at the moment is all I have access to. I tried over three days to get it to connect and managed to hook it up, once, long enough to get the firmware updated to the latest version of Android (I'm now running Jelly Bean). Since then, nothing.
So I found a solution in the Android Market, err, Play Store that says it will let me transfer files back and forth over wi-fi using a browser. Sounds good, right? A nice OS-independent solution. I have a good strong wi-fi signal so this should be a piece of cake.
Ha ha ha ha, still silly you.
I'm now going on about 45 minutes of trying to download one MP3 album so I can fix the tags and the track names will show up properly. I keep getting errors, and of course there are no helpful error messages. I don't want to have to go in, pull out the SD card, load it up on the laptop, transfer the files to the desktop where MP3Tag (a Windows MP3 tag editor but the best one out there by far in my experience) can fix them, then transfer them back to the laptop and finally back over to the phone.
I really think it should be easier than that.
Ha ha ha ha, silly me.
UPDATE: I finally got the files downloaded, edited, and sent back to the phone. I was so tired out I took a nap afterward while the phone's battery charges. In the process I found that somehow I had put two copies of Led Zeppelin IV onto the phone. Hey, I love "Stairway To Heaven" as much as the next child of the sixties, but once through at a time is sufficient these days.
Oh, by the way, the album that was giving me all the grief was The Duras Sisters' Rubenesque. Totally worth the effort.
Ha ha ha ha, silly you.
Well, you'd think at least it would be easy or maybe possible to move them back and forth between an Android phone and a Windows machine, since Windows is only the most popular operating system on the planet?
Ha ha ha ha, silly you again.
I love my new phone, even though it has a couple of minor cosmetic annoyances. It's a second hand phone, and the screen needs to be replaced, but the cosmetic defect is minor enough that it's not normally noticeable when you're using the device unless you know it's there and are looking for it. I can live with that for now. But it should be possible, if not necessarily easy, to move files back and forth between a server or desktop computer and a phone intended to be a media device.
Yet for reasons unknown Linux 13.04 (the latest version, just upgraded today) doesn't properly transfer files from Android. I can connect the phone to my computer, I can see the files, but (for instance) when I go into the media library on my phone and try to copy an MP3 to my desktop, I get a file with a numeric filename (e.g. 174.mp3) of the proper length but no content, no tags, won't play, nothing. Obviously not helpful.
This however is marginally better than on Windows, where the phone won't connect at all. It's apparently a driver issue with 64-bit versions of Windows 7, which at the moment is all I have access to. I tried over three days to get it to connect and managed to hook it up, once, long enough to get the firmware updated to the latest version of Android (I'm now running Jelly Bean). Since then, nothing.
So I found a solution in the Android Market, err, Play Store that says it will let me transfer files back and forth over wi-fi using a browser. Sounds good, right? A nice OS-independent solution. I have a good strong wi-fi signal so this should be a piece of cake.
Ha ha ha ha, still silly you.
I'm now going on about 45 minutes of trying to download one MP3 album so I can fix the tags and the track names will show up properly. I keep getting errors, and of course there are no helpful error messages. I don't want to have to go in, pull out the SD card, load it up on the laptop, transfer the files to the desktop where MP3Tag (a Windows MP3 tag editor but the best one out there by far in my experience) can fix them, then transfer them back to the laptop and finally back over to the phone.
I really think it should be easier than that.
Ha ha ha ha, silly me.
UPDATE: I finally got the files downloaded, edited, and sent back to the phone. I was so tired out I took a nap afterward while the phone's battery charges. In the process I found that somehow I had put two copies of Led Zeppelin IV onto the phone. Hey, I love "Stairway To Heaven" as much as the next child of the sixties, but once through at a time is sufficient these days.
Oh, by the way, the album that was giving me all the grief was The Duras Sisters' Rubenesque. Totally worth the effort.
