Update: My music was syncing for 24 hours, so I pulled the plug on the experiment. Maybe another day.
On Monday we kicked off the week right. Or, should I say, the guys at xda developers did. One of the first things I noticed after waking up was that someone had figured out how to sync music with the cloud using the Honeycomb music player. All it required was an Android 2.3.3 ROM — which Cyanogenmod was about to make available as Release Candidate 2 — and the Honeycomb music player. And so yesterday, after I flashed CM7 RC2 and downloading the Honeycomb music player APK file, I got to work. Here’s how you can do it if you want to try the feature yourself. The best part is that you might only need Froyo to do it.
The first thing you need to do is make sure your SD card is in order. If your music is in a directory other than /media/Music, this isn’t going to work. That’s the first issue I hit. My music directory was not a subdirectory of media, and so I got a little miffed when it didn’t work. But then I just dragged the folder and all was well. Then go to this forum post and click the mediafire.com link. That will bring you to the Honeycomb music player APK. Download that and then drag it onto your SD card. Before you install it, though, you have to delete the stock music player. I did this through Titanium Backup, which is by far the easiest way. Once I nuked that I opened up File Manager, clicked on the APK, and installed it. Then it was time to set up the sync.
The first thing you need to do is go to Settings, and then Accounts & sync. Then click on your Google account. That will bring up a check list of items to sync. You will see, for the first time, music listed as an option. Check it. Then back out to your app drawer. You’ll see that there are two gold speaker icons. One is Music. The other is JumperTest. Go into that. You won’t be here for but a minute.
Click on the Controls tab, and then click Start Peer. If you’ve done everything right to this point you should see the screen say Initilaizing…Init success. Starting… Peer started. You might also notice a new notification. At various points during this process you’ll have to accept new permissions. Make sure you accept these when you see them pop up in the notifications bar. In any case, once you’re done with that, click the bottom button, Import Local Media. You’ll see Import started Import complete. Now you can sit back and wait for your music to sync.
Be prepared to wait for a while. I did this around 2 p.m. yesterday, and as you can see in the screen shot, which I took this morning, the sync is still working. I only have a 4GB SD card, but I’ve been on WiFi for 90 percent of the time. Worse, I can’t get any of my music to play while it’s syncing. When I opened doubleTwist I noticed only one album available, and it’s been the same available album since yesterday afternoon. I’d say it’s a Honeycomb music player problem on my phone, but it worked before I started syncing. I’m really wondering if this is going to finish at all.
We had heard originally that this would only work with a 2.3.3 ROM, but xda member DiGi91 claims that it works on 2.2 as well. There doesn’t seem to be much harm in trying. Worst case you can just re-flash your ROM (or run Titanium) and get the stock music player back. Anyone try this with any success?
