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Android, Samsung, Apple, and FLAC

FauxHall

FauxHall

Super Member
Trying to store FLAC or Apple Lossless on my wife's new Samsung Galaxy SIII cell phone with its Android operating system.

She's copying our CDs onto her Mac laptop as FLAC or Apple Lossless files. but when she tries to copy to her new cell phone, Android and "KIES" doesn't recognize the music files on her laptop. It only allows iTunes MP3s, which suck.

Is this some sort of DRM or copy protection scheme? Are there workarounds?
 
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Considering it's an Android, there should be zero problem putting in non iTunes files, I've put plenty of flac and the like onto my android and it works. It could be the apple computer doing what apple does best.
 
The Apple laptop doesn't recognize the cell phone as a separate drive when connected with a USB cable. It only wants to "sync" MP3s from iTunes.
 
Try to just copy the FLAC files to the Android as files and forget iTunes. You may have to adjust the USB cable settings to allow data transfer to. i have to play games like that with my Motorola Android.
 
Wanna forget all about iTunes but it won't let me!

Yes, played with the USB settings on both the Apple and the Samsung to no avail.
 
Are you sure it's actually FLAC and not ALAC? There's very little difference between the two except that only Apple devices play ALAC. Non-Apple devices should have no issues accepting FLAC files but absolutely won't take ALAC files. Think of ALAC as Apple's propreitary version of FLAC. If you used iTunes to rip CDs to lossless files they'll be ALAC, not FLAC.
 
Also, with my android phone, I have to go through a sequence of hoops to get it to mount to my pc as a mass storage device, try going through
>Settings
>Wireless and Networks
>USB Utilities

and there should be a button to connect to mass storage, allowing you to simply drag and drop your files.
 
RamblinE said:
Are you sure it's actually FLAC and not ALAC? There's very little difference between the two except that only Apple devices play ALAC. Non-Apple devices should have no issues accepting FLAC files but absolutely won't take ALAC files. Think of ALAC as Apple's propreitary version of FLAC. If you used iTunes to rip CDs to lossless files they'll be ALAC, not FLAC.
Click to expand...

Of course ALAC is open source, not proprietary.
 
Bubbamike said:
Of course ALAC is open source, not proprietary.
Click to expand...

I hate that though... They just took FLAC and modified it just to make it their own EXCLUSIVE format. Typical Apple move. I despise iTunes or any player software that wastes a ton of RAM on bull*hit bells and whistles. VLC uses a bit of RAM and also runs independently of Windows (something I wish it didn't do), but it's a very-powerful, effective player WITHOUT all the BS. And Foobar is the king of meat-and-potatoes media-player programs (It's audio-only, but it barely uses any RAM (and I think it also piggybacks on Windows, which helps), is extremely-powerful, has a totally-bare-bones interface, and you can customize 'til the cows come home.

I've used FLAC the past 5-6 years, and I love it. I have my digital audio signal running as directly as possible, bypassing my computer's soundcard and K-mixer stage and running straight to my external DAC. My computer's not very-powerful, so I have to save power where possible.

I don't use my cellphone for a portable player. Instead, I have an old Dell DJ 20GB. They stopped making them about 5 years ago, but it's such a great-sounding audio-player. The one issue I have is that every so often it will alphabetize a CD's track list when I go to upload it, but I deal with it because I dig the sound and the build-quality.
 
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Do you have micro SD memory chip to copy music to? I am not mac user.

Windows laptop. Got 32 GB micro SD. Put chip into laptop with adapter. Copied mp3 files to chip. Installed chip into phone (Galaxy II) works great.

I think your galaxy III will take 64GB chip.
 
She has a 32GB chip in it already. I've been copying FLAC to my Blackberry's 32GB microSD chip over my PC successfully.

Since she ripped the CDs with her Mac they may have been to ALAC although I told her to get shareware to do the ripping.
 
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just pull the sdcard and directly move the files over, ever since android went to MTP, (damn you google) it's the easiest way.



I don't use itunes, because it's from hell, but you may want to look at google music.


jaz
 
With Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean most phones need Android File Transfer http://www.android.com/filetransfer/ to just drag and drop files to the internal memory. I have no experience with KIES but it may not like FLAC.
Install AFT to the Mac and it should function like a dumbed down finder window. I think you can only transfer files under 4Gb at a time.
AFT is not pretty, but it functions well and is much faster than previous methods of file transfer.
FYI I believe Macs have to use AFT (or something like KIES) because of the new file format Android began using in Ice Cream Sandwich.
 
WinAmp, and Media Monkey, both have a versions for the Mac, (Winamp is in beta), and both will sync with Android devices, MM will also sync with a iOS-6 devices as well. You might give them a try.
 
the underlying problem is MTP, which is the change in Ice Cream Sandwich by google.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol

MTP is a propietary microsoft designed "Media Transfer Protocol ",and unfortunately, Google started using it. It's a PITA to use, on linux, even if you have everything set up correctly, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. I'd assume mac is similar.
MTP is a key part of WMDRM10-PD,[1] a digital rights management (DRM) service for the Windows Media platform.....

...By design, MTP devices (like PTP devices) are not treated as a traditional removable drive. The actual file system is implemented by the device, not by the computer's operating system. In theory the operating system may hide this difference, but this is not the case on Windows or Mac OS. This also means that conventional file system recovery tools will be of no use if the drive is corrupted, or crashes.

As opposed to USB Mass Storage, a number of operating systems do not support MTP out of the box. Some even require third-party software.

Large file transfers using MTP are much slower than with MSC.

Neither the MTP nor the PTP standards allow for direct modification of objects. Instead, modified objects must be reuploaded in their entirety, which can take a long time for large objects. With PTP/MTP, the file size must be known at the opening stage.[8
Click to expand...
I also hate KIES.

they should have left it the way it was, which is a usb device.

this is why I suggest you take the sdcard out, (it's under the back cover, and does not require you powering the phone down) and directly transfer the files you want onto it. Once you plug it back into the phone, you should be able to use those files, (unless Itunes doesn't want to, and yer on yer own with Itunes)

jaz
 
Would converting the format help. db poweramp's converter will convert these files to another lossless format called APE, once there you could convert it back to apple lossless or to FLAC.

Jazzmans I hear you on itunes, I loaded Jriver last night, sweet! I sure wish iTunes worked this well.
 
I tried the "pull the microSD out and load it separately" trick last night to no avail.

Seems she ripped the CDs using iTunes so all that effort is lost in iTunes heck.

I'll play with it some more this evening. If all else fails, she can re-rip using different software, as I recommended before she started......
 
transmaster said:
WinAmp, and Media Monkey, both have a versions for the Mac, (Winamp is in beta), and both will sync with Android devices, MM will also sync with a iOS-6 devices as well. You might give them a try.
Click to expand...

I use media monkey, for the most part I'm pleased with it, it's good if you have a huge digital library as you can get meta data off of amazon very simply through it.

You can upload your music to google play if you have an android and then you can stream your collection from the cloud, but it will convert everything to 320kbps.... Better than apple though.
 
I was configuring Jriver last night, and I was thinking to myself, iTunes is so bad on a PC that Apple should pay me to use it, on the other hand Jriver is worth every dime of the $49.95 is costs.

The thing that makes Jriver for me is the fact I can control my Onkyo receiver in UPnP (DLNA) from the computer and not from the receiver. The Onkyo's interface is controlled by it's remote control and sucks big time.
 
Jriver is good, I was torn between that and media monkey, what swung mediamonkey is the ability to convert FLAC into mp3 files at a lower bitrate as you upload to an ipod/cellphone, but I did prefer the interface to JRiver
 
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