Syncing
In general your audio collection is much bigger than the storage on your portable allows for.
Often file formats supported by your media player are not supported by your portable.
As portables are limited in space and sound quality it often diesn’t make sense to use lossless formats.
One option is to do it manual.
You build a separate library that fits on the portable and has all the audio in e.g. 250 kbs MP3.
Maintaining a second library is a lot of work.
A better one is to let the media player do the job.
You make a playlist, a list of songs you want to have on your portable.
You tell the media player to transcode= converting the audio on the fly, to a format supported by the media player.
On connecting the portable to the media player it will compare what is in the playlist and what is on the portable.
If there are differences it will sync so all what is in the playlist but not on the portable will be transferred (and converted if needed) to the portable and visa versa depending on the settings.
Playlist
My collection doesn't fit on an 16 GB micro SD.
The trick is to make a playlist and use its content for the sync.
Converting
As the sound quality of my smart phone is a bit poor and space is limited, I convert everything to MP3.
You can choose various modes for the conversion.
Choose the encoder.
Specify encoder options.
Folder
You can specify the directory structure.
I changed
Music\[Artist]\[Album]\ to
Music\[Album]\
In my case Album Artist contains one name, Artist often contains all the performers involved.
Because of this the full spec (path/filename) can exceed the 256 limit.
Note that the spec is Music\ not \Musci\
Sync to devices like a USB stick
This type of devices won't be recognized as a an audio device to sync with.
It is simply a storage device like your HD.
In Tools > Options > Handheld > Add Device you can choose a device like a USB stick and tell JRMC to treat it as a portable.
As it is storage, all audio file types are accepted.
You probably have to tell JRMC to convert to a format like MP3 if you want it to work with e.g. a car radio.
Sync to Android
JRiver sees my Android 4.0.4 as a storage device.
As stated above, you can force conversion to MP3
Stability is a problem.
Sometimes my playlist is completely cleared.
I locked it to avoid this.
Sometimes files already on the device are synced again.
Might be a JRiver problem, might be a Andoid problem so let’s blame them both.
Sync to Win Mobile
My mobile runs Win Mobile 6.5.
As my PC runs Win7 synching should be no problem.
Connecting
There are 2 options on the phone Active Sync or Diskdrive.
The Active sync does about 0.6 MB/sec, the Diskdrive mode 4 MB/sec.
I couldn’t sync between JRMC and the phone with Active Sync until I found out that disabling “Fast Data synchronization” (a kind of network connection to make the sync with outlook more stable) did the trick.
After disabling the connection manifest itself as USB, allows for synching with JRMC.
What is on the mobile
Building a play list is very simple.
Select a track or an album and send it to the playlist.
If you want to add an album to the playlist, how do you know it is not already on this list?
You don’t but you can have a look inside the list.
This list is track based, you can’t switch to album view.
Trying to find out if an album is on this big list is a rather tedious job
A nice option would be Thumbnail Text, add something allowing you to see if the album belongs to a playlist in album view.
Tried
[Name]
[Album Artist (auto)]
If(playlistid==415681222,+,-)
But this doesn't work
I solved it by making a view ‘Albums not on mobile’
Make a view 'Albums not on mobile'
Use a search rule excluding all albums already in the playlist.
At least you have a nice overview of albums not on the mobile.
Select the ones you wish to add.
No, the moment you send them to the playlist, the view is not updated.
Conversion Cache
If you convert to e.g. a portable all converted audio can be stored in the conversion cache.
If you edit e.g. change a tag this is applied to the audio in the conversion cache as well.
This is a superior solution compared with maintaining separate libraries for home and portable use.
The conversion cache can be activated in the Options.