Today a shiny new toy arrived in the post for me – a Samsung Galaxy S II. High on my priority list was transferring my music across to the phone. My N900 was very easy to sync – some how I’d got into using Songbird a long time ago, but I don’t use it much any more. Ubuntu has moved to Banshee from Rhythmbox as the default media player, so I decided to use that. I imported the playlist that contained the music I didn’t want synced and plugged in the phone.
First problem is that Samsung phones default to trying to connect to the Kies software suite – which of course is not running on Ubuntu. A little searching turns up that I need to change a setting to make it connect in ‘Mass Storage’ mode – in Settings -> Applications -> Development. Although it looks scary with the warning messages, ###
Next, I find that the phone does not show up in Banshee. Again, some simple searching turns up a simple solution. Create a blank text file called ‘.is_audio_player’ (without any quotes, of course, and don’t forget the leading dot) and add text to it:
audio_folders=Samsung/Music/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mpeg,audio/mp3,application/ogg
Now Banshee sees it properly and will allow me to sync. Now I just need an SDHC card, I’ve got far too much music to fit anything else on there…