A little bit of background is probably in order before I get into my experience with doubleTwist. I've never really been an Apple person. Back in the day I bought one of the first available portable .mp3 players - the Diamond Rio PMP 300 - and used it when M and I would go to Bally's to work out. Well, our Bally's closed and the player only had 32MB of memory so it quickly got shelved, though I still have it floating around in the basement somewhere. Eventually M talked me into an early Apple iPod for herself, one of the 30GB models and she loved it; but it meant we needed to start using iTunes to manage our music collection which agitated me a bit as I was happy with MusicMatch Jukebox. Eventually I gave in and also got a 30GB iPod, but seldom used it except when I traveled. On one trip to Las Vegas, I did stay in a hotel room that had an iHome alarm with an iPod dock and made the mistake of mentioning that to J when I got home and ended up with one of my own and soon the iPod was relegated to serving as a music source for an alarm clock that I really didn't use. Eventually the battery died and rather than trying to replace it myself or having it done, it ended up in a box with other old/deprecated electronics.
But when I started walking last year, I decided I needed something to listen to and gave in and bought a cheap iPod shuffle. It worked well enough, though at only 2GB, I had to get creative with what music I put on there, so I started playing with Smart Playlists in iTunes. I have several, some are based upon star ratings, others on a combination of those ratings and play counts, and lastly others on a combination of ratings and last played date so I would cycle through music I hadn't heard in a while. This was all well and good until I picked up a LG Tone Pro a few months ago. I fell in love with it, but the iPod Shuffle doesn't do Bluetooth, so I quit using it and started using my phone. The issue I had is that depending upon where I walk in our neighborhood my cell signal can cut out at times, so I listened to a lot of downloaded pod casts at first. But I really missed my music and decided to see what my options were for my iTunes library.
I considered simply buying a Bluetooth adapter for the Shuffle, but the ones I saw were as big (if not bigger) than the Shuffle itself. I then looked at getting a more expensive iPod that would use Bluetooth, but for the little I use it for that seemed overkill. I then looked into my options for my phone - currently a Samsung Galaxy S4 since I gave my Note 4 to J shortly after getting it. I'm sure there are other options out there, but the three main ones I saw were:
- Manual sync.
- Google Music.
- doubleTwist.
Manual sync wasn't really an option as for what I was doing - just walking really - it wasn't going to be worth the effort to update songs often. Google Music sounded good at first, but then I realized I'd likely run into the same issue as using any other streaming service such as Milk Music (which I really do love - thanks Samsung), so that got shelved too. That left me with doubleTwist, and with the balance of this review.
The doubleTwist software can be downloaded freely from their website (the Windows portion) and from the Google Play store (the Android portion), though the latter does have some in-app purchases available which I'll get to in a bit. Installation of each is straight forward enough, though for the Android piece, I did need to go alter my music location to point to my SD card and not my phone's internal memory. I won't delve into all of the details of setting the sync up and such as the documentation and other reviews do a far better job than I could; but let me instead touch on my experiences with the sync and the program(s) themselves.
The Windows piece is fairly straight forward. In my case it located my iTunes library just fine, which was nice since it sits on a NAS device on my desk so that everyone can access one set of files. However, this led to my first issue. When the doubleTwist client first starts it brings up a sync window for each removable device it finds, which in my case was my phone, my iPod, and a SD card for a mobile hots pot that I had plugged in. It would be nice if there was some way to configure what did/didn't pop up as each comes up in it's own window like this one:
The box you see at the bottom is my device name which I blanked out, but otherwise this is the default screen when the app starts. The problem I ran into was when I went to sync the music from the music screen:
As you see in this screen it allows me to select music via playlists, albums, artists, or genre's all of which would be fine. What my issue was is that apparently because of the size of my library - around 32k songs at about 205GB - which is by no means tiny, but frankly not all that big compared to many people's - it took a good 25+ minutes for the library to load. In fact it took so long I kept killing the application thinking it was hung up. It got to the point that I felt perhaps the issue was the USB sync since the doubleTwist help pages mention that some phones don't play nicely and my S4 appeared to be potentially one of those. So I decided to go with one of the in-app purchases which is AirSync. This allows for syncing over the local wi-fi, which I really thought would be more of a pain than the USB sync, but at this point I figured it was worth a try since I really did want this to work. Rather than spending $5 of so for that, I went ahead and spent something like $9 to simply go with the "Pro" version which included AirSync as well as a few other features that I'm not really sure I cared about. In hindsight the AirSync itself would have been sufficient, but without jumping too far ahead I'm happy enough with the app I'm glad I went with the Pro version as I've gotten my money's worth.
Well, the AirSync takes an additional bit of setup to sync the Windows piece with the Android piece, but that was fairly painless - sort of like some Bluetooth devices with a "code" work. However, the library was still not coming up so I finally left it sit and went and washed the dinner dishes and cleaned up the rest of the kitchen and lo and behold when I got back a little later it was on the music screen I showed above. I picked two of the smallest playlists I had and hit sync, and it quickly did it's thing.
I then went into the Android app to see how if it would actually worked. Below are some screen shots - the first is my default view which I have set to "Songs", though that is configurable. The second is a menu, and the third is of it playing a song - in this case "Blow Me (One Last Kiss)" from Pink which is currently a favorite of mine - no judging - LOL:
The player itself is nothing overly special, but it does work for what I need and I am happy with it. I believe the Album art is part of the aforementioned "Pro" upgrade and truthfully isn't really a think I care about as when I'm listening it's via Bluetooth and the LG Tone Pro can control the player so my phone is either lying on my desk, the kitchen island, or in my pocket/on my belt.
That being said I do have some thoughts/issues with the player that I want to touch on. Now none of these are "deal breakers", but they are annoying to varying degrees.
- I normally chose to start with a song I'm in the mood for, which is fine, but the player then plays in alphabetic order which I don't like. There is a shuffle all button that you can see in the top screen shot and that works; but it immediately shuffles to the next song and does not complete the current song which agitates me. This can be worked around by hitting the shuffle icon on the playing screen (third screen shot above), but I'd personally prefer to have the "shuffle all" option simply shuffle *after* the current song has finished. And regardless of my personal feelings on that, I think it's less than optimal UI design to have the shuffle work differently between the two ways of initiating it.
- Play counts and last played date/times do sync back to iTunes which is important to me because of my Smart Playlists. However, iTunes and my iPod only update these counts and date/times upon completion of a song - at least from what I can tell. doubleTwist will update if a song was played at all, even for a brief moment which is agitating since I do skip songs. Additionally, the date/time is 6 hours behind - I'm assuming that's because of my offset from UTC (6 hours) and I have broached this with their support and "it's an open issue" at the moment.
- The sync process itself is fairly quick for updating my music, as each sync the Smart Playlists that I have set to sync will change based upon music plays, but updating play counts and last played information in iTunes does seem to take longer than I'd expect. Perhaps this is an iTunes issue, but one I felt I should mention.
- On my phone at least the equalizer, which I believe is also part of the "Pro" upgrade will not initialize. Again, really just a small agitation, but considering it was a part of the price difference from just enabling AirSync and getting the "Pro", it really should work - I didn't see any references to it being an issue with my phone model.
And to summarize my issues/thoughts on the Windows piece:
- The sync client on my Windows machine crashes every couple of days. This in and of itself wouldn't be a big deal if it didn't take 25+ minutes each time it was restarted to load my library. It would be nice if it could use a "cached" copy right away while it was loading the actual library. Perhaps that's not feasible, but it would make me far happier with the product.
- The documentation for the Windows piece is a bit dated, the screen shots are of an older version and the current version has had some media functionality removed. I don't really care about the functionality changes as I do use iTunes on the PC for playing music, but it was agitating when I was looking at the documentation over my slow library load times.
All in all I am happy with doubleTwist. I do think the AirSync is worth the price, though I'm not sure the "Pro" was. Overall though, despite the fact that I do like the software and have used it quite a bit I'm hard pressed to give it more than 3 1/2 stars out of 5 due to the various "issues/annoyances" above. I will say I did post something about the UTC time issue mentioned in #2 in the player list above and got a response from doubleTwist fairly quickly. Granted the response was that it was "an open issue" as I mentioned above, but the fact that they responded as quickly as they did made points with me.
Overall, I'd probably be happier with an iPod that had Bluetooth than trying to make iTunes and Android play as nicely as I want, but since I'd rather just carry my phone and I'm not interested in moving to an iPhone, I believe doubleTwist does enough to make me happy.
- M
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