[guide] manual but efficient two-way sync with phone (playlists and ratings)

[frostbyte]

I thought, I should share my approach I am using for quite a while now. Especially, after I had no success with the wifi sync app, today. I tested this with Android Samsung S10 and gonemadmusic player. But all you really need from the phone are m3u playlists (or any other playlist, Musicbee can read). So it should work with other devices and apps, too.

General idea: merge playlists and ratings (with intermediate rating playlists) from phone into playlists on PC. Sync back from PC to phone.

Important: you need to have the same folder structure of your music files on the phone as on your PC.

Step by step
1.) Copy m3u playlists from phone to PC. If you want to sync ratings: create smart playlists for each rating and save them into intermediate "materialized" m3u playlists (gonemad can do this). Copy to PC, too.
2.) Batch process the m3u files: path prefix have to be replaced (e.g. \Music\... to D:/files/music/ and path separators have to be swapped usually from / to \. Can be done easily with a Notepad++ makro. Record it once. Then open a playlist and apply the macro. Repeat on every playlist.
3.) Run Musicbee
4.) Copy all the these adjusted phone playlists into some helper folder that Musicbee sees (like "_Smartphone"). Now you should see the original playlists and the corresponding playlists from your phone in the subfolder. Each of these pairs might be out of sync.
5.) Some one time setups needed. Create another helper playlist folder, e.g. "_Comparer". Within that folder create for each pair of 2 corresponding playlists a smart playlist configured like that: source: these 2 playlists. confirms to 1 of these 2 rules: playlist is part of PC playlist AND playlist is not part of smartphone playlist | is part of smartphone playlist AND is not part of PC playlist. Essentially, this smart playlist will show you the DIFF.
6.) Merge song ratings: open the comparer playlist select all and adjust the rating
7.) Merge songs to be added to a playlist: select (all), drag an drop to the PC playlist
8.) Merge songs to be removed from a playlist: select (all), right click > search > show title in PC playlist, remove from the PC playlist
9.) For a clean full sync remove all files on phone. Clear database in gonemad etc. (also to see changed ratings on phone)

Update 2020-10-31: It seems like Musicbee doesn't refresh the playlists correctly. You can workaround it, by right clicking on the compare playlists and manually refresh the auto playlist.

I love this kind of diff view, because it has all the comfort from musicbee (playback these songs, change ratings, etc...). And most important: I have full control about what is going on. You could also create more than 1 comparer playlists per playlist pair, in order to see better on which side a song was removed. The single diff playlist doesn't show this.