You mean copy the songs/folders/files onto the SD card, regular standard transfer, and THEN do the wifi sync (should one always do "preview" instead of "sync now"?).
Yes, copy them manually with a regular transfer. When I first changed over to musicbee from itunes I found a lot of inconsistent tag data especially with the album artist field. So while that was getting fixed up I would do a preview to get an idea of how long it's going to take. But don't bother so much now. From what I have seen, playlists get re-synced every time.
I assumed you were just copying your entire library over which should make it easy. Just copy everything in your music folder on the PC to the music folder on the android device. If you are only syncing a playlist that makes things more complicated as you will need to copy over all the individual songs in the playlist and maintain the folder structure.
Once you have copied them over, run the wifi sync. That will sync your playlists (copy them to the device) and check all the songs in the playlists are on the device, if not it will copy any over that you missed.
If you didn't miss anything, the wifi sync should be pretty quick.
I was actually doing a playlist based sync. My entire library is too big. So I created a playlist "For Phone" just to transfer a big bulk of music, alongside my 'normal' playlists.
I opted to JUST try that "For Phone" playlist first, with about 40g of music. And I transferred the specific artists first onto the SD card.
You were right. It was much much quicker.
Then, I ticked a few more common playlists, without transferring the files beforehand, thinking I'd do them one by one or two by two, even if it takes longer (because copying over the individual songs and maintaining the structure seems very annoying).
The tracks did copy, but they don't appear as "playlists" in my music players (trying both Media Monkey and Omnia).