Been a while since I posted here, and this is completely off-topic from development (other than to give a shout-out to open standards for mp3 playlists perhaps :)

The new Droid phone rocks -- both the Motorola Droid as well as the HTC.? Case in point - my wife and I play in a band, and we have our 3 set lists organized for easy access and maniplation in iTunes.? It's a solid three hours of music we play, and we like to have access to it anywhere, so we can review, do some personal practice, etc.

Anyway, in a matter of about 10 minutes today I was able to copy mp3s from iTunes, export the set lists, and play our sets on BOTH of our phones.

Here's how it's done.

What You'll Need

• An android based phone
• A machine running iTunes, with your mp3's and your set lists all set up
• A free USB port
• An installation of a program called iTunes Export

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How To Get Your iTunes Set Lists To Your Droid (one of several ways, I'm sure)

1. First, get everything set the way you want in iTunes -- mp3s, playlists, etc.
2. Plug in your Droid.? You will see an icon appear in the notification bar at the top; open the notifications and choose to mount your USB drive
3. Your PC should now see your droid as it would any other usb drive.? Go into the root of the drive.
4. Create a folder called mp3
5. Launch iTunes Export
6. Point it to your iTunes library as prompted
   
7. In the next step you should see a list of all the set lists you've set up; choose one or more set lists (hold down shift or ctrl or the mac equivalent to select multiple set lists).? Click next.
   
8. choose the mp3 directory you created on the usb drive as the output directory
9. Choose m3u as the playlist format
10. Make whatever other settings adjustments on this page that you feel appropriate -- experiment.? Be sure the music folder prefix is correct for your system.? I chose my prefix folder and then chose "flatten" since I don't mind just having all mp3s in one directory; you may choose whatever you wish of course.
    
11. Your mp3s and your playlists will be copied.

Another cool trick - you can drag and drop directly from iTunes into ANY folder, including Droid-based USB drive, and it will grab all those song files and copy them to their destination.

It was amazing to me how quickly this worked, and reliably too.? I put up with Windows Mobile for so long (over 5 years) that I just hadn't realized how advanced these devices had become... and the battery life -- holy cow.? My Windows Mobile phone never lasted more than a day, and that was with just a rare phone call, average texting and email.?? The Droid -- SHEESH... I can use it pretty much all day, and leave it uncharging on the night stand all night and still have a lot of juice left the next day.

Anyway, hope other iTunes users will find this useful.

If you want to know about sync'ing your Droid with Outlook via a SmarterMail or Exchange Server, you can read my (SmarterMail-centric) Droid Synchronization post over on the SmarterTools Forums.

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