I spent from September of 2024 until March of 2025 using an iPod Classic 5th Gen for all my music listening needs. So that meant sitting in a coffee shop working with headphones as well as playing music in the car over Bluetooth, and I loved it.

It took me weeks to clean up the music library and attach all the album art and clean up the ID3 tags to get a nice clean library, and it was great. It was essentially the perfect system for me. After doing all the cleanup, I discovered iTunes/Apple Music's Smart Playlist feature where you can make a cool dynamic playlist. So I can make a playlist that goes through my library and grabs every song that has a genre of rap that was released between the years of 1990 and 1999, for example. I made a dozen or so of these playlists and had different ones for difference moods and vibes or nostalgic eras.

But then in March, the iPod just died one day while I was driving. I tried every troubleshooting recommendation on YouTube, Gemini, ChatGPT, etc. to try to get it working again, but nothing worked. A week later, my phone (Google Pixel 6a) stopped working. March was just a bad month for my gadgets I guess.

So now I needed a phone replacement and an iPod replacement. But with a newborn, I no longer have the resources to replace both devices at the same time. I decided to replace my phone and use the replacement as a music player for my local library as well.

I ended up with a 2024 Motorola Razr (Android).

After spending a lot of time trying to find one that did smart playlists in a similar fashion on Android, I found the app Symphonium, which handles smart playlists similar to iTunes/Apple Music. For the most part, everything was fine with the drag and drop OSX to Android music folder transfer.

Issues:

• Smart playlists were incomplete. This came down to an ID3 tag issue. There are a bunch of supported id3 tags, and one issue was with the tags "Year" and "Original Year". iTunes ignored "Original Year", while Symfonium respects that tag. An example of the problems this posed: Madonna - Like A Prayer was released in 1986 but ripped from Madonna's Greatest Hits album from 1996. But the tags (which I had mostly gotten MusicBrainz Picard to fill out for me - a brilliant piece of software by the way), would have them reversed at times. So tons of songs like this were being ignored by the 1980's pop smart playlist for example.
• Many genre's suddenly became inaccurate. Does iTunes/Apple Music write id3 changes to their database instead of the actual mp3? Looks like it!
  
• Some cover art was missing or wrong.
  
• Symfonium didn't recognize the "Grouping" tag, which I used to add a tag of "full-album" if I wanted full albums not clutter up my smart playlists which were single-focused.
  

That meant I had to find a way to bulk edit the affected music on Android without driving myself crazy doing all this on a small touch screen. I tried a bunch of apps from the Google Play Store and F-Droid and they all had some issue or the other that made me uninstall them. The one that worked best was Musicolet, which is a full-fledged music player. I'd recommend using it if you don't need smart playlists! But for the bulk editing, it worked pretty well! I could select as many songs as I wanted and change the genre and remove the offending year tag, which got everything flowing properly into the appropriate smart playlists.

For cover art, I was actually able to do that in Symfonium itself. There's a long press song option "change local thumbnail" which allowed me to choose the cover art i re-downloaded from the net. It doesn't allow for any other tag editing though, so this may be a locked-in database situation like iTunes was.

Finally, for the grouping, I switched to using the more univerally acknowledged "Comment" tag to denote whether something was from a full album and should be ignored on singles playslists.

So with everything set up well...Symofonium is great. Everything's set up perfectly, and I'm having a blast with my music on this new Razr.

Author: