Since I carry my Android phone everywhere I was feeling a bit silly carrying the phone and my little iPod Shuffle when at the gym or on bike rides. I had just one small wrinkle to sort out: the music library aspect.
Love it or hate it – and I rapidly oscillate between the two – all of my music is managed via iTunes. As we all know, iTunes only works with devices from Apple whose name starts with an “i.” I really didn’t want to install/configure another music library manager… went down that road once before and took a while to get each manager to stop moving things around from each other. That way lies madness.
Fortunately, a quick web search turned up doubleTwist. This is a brilliant little app that kind of gets in between your Android phone and your iTunes library and lets them talk to each other.
Sync your iTunes playlists, ratings and playcounts to your Android phone with the doubleTwist Player for Android.
It appears to do quite a bit more than that but I haven’t really explored much (yet). What I wanted to do, it did and it did it painlessly.
I went into iTunes and created a new blank playlist (“4doubleTwist”). Then I found a song I liked and did a Genius mix from it. Dragged that genius list to my 4doubleTwist list and did a few more Genius mixes to give me a nice psuedo-random variety of a few hours worth of music.
Next I plugged in my phone, tapped it to mount the USB drive and fired up doubleTwist. DoubleTwist did its sync and there was my new playlist. Tagged that to sync to the phone and I was done.
Awesome!
I see they have their own player for the phone as well but I haven’t checked it out yet. Honestly, the default Music app with the “Shuffle All” option works quite well for me 
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Ooh! It supports OS X and WebOS! I’ll have to give it a try when I get home.
It works well on a Mac & a Pre. It won’t sync podcasts, which is apparently a limitation of the doubleTwist on OS X.