This post is probably only of interest to geeks, both music and computer.

As those in my family can attest, I am not an Apple guy. (I like to eat them though.) Still, a few years ago when I moved to a condo and no longer had room for my CD collection and stereo, I got an older iPod and transferred all of my music to it.  I had to use iTunes to sync it with my PC.  (A lot of people complain about iTunes, but I actually don’t think it’s that bad.) I have more than 5000 tracks in iTunes, and I painstakingly categorized my music to set up playlists for them.  As I started using a smart phone that had enough memory, I transferred my music from the iPod to my phone so that I only had one device to carry.  The problem is that since I use an android phone (and earlier a Windows phone) I had no way to sync my playlists between my phone’s music player and iTunes.  It would be extremely cumbersome to have to set up the playlists in my music players.

Unfortunately, there is no iTunes for the android phone.  Recently though, Apple came out with an Apple Music app for android.  I decided to subscribe to Apple Music, but once again, my playlists did not sync between iTunes on the PC and Apple Music on the phone.  I started exploring on Google to find ways to accomplish the syncing.  I finally found a suggestion to install iCloud on the PC and sync iTunes to the iCloud.  (Note: Apple and Microsoft are not much different from each other—they both force you deeper into their ecosystems.) Supposedly, this would allow Apple Music to pick up the playlists from iTunes.  I installed iCloud, but I discovered that I cannot access iCloud without first registering it on an Apple device.  I’m going to all this trouble because I don’t have any Apple devices!

Checking again with Google, I discovered that there is a beta version of iCloud that works with the PC and does not require registration through an Apple device.  I was able to set up iCloud on the PC so that I could sync iTunes from the PC to iCloud.  I checked Apple Music on my phone but I still did not see my playlists.  I reinstalled Apple Music and there they were!  I now have access to my playlists.  I don’t know if it was a coincidence that they appeared after I reinstalled Apple Music, or whether it just took a while for the syncing to be accomplished.

Lucky Jess!  As I mentioned, we’re going on a road trip next week.  He will have access to listen to all of my Irish and Celtic music!

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