Droid Day Three; Copying my Music

Day One; First Impressions
Day Two; In Search of Apps

This is my 3rd day playing my new Motorola Droid and logging about my experience. By now you may have realized I never bothered to read any manual or instructions on using the Droid. As a UI freak I wanted to find out how intuitive the Droid User Interface Experience is.

I had hoped to spend today converting my schedule and contacts from my iTouch to the Droid. I decided I could miss some appointments as long as I had some good music to listen too.

The first step naturally was to connect the Droid to my PC using the included USB cable. I opened up Windows Explorer expecting to see a new drive appear or some other indication that a new device had been detected. As a long time Windows users I stared at the screen quite a while until I realized something was wrong.

Well, I confess, I did search online for help on this one. It was not intuitive. Turns out there was another secret hidden in the Notifications panel. When the USB cable is plugged in you can pull down the Notification menu and there it is; ”USB Connected Select to copy files from your computer”

When you click on USB connected menu item you’ll see the following screen asking to “Mount” your Droid. I don’t know about you guys but this sounds like ancient computer terminology and doesn’t fit the into modern design. Would R2D2 ever Mount anything? I think not.

Once you click on “Mount” your Droid SD card will show up as a drive on your computer.

The next step again isn’t so obvious. You’ll see a folder for your Google GPS and your camera(DCIM) but there’s no Music folder. You’ll also find a folder named “data” which is used as a data cache similar to your Windows Temporary Internet Folder.

While you’re connected to the computer go ahead and create a folder named “Music” as a top level folder. Then you can just copy your music from the computer to your SD card used in the Droid. Support formats at this time include MP3, M4A, AMR,WMA (8), MIDI, WAV, OGG Vorbis.

You’ll also want to create folder named “Movies”.

When you’re done you’ll still want to (1) eject the drive to make sure all data has been safely written. After that you’ll still want to touch downward on your notifications panel to tell the Droid to (2) Turn off the USB storage.

And when you touch this menu item you’ll still have one last step to (3) Turn Off, before you want to disconnect the cable. Is there a chance for data lose if you don’t follow all three steps? Probably not but that’s what Apple used to say when they first released the iPod.

If you have a microSD connector or slot on your computer I’m sure you can also just remove your microSD card from your Droid and plug it in. You’ll still want to create a Movies and Music folder on the microSD chip.

As far as a music player the interface is very intuitive and straight forward. Having a speaker on the back panel provides much cleaner sound quality then my iTouch (rev2) and a much higher volume level.

For some reason I’m still a problem syncing up my album covers but there were only do many hours in the day. I suspect the reason almost all my songs display Jim Morrison's face is just a user error.

Thank you to every one who has contributed comments. I’m still committed to two more days of Droid Blogging and appreciate your participation.