

Initially, I thought about that option, in particular with Apple Music, which would support Smart Playlists.

But programs like Apple Music and Google Play Music (GPM) do allow you to, within limits (50,000 songs for GPM 100,000 songs for AM), upload your music library to their cloud (where they may substitute existing tracks they have), and then download it into the SD card from your mobile device. For a multitude of reasons, I do not like streaming music - you need larger data packages for your phone, and you may not always have service where you want it. When I started exploring the Android ecosystem, the first option was a cloud subscription model. Using my existing Android phone, which can support Micro-SD cards up to 2TB.An older iPhone has more storage, but is also much more expensive, and has been designed by Apple to have diminishing battery life - plus planned obsolescence. An iPod Touch does not work, because their storage is not expandable and currently maxes out at 128GB.There are precious little details online about their interfaces, and especially about their interfaces on the PC side for managing the music libraries.

Dedicated music players such as the Fiio or Astell & Kern provide great sound quality, but are expensive, require additional SD cards for storage, do not support smart playlists, and cannot integrate with my large existing iTunes library.There were a variety of options available: That got me thinking again about non-iPod solutions. Luckily, the fellow who installed the adapter for me was able to get them out of the Reboot loop, and I have restored them. If you recall, I recently wrote about some problems I was having with my iPod Classics, both of which had been modified with the Tarkan iFlash adaptor to 512GB.
