Before we get into "why don't I just drop iTunes or the Galaxy", I'm going to explain why I use these two things. First, I like Samsung's phones and other products. My Galaxy Active S5 and now S7 are great, durable devices. The only issue with my S5 was that I 'm stupid and "demonstrated" its durability a few too many times, which caused issues with the screen.

I use iTunes because it was a clean, stable, music player years ago, and generally still is now. Lots of old music players I might have used a decade ago are gone or transformed into something else entirely. I never buy anything from the iTunes store. I buy most of my music in physical disks and rip it via iTunes, or download from Amazon if it's prohibitively expensive in physical form, or I just can't find it like that Shadeweaver album.

Also, stats and organization. I generally like, and let's face it, am used to the iTunes format. It has huge collected playtimes, stats, ratings, and organization to it that I have gradually built and improved upon over time. Programmed playlists, detailed genre sorting, star ratings, play counts, album art, etc. I would like to keep that shit in it's neat little order. But I generally loathe anything Apple, have been using the same iPod since 2009 somehow, being fully aware that the life expectancy of any Apple product is somewhere between 4 and 8 months.

At some point, this iPod is going to die and rather than spend an absurd $300 or $400 for something to just play MP3s from Apple (only Apple and Nintendo can get away with selling over-priced hardware with no storage space), I would like if there was a way for me to put all that music on my Galaxy, with a caveat: I want to still maintain and sync with the stats and organization in iTunes, and be able to use the two together.

I have looked online, but am wary of some of the solutions I've seen crop up. I figured I'd throw this out to a group where seriousness about the music, use, collections, and organization is probably along similar lines. Maybe someone here has found a way to make this work without it being a headache. My phone can handle up to 256GB Micro SD, and that is bigger than my iPod and would currently hold all my music without issue. I would like to keep my star ratings and hundreds of hours of collected stats and data in the process.

I use the same set-up as you do, with a Samsung Galaxy phone and iTunes to store music I bought myself. I find it actually easier than using my old iPod which I lost under circumstances I still don't understand. You just connect the phone to your computer, right click on the folder in your 'My Music' and click 'send to (phone).' Should be easy to use if you have Google Play on your phone. It's worked flawlessly for me so long as I've had a decent SD card.

Can this sync play stats and stuff, or does it just send the music to the phone?

Honestly, it doesn't seem to keep track of stats on the player on the phone, but I am fairly sure my iTunes updated play numbers whenever I connected the phone to the computer, just like my iPod used to.

Weird, okay. Does that carry over all the playlists and stuff, too?

You can certainly make playlists on the Google Play app, though I've never done it much myself since getting this device. Sorry I can't be of more help on that one.

Eh, every bit of information on this is one step closer to me finding a full, workable solution for the picky bullshit I'm trying to make work. So it's appreciated. I checked my iPod yesterday after syncing it, and I only have 70GB of music over 10,200 songs, so that will easily fit onto a 128 GB Micro SD with room to spare. I'll need to grab one of those before I start experimenting on my own.