by SummitPlot » Wed Dec 18, 2019 6:48 am
I've spent the past six months trying to fix the same problem, even with one-on-one help from MediaMonkey support. With 23,000 music tracks, everything just took a long time. But I think I have finally got things working right. I'm not sure if there was just one lucky fix but here's some things I did until it all worked.
1) Don't use USB sync, use WI-FI.
2) Be very patient - it takes a long time to complete syncs, scans, deletions, etc when first cleaning things up.
3) Consider MMW (MediaMonkey on your Windows PC) as your base. Fix everything there before even thinking about syncing. For example, I never add new content to MMA (MediaMonkey on my Android phone).
4) Spend a long time cleaning up your files on your PC Music folder and your MMW database. And I mean a lot of time, especially when you have 1,000s of tracks.
CLEAN UP MMW FIRST.
Run the various clean-up tools on MMW. (This will take hours and hours, if not days.) The object is to have a perfectly clean and consistent set of files, tags and library. On the left of MMW, expand Music, go to Files to Edit, then run through each of the sub-tasks, most importantly
Unknown Title
Unknown Artist
Unknown Album
Unknown Genre
Dead Links
Unorganised files (really key!)
Unsynchronized Tags (really really really key!)
Duplicate content (really key)
Do all this at least twice. (The second time should be quicker.) Run autoscan and triple check that the library looks "correct".
PUT SD CARD IN ORDER
Once you're sure your music files and MMW library on your PC are absolutely clean and consistent, make a direct copy via Windows File Explorer of your PC's Music folder onto the phone's SD card where there must not be any other music files. To make life easier, take the SD card out of the phone and connect directly to PC. (MediaMonkey not involved here.)
Then use the program WinMerge (or something similar) to compare the Music folder on your PC with the Music folder on the SD card. Ideally, all files should be the same on both sides although WinMerge may say the song files aren't identical but this probably reflects different time stamps on the files. Just make sure there's not missing files on either side. If there are, copy or delete whichever way will fix things. This applies to Album Art files as well. Re-run Winmerge to double-check.
Once the two Music folders are identical, run MMW's autoscan again. Now the MMW Music library should be "perfect".
IT'S TIME TO SYNC!
Put the SD card back in the phone and fire up MMA. (No connection to your PC yet.) Let MMA's circle away for a very, very long time, probably overnight if you have 10s of thousands of tracks. Take a look at MMA's library to see if it generally looks like MMW's library.
Now go to MMW and under tools, select Options, then go down to Portable Sync Device. Select your SD card and choose Configure.
On The Summary tab, make sure only "Grant remote sync/access rights" is checked. (You can check the others when you're confident things are working OK.)
On the Auto-Sync to Device tab, check all the relevant boxes under Collections. Leave unchecked "Sync random subset" but do check "Delete other files and playlists from the device" as well as "Confirm deletion."
On the Auto-Sync to Library tab, uncheck "Auto-sync new files and playlists". Like I said before, I'm only adding content via MMW, not MMA. Down at the bottom, I've checked "Auto-sync file metadata from the device to the PC." This is so MMW captures my changed ratings as I listen to music on MMA.
Fingers crossed, you should be ready to Auto-Sync now. Take a deep breath, make sure MMW is up and running, go to MMA (which is NOT connected to the PC via USB) and hit Sync! Let it run its course, don't interrupt.
And good luck!
I've spent the past six months trying to fix the same problem, even with one-on-one help from MediaMonkey support. With 23,000 music tracks, everything just took a long time. But I think I have finally got things working right. I'm not sure if there was just one lucky fix but here's some things I did until it all worked.
1) Don't use USB sync, use WI-FI.
2) Be very patient - it takes a long time to complete syncs, scans, deletions, etc when first cleaning things up.
3) Consider MMW (MediaMonkey on your Windows PC) as your base. Fix everything there before even thinking about syncing. For example, I never add new content to MMA (MediaMonkey on my Android phone).
4) Spend a long time cleaning up your files on your PC Music folder and your MMW database. And I mean a lot of time, especially when you have 1,000s of tracks.
CLEAN UP MMW FIRST.
Run the various clean-up tools on MMW. (This will take hours and hours, if not days.) The object is to have a perfectly clean and consistent set of files, tags and library. On the left of MMW, expand Music, go to Files to Edit, then run through each of the sub-tasks, most importantly
Unknown Title
Unknown Artist
Unknown Album
Unknown Genre
Dead Links
Unorganised files (really key!)
Unsynchronized Tags (really really really key!)
Duplicate content (really key)
Do all this at least twice. (The second time should be quicker.) Run autoscan and triple check that the library looks "correct".
PUT SD CARD IN ORDER
Once you're sure your music files and MMW library on your PC are absolutely clean and consistent, make a direct copy via Windows File Explorer of your PC's Music folder onto the phone's SD card where there must not be any other music files. To make life easier, take the SD card out of the phone and connect directly to PC. (MediaMonkey not involved here.)
Then use the program WinMerge (or something similar) to compare the Music folder on your PC with the Music folder on the SD card. Ideally, all files should be the same on both sides although WinMerge may say the song files aren't identical but this probably reflects different time stamps on the files. Just make sure there's not missing files on either side. If there are, copy or delete whichever way will fix things. This applies to Album Art files as well. Re-run Winmerge to double-check.
Once the two Music folders are identical, run MMW's autoscan again. Now the MMW Music library should be "perfect".
IT'S TIME TO SYNC!
Put the SD card back in the phone and fire up MMA. (No connection to your PC yet.) Let MMA's circle away for a very, very long time, probably overnight if you have 10s of thousands of tracks. Take a look at MMA's library to see if it generally looks like MMW's library.
Now go to MMW and under tools, select Options, then go down to Portable Sync Device. Select your SD card and choose Configure.
On The Summary tab, make sure only "Grant remote sync/access rights" is checked. (You can check the others when you're confident things are working OK.)
On the Auto-Sync to Device tab, check all the relevant boxes under Collections. Leave unchecked "Sync random subset" but do check "Delete other files and playlists from the device" as well as "Confirm deletion."
On the Auto-Sync to Library tab, uncheck "Auto-sync new files and playlists". Like I said before, I'm only adding content via MMW, not MMA. Down at the bottom, I've checked "Auto-sync file metadata from the device to the PC." This is so MMW captures my changed ratings as I listen to music on MMA.
Fingers crossed, you should be ready to Auto-Sync now. Take a deep breath, make sure MMW is up and running, go to MMA (which is NOT connected to the PC via USB) and hit Sync! Let it run its course, don't interrupt.
And good luck!