Playlists on Android just updating once (player pro sync)

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Playlists on Android just updating once (player pro sync)

Post by Guest »

Hey, I have the following problem:

I'm using PlayerPro to create Playlists and listen to music. If I create a new playlist and add some songs everything is fine - MediaMonkey on Android is recognizing the new playlist and shows the tracks but just ONCE!

If I go to PlayerPro again and add some more Songs to this playlist MediaMonkey does not update the Playlist so the new tracks are not visible.

Also Libary Update doesn't solve this problem...

Please help!
Peke
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Re: Playlists on Android just updating once (player pro sync

Post by Peke »

If You rename playlist on PlayerPro MMA should pick it up again?
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
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b-hard
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Re: Playlists on Android just updating once (player pro sync

Post by b-hard »

Peke wrote:If You rename playlist on PlayerPro MMA should pick it up again?
Hm, no, i rename the playlist in the Player Pro Folder to *.m3u start a scan on MMA but MMA shows the playlist just empty... Like all other playlists too...

If i could sync my Playlists with my PC i would be happy with that but also now updates there.

No Covers, Ratings or Anything else will be updated except i delete the folder on Android and Sync again...
Peke
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Re: Playlists on Android just updating once (player pro sync

Post by Peke »

Problem is that MMA can't find files in paths set in playlists.

Can you:
1. copy one of playlist to PC
2. open in notepad
3. See the path of first few songs
4. Try to navigate exactly by that path to to tracks on android
5. see if files are there and if that folder is added in MMA library
6. If all that is OK Please open support ticket and supply us with playlist and screenshot of track path and Library folders in MMA

That way we should be able to see what and why MMA do not add any tracks from playlist to library and proceed with solution.
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
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Ccarnage
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Re: Playlists on Android just updating once (player pro sync

Post by Ccarnage »

Note I posted on another thread (https://mediamonkey.com/forum/viewtopic ... 91#p434991) but since this appears to be the same problem I'll post it here too:
I'm having this exact same issue today, a year later. Was wondering if any devs were aware of the problem or if a fix was in the pipeline? Just to make the issue I'm having clear:
Scenario:

-I use MMW on my main PC to listen to music, however on android I use a combination of Playerpro and Blackplayer for listening (since blackplayer has a great interface/customizability and also has the ability to add songs to 'favourites' from lockscreen/notifications or doubletapping artwork I use it for listenign, and playerpro has smart playlist functionality that MMA is sadly missing).

-I use MMA to sync playlists/new songs/metadata changes between android to windows

-Within most android media player apps (Google play music aside), the system playlists (ie playlists in the music.db file; handled by the android filesystem) are used as the application’s playlist database. This means that if I make a playlist in blackplayer, playerpro can see it, and if I add more songs to the same playlist in blackplayer and reopen playerpro the playlist will be refreshed and up-to-date in both applications. Same vice-versa for playerpro->blackplayer (note that google play music app doesn't behave like this, it will 'listen' to playlists in the db but then fork them and make its own semi-proprietary playlists within the db once you edit them in google play music _shrug_ )

-MMA, however, does NOT behave in this way: it will find system playlists when they are newly created, but they won’t be updated if they are changed in future. Eg If I go back and update the playlist in blackplayer, after MMA has picked it up, the changes will not be reflected in MMA (even after triggering refresh of media store).
I figured this was because MMA uses a weird combination of it's own database AND .m3us imported into a folder from MMW to keep playlists up to date, and so I did some investigation.

I found that MMA not only accesses music.db to pick up on newly-created playlists from other apps, it also is capable of DELETING playlists from music.db if they are deleted from MMA. This tells me that the main problem is the result of MMA’s refresh only comparing the playlist NAMES in music.db to against its ‘playlist’ sqlite database component (which only contains the NAMES of playlists, and thus MMA only imports playlists from music.db which is does not already have a similarly named .m3u for, rather than actually comparing the playlist_items_map to music.db). This explains why it imports newly made playlists, but doesn’t update modified ones.

I believe there are 2 relatively easy ways to modify the program (only MMA, no/minimal mods to MMW needed) to solve these problems:

1. Continue to import playlists from MMW as .m3u files (as currently) into a folder on the android device, but add a ‘.nomedia’ file within the folder so that android doesn’t constantly replace system playlists with these m3u files. Then, make it so that MMA parses music.db upon starting/clicking on playlists in the menu (as it kind of already does with a newly created playlist, but make it check for changes) and save these changes to the corresponding .m3u files. Any changes to the playlists made in MMA should also be reflected in the music.db; so instead of just writing changes to the .m3u file, also write changes to the system’s database so that the playlist is updated for all applications (I’m unsure if MMA currently does this bit, it might already be doing this). In this scenario MMA would continue to use the .m3u files as its own little personal database.
OR
2. Similar to as above, except switch to using the music.db for the playlist information instead of bothering with .m3us. To prevent having to modify the way MMW syncs, MMA could compare the.m3us from the playlist folder (with .nomedia) that MMW deposited, and update music.db from them. That way, during operation, MMA would be using music.db as it’s playlist information database. Then, before syncing with MMW, MMA would generate .m3us in the playlist folder which reflect the current music.db information, allowing MMW to receive the latest changes from the phone. The advantage to this method is that it would require fewer comparisons between music.db and the .m3u files; only requiring comparison when wanting to sync MMA and MMW, rather than whenever you opened the MMA app.

Ideally in the long run I think that the playlist sync experience would be better if implemented without .m3us, eg including all playlist data in the MMA database like how MMW does it, and then keeping the MMA.db and music.db database in sync. This would also solve another current limitation of playlist sync: while the syncing of most file properties such as star rating through MM is excellent (in that you can modify eg rating on the phone AND on the PC, and the rating most recently given is the one kept when synced) this is NOT the case for playlists. If you add a song to a playlist on MMA, and add a different song to the same playlist on MMW and then sync, weird shit happens, like it doesn’t even sync if you update the MMW playlist more recently than the MMA… This could be fixed if it was essentially just syncing tags (eg a custom tag with names of all playlists the song is in, idk).
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