Syncing play history

[Jlexa]

When MediaMonkey for Windows (the MediaMonkey server) syncs with an Android device, it is capable of syncing tracks and playlists, including metadata such as Artist, Album, Title, and Track#, ratings, volume leveling information, play history, play count, bookmarks, Album Artist, Composer, Lyrics, and Album Art.

This is a quote from here.
According to the written, the mobile version of MediaMonkey supports syncing play history. But in fact this is not. Play counters of songs that I listened to increased by N after sync with desktop, but I can't see the fresh history play using Add/Remove playstat plugin. Thus, play counters don't match the count of history plays. What the wrong? Or I don't understand something?
Sorry for the bad English, this isn't my native language. I hope that I quite clearly described my problem.
I use:

• MediaMonkey Gold 4.1.15.1828

• Android 4.1.1

• MediaMonkey Android 1.3.0.0694 with installed unlock

[frankz]

Never realized this before, but I've just checked and can confirm it's happening here, too. (Latest beta of MMA, MMW 4.1.17.1840. LastPlayedTime and PlayCounter get updated in the MMW Songs table, but the play never gets inserted into the Played table.

You should really post this in the "Beta Testing, Bugs..." forum. It's a bad one. Throws all the stats out of sync with themselves.

[Jlexa]

By this reason I don't want more to use mobile version of MM At least until someone tells me what's wrong.
I once again checked the songs after the sync - only play counts increased without getting inserted into played table information about the plays dates.

[rusty]

Hi,

Can you clarify a bit? Are you saying that # Times Played and Date last Played aren't in sync across MMW and MMA? Both fields sync as expected for me.

-Rusty

[frankz]

I'll be as detailed as I can.

When you do a sync between MMA and MMW, MMA copies its play data back to your MMW library, but it is incomplete (in your MMW database).

What's supposed to happen is that it should copy all plays into a table called "Played" in your MMW database and then update the "Songs" table with the most recent play and the number of plays (displayed as "Last Played" "Play Count in MMW") if your most recent MMA play of a song is more recent than your most recent MMW play of a song. This is what happens in Ipod/iPhone.

What actually happens is that it does not copy any of your MMA plays into MMW's "Played" table at all. It only updates MMW's "Songs" table with the most recent played and increments the Play Count there.

Which means that you could have 10 plays of a song in MMA, but your actual play history (if you look at it with "Add/Remove Playstat") does not contain this history. It only contains your MMW plays.

When MMA updates metadata to MMW, it should:
1. Copy each play of each track you've listened to into MMW's "Played" table.
2. Look at which play (MMA or MMW) is most recent and then update MMW's "Songs" table (LastPlayedTime field) if the most recent MMA play is more recent than the last MMW play.
3. Increment MMW's "Songs" table ("PlayCount" field) to add the number of plays it has added to the song's history.

As it stands now, it's only doing #2, which means none of the MMA plays are added to the song's actual history, and only its most recent play is added to the song's displayed data. The PlayCount in the "Songs" table (displayed in the interface) does not match the number of plays in the history, and the number of plays in the history isn't accurate because it doesn't contain the MMA plays.

So, yes, the displayed "LastPlayed" and "PlayCount" will match between MMW and MMA, but "Play Count" is certainly inaccurate as is the MMW database history of plays.

[frankz]

Small correction to above: iPhone/iPod does *not* appear to do this either. I'm shocked. This creates a complete database mess.

I thought MediaMonkey was managing my music library and keeping all the data in a central place. If you're syncing your library to devices and your devices to your library, everything should be kept in sync with master data in one central place. Listening on one device should "count" the same as listening on any other device.

I feel like this is a fundamental flaw.

[Ludek]

Hi,
sorry for the confusion, my impression was that the "Played" table was rather deprecated.
Actually MMW doesn't use it for anything, but apparently some third party addons use the data?
What is the "Add/Remove Playstat", I suppose this is a script using the data from Played table, right?

Otherwise yes, MMW writes to Played only when the play counter is increased by playback in MMW, for the iPods and portable devices MMW simply doesn't have the timestamp for each individual playcount entry. It has only the last time played info.

[frankz]

Thanks for the reply.

This is probably more a topic for the MMW forum, then, but if you're taking suggestions, I'd suggest making use the Played table in the future and adding whatever device plays can be retrieved from a device into it. If it's only the most recent, then one is better than none. Beats having to do it manually after every sync from each device.

I've had situations where, for unknown reasons, my number of plays has gone wildly off, and syncing it to the Played table was the only way to retrieve anything resembling accurate counts.

Add/Remove Playstat is a tremendously useful plugin by Bex with almost 5000 downloads from this site's archive alone. There are apparently bunches of us who are interested in managing our detailed play history.

[Jlexa]

Is this problem relevant now?