MM3 Same song on multiple playlists? (Zen Vision M)

[Binsky]

Hello,

I was very happy to see that the new version of MM allowed us to actually get the playlists to work on my Zen, great feature! (If it already worked on previous versions, I must have missed it.) I actually purchased a license because of it, very happy with the program.

That said, I've noticed some silly behaviour when sending playlists to my Zen Vision M. I had created several playlists on my pc, based on star ratings. When transfering these lists to my Zen, MM seems to also check the playlists that are already on the Zen. Which isn't that bad, but if it encounters a song on a new list that also appears on an earlier list, it removes the song from the previous list! (Am I making sense yet?)

I was "lucky" to have synced the lists that contained everything after putting the "genre" lists in, which ended me up with a complete playlist, and 12 genre playlists that were empty. (They were filled previously, I checked)

I want to have several playlists on my Zen, and there should not be a problem with a song being on several lists. Is this an oversight of MM, or is it a "feature" on the Zen Vision M?

Edit: In case it is important, I am running MM Gold 3.0.1.1127, on an XP SP2 machine. The Zen has the latest firmware, and all drivers are updated.

[nynaevelan]

This is a problem with MM, there is no way that I have figured out to add a single playlist to the Zen that will not remove the songs from any other previous playlists. The best way to avoid this to to create an autosync list which will include all the playlists that you always want on your Zen. This way when you are syncing, MM will relink all your playlists and they will remain intact. This setup works very well for me, since the syncing is vastly improved over v2.5. I have over 100 playlists on my autosync list and unless I have made some major changes to my database, it only takes about 5-30 minutes to finish the sync.

Nyn

[Binsky]

That's a shame! Here's to hoping that there's going to be a way around this sometime in the future... It sort of goes against the whole playlist thing if items are not allowed to be included on several lists, after all, they are just referencing songs that are stored somewhere on the player, it would not have to make a new copy each time. I also tried to put the playlists within another playlist, but apparently the Zen doesn't care where you put the lists, it will scan them all. (and removes those 'pesky' double items)


Your workaround is a good one though, but it won't solve my problem. (as you noted ) I bought the Zen because it can hold my full music collection, and spent ages rating them all so I could create playlists based on those. If I would use your solution, the first sync would takes ages to complete. (9k+ songs)

I agree that the syncing has greatly improved over the last few versions, great to see good progress being made!

In any case, thanks for your reply. If anyone ever finds a way to tackle this, I'd be glad to know about it.

[nynaevelan]

I have almost 9000 tracks and the last time I did a complete sync of all my tracks, it only took about 3 hours. You could leave it running overnight, this would be the only time you would have to do a complete sync. The only thing that I found that came close to what you want is to use Creative's software, and I am not that desperate.

Nyn

[Binsky]

LOL! I hear you there, I am not about to create playlists "the Creative way" either, it's just too much work!

I was very happy to dump their software when I found mediamonkey, it just works so much better...

[Music Diva]

This bug seriously is the main thing that annoys me about MM. It makes no sense whatsoever to remove songs from playlists just because they're added to more than one!!

But it's way better than Creative's sync software, so I deal with it. I may try the solution mentioned above and see if it works for me.

Thanks nynaevelan!

[chrisjj]

FTR, this bug is fixed on 1708, and some earlier.