Android sync through MTP takes a long time and often fails

[eagle79]

Okay. I've spend a ton of time getting my device (Droid Bionic) to sync using an admittedly rather large library (about 2000 files on my device, all mp3, and four playlists). It took about 4 sync attempts to progressively add my music to my device (the first sync managed to add 900 or so before it failed), but I finally go it all on there. Interestingly, for every sync, it got through the "copying [filename]" steps, and then failed after sitting at the final step, then it later decides to tell me it couldn't add the rest of the files...

But anyway, my question isn't about the failed syncs (which were very frustrating as well, but I don't want to clear my device to reproduce them at this point), but rather the amount of time a sync takes. First of all, when I first connect my device, MM "scans" it for what seems a very long time. Then, as I sync, it takes a reasonable amount of time copying files (I can't expect it to be much faster than it is, considering that it has to write across USB to a microSD card through an MTP interface -- not the fastest deal in the world). But then after copying all the files, it sits at what appears to be 100% for a REALLY long time. What in the world is it doing all this time? Surely it doesn't take that long to write a few playlist files...

I just ran a sync that updated about 150 files on the device (no new files were added). Before running, I got the MMLog file and I captured the debug output. I can supply if needed. The complete synch, from connection of the device to successful completion, took about 30 minutes. Does this make sense? Why should it take so very long?

I'm syncing a Droid Bionic against MM 4.0.3 (debug) using d_WMDM.dll; autosync of four playlists on a Windows 7 x64 machine

[untel123]

I had the same problem ... force the unit using the USB driver and you will solve your problem. To do so, Connect your unit and validate the drive letter with MS explorer. If you want to change the name, you can do this within Explorer.

Open MM. In menu, click on "tools", "options". In the new window, at the bottom of the left items, click on "portable/audio devices", on the right, click on the d_USBMass1.dll then click on the "configure" button (upper right of this window). A new window will open, click on the "Options" tab. On the left click on "device configuration" (the last item). Enter the name of the unit (Walkman or the new name you gave), select the appropriate drive letter from the drop down menu, enter a drive name if you want (not required). I then clicked on find device (it may not be required but for me it was). I was given 2 usb ids ... I tried the first one and it didn't work in MM. With the second one, my Z unit appeared and I could access it from the MM.

For me, this solved my synch problem (was taking eternity to synch 3 songs .... )

[eagle79]

I might give that a try... though I find it very frustrating that I can't use MTP.

Are there any caveats to doing it this way? MTP is supposedly "preferred", though I don't really know why.

[eagle79]

Well, I finally got around to giving this a try... I didn't have to do quite the prescribed amount of configuration, because MM picked up a good bit of it. All looked good at first, but then things hung up during synchronization... I got fed up and decided to go a completely different route: I shut down my phone, popped out the microSD card and put in in an SD adapter. Then I copied some unrelated folders off, formatted the card, copied everything back on and used MM to "sync" directly to the card. The sync itself went flawlessly and "quickly" (when you're copying ~2000 music files, nothing can really be fast!). I did have to change the sync settings to force relative paths for the playlist files, though.

Then I popped the card in my phone and restarted. Went into the music app and tried to open a song from one of the playlists... it generated an "unsupported file type" error. I thought everything failed until I switched from looking at the playlists to looking at the media list itself... I quickly realized that it was too short, but beginning to grow. I suppose this was the media scanner in Android reading the directories... it took FOREVER! But after it was done, all was working well.

I have yet to try a small sync (such as adding 2 or 3 new songs), but I don't think I'll have to deal with the protracted scan in those cases... My guess is that this is because I completely rebuilt the entire library.

Honestly, this is far from an ideal solution, and for some people, it's likely to be no solution at all. (I'm also curious as to whether it would work with DRM protected songs...) But it at least does the job for my situation.

Thanks for the assistance!

[eagle79]

Just as an update, I did an update yesterday that added about 40 new files to my device (using direct sync to card as before). As before, the device spent some time re-scanning the media on the device. It was a bit faster this time, but still not as fast as I would like. 40 new files is really not that much data...

In any case, this still works pretty well compared to MTP synch. I just have to allow some time for the device to do its thing after I put the card in and start the phone back up...

[Eso Rimmer]

I think the only benefit of MTP is that you can access you phone's memory (both internal and SD card) from PC and phone in the same time. Which is nice, but for some reason takes ages to copy file on it, so no point for me. For me, USB mode is the way to go.
In USB mode the drives are disconnected and accessible only for PC though.