Having Android Sync Issues? Special Characters in Filenames

Report bugs & feature requests for MediaMonkey for Android and learn about the newest beta build.

Moderator: Gurus

sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Having Android Sync Issues? Special Characters in Filenames

Post by sirandar »

This issue has been resolved IMO
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
But MMW is still broken until proper rules are enforced to prevent creation of unhandle-able files on Android SD cards.

Having MMW push any file to Android with any special characters in the filename or dirrctory structure is fatal for MMA.

The name of the pushed file comes from the <filename> <folder>, <title>, <album>, <artist> fields used in the Location part of the sync device menu.

Having any of these push a filename that has a ,.()/@#$&@#$&?!;:* Really messes up MMA.

This manifests in sync hangs and album art not displaying in the MMA Artist tab scrolling album art.

Once these files get onto your SDcsrd they CANNOT be removed by MMA and any attempt to do will cause a sync hang



I would like to pop out my microSD card out of my phone and into my laptop and copy first my whole library and then any tracks I add as needed. Then back into the phone.

In my opinion this would result in a 10 fold decrease in my effort.

I can do this but all the metadata including playlists are missing .... I may as well use PowerAmp

It there any way to manually transfer this info?

What the real problem was:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

The root cause is MMA and Android cannot handle even a single special character or non-English character in the filename of any file that gets pushed to an android device.

Even one file getting pushed with these characters destabilizes the whole sync. Even MM4 for windows doesn't like to have non-English characters in actual file names and there are issues but they are minor, I painstakingly removed every one from my W7 MM4 library a few years ago.

I incorrectly stated in previous posts that special characters in the <title> <album> and <artist> cause sync issues. They cause no issues in themselves, but cause fatal issues when the sync pushes them to the device with the special characters they contain. It was a case of indirect causation

I would very very strongly suggest that the devs change the default sync setting and profiles so the MM4 and MMA exactly replicates the PC directory and filename structure and character content in the sync process to the device. A routine to report errors related to this issue or just replace/filter problem characters would also work.

I cannot be the only person with an international multi-language music library. This issue may be wasting a lot of interest in your very good software.
Last edited by sirandar on Wed May 24, 2017 2:54 pm, edited 5 times in total.
Peace through music
Lowlander
Posts: 56465
Joined: Sat Sep 06, 2003 5:53 pm
Location: MediaMonkey 5

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by Lowlander »

No, MMA currently relies on Android Media Scanner to gather metadata for files not synced to MMA (via MMW). This should change sometime in the future.
rusty
Posts: 8393
Joined: Tue Apr 29, 2003 3:39 am
Location: Montreal, Canada

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by rusty »

We recently added instructions at http://www.mediamonkey.com/wiki/index.p ... oid_device re. how to 'sync' directly to an SD card that can be inserted into the Android device (mainly for large collections / SD cards for which Wi-Fi sync is too slow).

My suggestion would be to do a clean install on your device and then proceed as described there (using MMW 4.1.15 / MMA 1.3.69x). I haven't had any sync problems with MMA/MMW for some time via Wi-Fi sync (depending on your device/h/w USB sync may not work reliably for you).

-Rusty
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

Thanks Rusty .... a much better option

You may want to update the resource you linked to to include the following info.

You need to delete any profiles associated with the card you may have made previously and these may just be a drive letter and nothing else.

If you include playlists in the sync .... All Accessible Tracks being checked may force all your videos to sync to the card even though they are not selected

Glenn
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

sirandar wrote:Thanks Rusty .... a much better option

You may want to update the resource you linked to to include the following info.

You need to delete any profiles associated with the card you may have made previously and these may just be a drive letter and nothing else.

If you include playlists in the sync .... All Accessible Tracks being checked may force all your videos to sync to the card even though they are not selected

Glenn
Finished the entire process once and the first part went very smoothly once all the previous sync profiles were deleted and I got rid of accessible tracks playlist.

However when I put the card back into my Note 4 and let cataloging finish ..... Wireless sync wanted to sync 200 more files. Note this sync is only tracks >3 stars.

I am doing it again with another bigger card and have synced many times at the PC to makes sure everything is stable. The whole library is syncing this time.

Yup .... your method doesn't work properly ..... Did everything and made sure sync was stable on the PC ...... put the card into my Note 4 and let it catalog.... Still wanted to sync 6000 tracks wirelessly ...... broken

I can confirm that all the MP3 did transfer using my SD card reader from my PC ...... Wireless just wants to sync them again 6000 of them
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

As a final note:

Using the latest 16.1833 MMW build on Windows 10 ..... Wireless sync is not reliable using this technique or any technique I know of.

Wireless is also 10x slower than ejecting my microSD card and syncing directly using my built in SD card reader on my laptop.

However .... using the technique on the page linked to by Rusty does work very rapidly and is quite reliable as long as your sync only in your PC.

PS It seems like whenever you have a issue is is best to just format your SD card, clear MMA's data, delete the mediamonkey directories internal and microSD remove MMA, reboot and start from scratch. It seems MMA cannot recover when anything unexpected happens.
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

I figured out why MMA wireless sync wants to sync 6000 tracks after a perfect sync on the PC using the SD card reader.

In MMA even after all the cataloging is done there are 6000 tracks without rating metadata even though on the PC that are all corrected rated.

The metatdata is all messed up WRT rating, but all else seems to be OK. When doing a wireless sync MMA sees 6000 tracks with missing rating and for some reason wants to re-sync the track instead up updating the rating ...these tracks are clearly on the android device man play properly.

The card was formatted before doing Rusty's technique and MMA was uninstalled data cleared and all mediamonkey directories deleted.

Not your fault really as Google's cataloging engine is unreliable ..... IMO you need to divest from it ASAP

PS .... I have some M4As from Itunes ..... I would bet they are messing up the metatdata sync on the PC.... I will convert them and see
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

In the end I just couldn't tolerate all the missing metadata and lyrics ....... so I decided to try the wireless sync after the direct SD card reader sync in PC.

After getting rid of my M4As (13 of them) the tracks that wanted to transfer due to missing metadata dropped from 6000 to 1000.

Synced once dropped to about 40.

Synced again dropped to 8

Synced again dropped to one

Synced again dropped to zero.

Finished ...... I how I never ever have to do this again
Peace through music
Peke
Posts: 17446
Joined: Tue Jun 10, 2003 7:21 pm
Location: Earth
Contact:

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by Peke »

Hi,
Thank you for detailed explanation, I repeated your tests and you were right in steps you've done.

Only thing I made differently is that before USB sync I've selected all tracks and done Tag sync so that file tags reflect Library tags.

This ended me in <50 metadata resync during WiFi instead 6000 like you.

If you need feel free to send me PM.

Happy Monkeying!
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
Image
Image
Image
How to attach PICTURE/SCREENSHOTS to forum posts
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

Hi Peke

I am on win10, and I figured out the commonality in all the tracks that have been giving me issues not only now but for quite a while.

They all have either a colon or a period in the Album Title

I am guessing MMA or MMW is parsing these symbols as operators instead of characters and this is messing up both sync and the display of album art in MMA in the Artists tab.

I have renamed all the albums with these characters in my library so they are no longer present, and an doing a full SD card PC sync according to your instructions.

I would be very surprised if it doesn't work now ..... I have a lot of Classical with op. and No.

I am re-posting this as a bug in case you don't read this

After testing it again I actually saw the catalogger in MMA get stuck on Artist with a period in the name ...... went back to eliminate all these characters from the artist name too before trying a wireless sync
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Potential Bug: A colon or period in an key field is bad

Post by sirandar »

Win 10 latest everything

Having a colon or a period in the any database key field name in MMW messes up syncing to an SD card in the PC resulting an a partial sync that is messed up.

Syncing after with wireless will eventually get all the tracks there but MMA will be a mess permanently as album covers will be missing in the artist tab.

UPDATE: There can be no special charcters of any kind in any field for sync to work reliably
Last edited by sirandar on Sat May 06, 2017 1:50 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

Final Assessment under Win 10 -Note 4:

Cleaned up all the colons and periods in all fields that have a tab except title (artist, album, genre, composer), also did a full music file , library tag database synchronization on the PC

Did a full uninstall of MMA and removed all traces of MMA on my phone

Did a full SD card library sync as per Peke and ensured it was stable (re-synced)

Popped the microSD card into my phone and let it completely catalog ..... one album of FLAC was missing from the library but was transferred to the card by the PC.

Did a library wireless sync .... After the long file matching process seems 0 files needed to transfer. Before this cleanup 1000s did

Checked the phone for the missing FLAC album ..... now present

Checked for missing album art under the Artist TAB in MMA ..... only one missing with the Various Artists as the artist.

Seems the problem is fixed for me at least.

Three possibilities
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

1) Tag sync fixed
2) Removing all the colons and periods fixed
3) both
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Potential Bug: A colon or period in an key field is bad

Post by sirandar »

Final Assessment under Win 10 -Note 4:
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

Win 10
Android 6.0.1 Note 4
MMA 0694
MMW 1833

Cleaned up all the colons and periods in all fields that have a tab except title (artist, album, genre, composer), also did a full music file - library tag database synchronization on the PC (under advanced tools) FURTHER testing showed that / is bad too

Did a full uninstall of MMA and removed all traces of MMA on my phone

Did a full SD card library sync as per Peke and ensured it was stable (re-synced)

Popped the microSD card into my phone and let it completely catalog ..... one album of FLAC was missing from the library but was transferred to the card by the PC.

Did a library wireless sync .... After the long file matching process seems 0 files needed to transfer. Before this cleanup 1000s did

Checked the phone for the missing FLAC album ..... now present

Checked for missing album art under the Artist TAB in MMA ..... only one missing with the Various Artists as the artist.

Seems the problem is fixed for me at least.

Three possibilities
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

1) Tag sync fixed
2) Removing all the colons and periods fixed
3) both

This has been a very annoying process, but it is hard to be too pissed as if it wasn't for MMW I might be stuck with Itunes. You proved it could be done, but now you have copycats and at least one is almost there .....
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Potential Bug: A colon or period in an key field is bad

Post by sirandar »

Nevermind .... after about 5 stable proper syncs MMA just decided to sync another 1022 tracks for no reason .... they are already there.

Did an advanced search for track titles that contain a period, colon or / = 1072 tracks = there must be a few other characters MMA doesn't like

There can be NO special operators in ANY field on my system
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

Re: Potential Bug: A colon or period in an key field is bad

Post by sirandar »

Got rid of all of the special characters from every field and finally got a perfect sync ....

No stalling and aborting when Android is cataloguing and no missing album art in the Album Artist view tab.

Used only SD card reader sync on PC and no wireless .... I will never touch that again

Finally....
Peace through music
Post Reply