Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

Post a reply

Smilies
:D :) :( :o :-? 8) :lol: :x :P :oops: :cry: :evil: :roll: :wink:

BBCode is ON
[img] is ON
[url] is ON
Smilies are ON

Topic review
   

Expand view Topic review: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by terrypin » Wed Jul 15, 2015 1:41 am

Thanks Steve. None of the seven USB sticks I was using in my protracted tests were SanDisk. So thankfully I was spared that additional potential complication! (Assuming it's confined to that brand and batch?)

Great detective work in isolating that surprising cause of your ASX playlists issue. :)

I was very interested to see those exchanges in May between you and the development team. I've never made a point of browsing the Wishlist Forum as a source of feedback about possible bugs and hardware issues, but I will do in future.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by steveg_nh » Tue Jul 14, 2015 10:32 pm

I'm not sure if this is related, but if you are curious why you have drive letters, I'm curious, is it a SanDisk usb stick? There was a time when SanDisk released a bunch of USB memory sticks with the removable disk bit set to no or something, and Windows recognized them as hard disks, vs removable. Something do with Windows 8 certification. They've since stopped, but if this was a card you hadn't already used ok, this could be at play.

I posted a thread about it too, a few weeks ago.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by terrypin » Thu Jul 02, 2015 3:03 am

To echo rivorson's comment, thanks for taking the trouble to report your findings in such careful detail.

I raised some similar points in my post 'Confusing display of USB drives' here:
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 12&t=81076

For background, that was during my vexed attempt to transfer playlists to my car player using USB flash sticks. I found the MM GUI and terminology for syncing quite confusing and still do. But a major contributor to my failures (over a couple of weeks) was the obscure way that Windows assigns and displays drives' names and letters.

Thankfully I eventually got a 32 GB USB stick working in the car, so I dropped the project with several puzzles left unsolved. But at some time I'll return to them and your post will be one key resource.

--------------------

Perhaps you could take a similarly forensic look at another aspect of the syncing facilities?
Auto-Sync: To Sync display?
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 12&t=81182

Sync reservation feature
http://www.mediamonkey.com/forum/viewto ... 12&t=81286

I raised these with MM Support on 10th June and chased on 25th. They agreed that there was "something bad about this" but couldn't replicate. I've no time at present to resume my work on it, so any further feedback from other users would be appreciated please.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by rivorson » Wed Jul 01, 2015 9:58 am

Tirugondar, that is a very detailed post and hopefully the information will be useful to others. I don't believe the device settings should be lost when you rename it in the media tree though. If it happens again then it may be a bug that would be worth reporting so that it can be investigated.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by Tirugondar » Wed Jul 01, 2015 2:43 am

Just in case any other newbie is following this thread, I'll note what I think I've learned.

It appears that if I first open MediaMonkey and THEN plug in my memory card, MediaMonkey selected the device listing with the d_WMDM plug-in. If the memory card is inserted first and MediaMonkey is opened AFTER, it then selects the device listing with the d_USBMass plug-in. So now I'm careful to always open MediaMonkey first and then insert my flash drives or memory cards. The order appears to affect what MediaMonkey does.

I've also unchecked the box beside the device with the d_USBMass plug-in (as nohitter151 recommended), which ensures that it can never be selected. I tried to delete this plug-in, but it didn't work. I learned that the list in the "Available Devices/Plug-ins" window is NOT, in fact, a list of plug-ins. It is a list of Devices that you've attached to your computer and that MediaMonkey has scanned. As such, the window appears to be misnamed. It is not a list of the plug-ins that have been downloaded to MediaMonkey. It is a list of devices (followed by the plug-ins used to control them).

As far as I can tell, the only way to see the full list of available plug-ins is to go to MediaMonkey's program files on your hard drive and open the Plugins folder. I assume that if you delete a plugin from this folder, you are deleting it from MediaMonkey. So if you wanted to delete the now outdated d_USBMass plug-in, you'd have to open this folder and just delete it manually. I see no way of doing it through the MediaMonkey interface. (In my case, there's more confusion here. The d_USBMass plug-in is NOT listed in my MediaMonkey plugins folder. Yet, it is used in the "Available Devices/Plug-ins" window. I have no idea where MediaMonkey finds it when I plug in my memory cards.)

I also learned that it is possible to rename your Devices listed in the "Available Devices/Plug-ins" window. This is very helpful. I use several different memory cards to sync to MediaMonkey and they were all listed exactly the same - E:\ - even though each had totally different configuration settings. Since there was no way to tell them apart, it became very confusing. Now I've renamed them all and given them distinct names.

If you do rename your devices, it's best to do it when you've plugged in your device. Then go to the Summary tab for that device and click on the name of the Device. You can then change the name to anything you like. There is no indication anywhere that this is where you should or even can change the name, but it works well. I found that changing the name anywhere else wipes out all the configuration settings and sets them back to the default. But if you change the name on the Summary tab, everything stays exactly the same and MediaMonkey will scan the device and sync with it exactly as it did before. If you change the name in the Media Tree, for example, it wipes everything out and you have to start all over again.

I'm no expert, so I could be doing all of this in exactly the wrong way, but this is what has worked for me. I still find everything incredibly complicated (especially when you consider that I have to do all of this work just to listen to some podcasts), but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. Hopefully the learning curve flattens out eventually.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by nohitter151 » Tue Jun 30, 2015 7:31 pm

You can just uncheck the usbmass plugin in the options to prevent MM from using it.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by Tirugondar » Tue Jun 30, 2015 7:20 pm

Thanks for the advice, everyone. It's really helping me figure things out.

It looks like part of the problem might be related to the d_USBMass plugin that Rivorson mentioned. It IS listed in my "Available Devices/Plugins" window. However, the other one - d_WMDM - is also listed. So I have both.

I don't deliberately use one or the other. I wouldn't know how, to be honest, and I have no memory of putting either one there. MediaMonkey just seems to randomly choose one or the other whenever I plug in a memory card.

The advice here seems to be to remove the d_USBMass plugin, but I don't know how to do that. When I highlight it in the "Available Devices/Plugins" window, the "delete" option is greyed out and unresponsive. Is there another place where I can delete this plugin?

I guess I don't understand these things at all. I CAN activate the Configure option for this plugin, but it doesn't refer to it as a plugin. I get the message "This device is not plugged in." So that confuses me. Is d_USBMass a plugin or a device? Either way, how do I remove it?

Thanks!

Doug

(PS I have additional related questions, but I'll start a new topic for them when I get this one sorted out.)

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by nohitter151 » Tue Jun 30, 2015 9:10 am

tuttut wrote:
It sounds like you're using the old d_USBMass
Nope.
Well rivorson is correct. If the memory card or portable device is being assigned a different drive letter, that is the fault of windows and causes MM to think its a different device. You should figure out why Windows assigns it a different drive letter as that is unusual behavior and causes the problem.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by tuttut » Tue Jun 30, 2015 5:56 am

It sounds like you're using the old d_USBMass
Nope.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by rivorson » Tue Jun 30, 2015 5:40 am

Drive letter is assigned by Windows, not by MediaMonkey.

It sounds like you're using the old d_USBMass which was removed several months ago. The developer's discussion on the reasons for removing it is here: http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=12383


Unless there's a very specific reason you want to use d_USBMass, you're better off removing it and letting d_WMDM take over.

Re: Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by tuttut » Tue Jun 30, 2015 4:44 am

I have the same problem with this. It's a mess, if you ask me, and a very big fail - which is why you haven't yet had a response.

Portable Device Sync assigned drive letters

by Tirugondar » Mon Jun 29, 2015 11:29 pm

When you attach a portable device (MP3 player or memory card or flash drive), MediaMonkey scans it and assigns a drive letter, etc.

The NEXT time you plug in that same device, does MediaMonkey remember the device itself or just the drive that was used?

I'm confused by this because whenever I attach a memory card, MediaMonkey keeps switching the drive letter, and this in turn switches the plugin used and all the configuration settings I've chosen. I'll hit the "Auto-Sync" button, but I get disastrous results because MediaMonkey will use settings I've chosen for a different device.

Sometimes the memory card will be assigned F: as the drive letter. Next time, it will choose E:. Other times, it chooses "Memory Card". And there are different plugins and settings associated with each drive because each is used with a different device. (I don't even know where all these plugins came from. I didn't put them there. MediaMonkey just seems to create them automatically each time I attach a new device to my computer - whether I plan to use that device with MediaMonkey or not.)

I'm doing this with Podcasts, by the way, not music. I sync my podcasts to a memory card and then insert that memory card into my Sansa Clip MP3 player.

I just don't understand why MediaMonkey keeps switching drive letters and configuration settings even though I'm plugging in the same device (memory card in a memory card reader) into the same USB port.

Thanks for any help!

Doug

Top