songs missing from playlists

[JeffV64]

Hi all,

I haven't seen this issue in the forums. I now have a Droid Razr M, using fully updated MMA and MMW beta, with music and playlists stored on an external card.

I have six playlists that get transferred to the Droid, and all have different counts of songs in MMA vs. MMW, with fewer showing up on MMA (about 10% or so, on average). Here's what I know:

1. I can see differences between the physical playlist file on the Droid vs. what is represented in MMA. That is, songs 1, 2, and 3 will be on both and song 4 will be missing from MMA but present in MMW.

2. Some songs are on multiple playlists. I can verify that if a song is missing in MMA from one playlist, it is also missing from the other playlists that it should be on.

3. I can verify that the playlist-missing tracks are present on the phone and play properly when selected.

4. I can verify that I see the behavior described in other media players (have tried Player Pro and Google Music). As such this is not a MMA problem per se.

I have tried using different apps that force a media rescan, but nothing has helped. Any other thoughts appreciated!

Jeff

[nohitter151]

Anything special about the missing tracks? Mabye special characters in the file name or something?

[JeffV64]

Anything special about the missing tracks? Mabye special characters in the file name or something?

Nohitter, here are the file names for the tracks missing from the first 100 songs from one of my playlists:

06 Train Kept A Rollin'.mp3
05 One Way Out.mp3
14 Pinball Wizard (Live).mp3
09 The WASP (Texas Radio and the Big Beat).mp3
16 See Me, Feel Me.mp3
01 Break on Through (To the Other Side).mp3
11 A Quick One, While He's Away.mp3
04 Crossroads [Live].mp3
06 I Want You (She's So Heavy).mp3
18 Smokestack Lightning [Live].mp3
14 Revolution (Single Version).mp3
09 One After 909.mp3
05 Alabama Song (Whiskey Bar).mp3
14 Magic Bus.mp3
03 Happy Jack.mp3

I investigated further and am fairly certain that when a file name terminates with ' or ) or ] that this seems to be associated with tracks that are on the device but are not properly represented on the playlist. So for example (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction is there just fine, but it is the only song I have in that playlist that has parentheses anywhere but the end of the file name. Train Kept a Rollin' is messed up, but Jumpin' Jack Flash is fine (as are countless others that have an apostrophe, but not as the terminating character).

I am at a loss to explain the other six files. One Way Out, Magic Bus, and Happy Jack are about as clean as file names get. A couple of the others have commas in the titles, but I have songs that are fine that have commas in the titles.

Additional details: I am running jellybean, and the playlists are exported as M3U. In MMW, I have checked the box that says "Use Unicode (UTF-8 encoding)". And, my issue seems to be very similar to what was reported here: http://forum.subsonic.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5486

Again, any help appreciated!

Jeff

Edit: Forgot a couple of things: (1) With this phone I have been using MTP sync as I can't get mass storage mode to work for some reason (possibly need a new USB cable that I am going to try to avoid purchasing) and (2) Just for fun I used MMA to add the missing songs above to a new test playlist, and of course they played fine.

Jeff

[JeffV64]

Because file names ending in special characters seems to be part of the problem, last night I have MMW add the song's bitrate to the file name. This worked, in the sense that it cut my error rate approximately in half. Now, 17 of the first 200 songs on the playlist I've been testing are missing (was 15 out of 100).

Tonight I am going to try to get a sense of whether it is always the same songs or whether it varies from sync to sync (the latter would be much less of a problem for me).

Jeff

[JeffV64]

Update: In tracking down which songs are missing from playlists, I started noticing that songs I recently played on the phone seemed to be awfully likely to turn up missing. So I:

1. In MMW, created a new playlist with 30 songs, ordered by title
2. USB synced this list to MMA
3. In MMA, played the fist 8 songs on that playlist
4. USB synced the phone

After rescan, my new playlist is showing as having 25 songs, and all five of the missing songs were in the batch that I just played. So in other words, I played eight songs and five of them turned up missing after the next sync. This missing songs are on the phone and are playable through the tracks menu.

I am at a loss as to why this is happening.

[JeffV64]

Another update -- last night I played another 16 songs from my test playlist, then USB synced. After sync, I show 15 songs on that playlist. So of the 24 songs I played in total yesterday, only 9 are recognized by the Android media store today, while all six of the unplayed tracks are recognized.

I got the app "playlist backup" which allows users to see the system playlists and can verify that what I see in that app is the same that I see in MMA (which is the same that I see in Winamp, etc.). And, to reiterate, the physical M3U file is fine and shows all 30 songs.

Sigh!

Jeff

[BigInJapan]

This has been interesting saga to follow. I sure hope you get it figured out.

You've mentioned the M3U file a couple of times. That may be something of a red herring for you. In my understanding, MMA isn't reading the M3U file at all. It's reading an independent version of the playlist that's registered in the media store.

The media store playlists are shared by all media apps. Do you by any chance have any other music players that might be altering the playlists?

Also, this is kind of drastic, but you could try clearing the media store entirely and letting Android rebuild it. That's Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > All > Media Storage, then tap the Clear data button. Then reboot. Then wait. The few times I've done this, it took like an hour to fully rebuild. This doesn't delete any media files. It just rebuilds Android's index of those files. To put it technically, you might have some gunk in there that's gumming things up.

Those are just some guesses that occured to me. Good luck.

[JeffV64]

BigInJapan,

Thanks for the kind thoughts!

Re: reading files via the media store, I had actually read about this but didn't really process what it meant until reading your post. It seems that regardless of whether one is using a file browser app or browsing via USB that what the user is seeing is actually the media store, not the files themselves. That behavior really surprises me, but it does clear up some mysteries.

As suggested I deleted the media store - it was not a drastic process for me. Over the past day or so I have tried a couple of different things:

1. The first was to delete the media store db, rescan, and see what is there. Unfortunately it turns out that playlists don't show up until after resync.

2. So the next step was to resync. After a rescan, the playlists appear, but I am seeing evidence of my disappearing songs problem. Again, the songs that are missing from the playlists are (a) only songs I have played since the last sync (no songs that were not played since the last sync disappear) and (b) most - but frustratingly not all - of the songs played since the last sync will be gone from every playlist they appear on.

Of course there is a new oddness. Yesterday morning my test playlist was down to 15 songs, but after stopping the media store and rescanning, it went to 16. And, I just played the entire list of 16 songs, deleted the media store, resynced and rescalled, and it is still at 16 songs. So just judging from the test playlist you'd think things are not getting worse, but my experience yesterday suggests otherwise.

More testing coming up!

[JeffV64]

Tonight I am going to reformat the SD card and start over, but as one last test I used MMW to make an autoplayist of songs that are on 4 of my playlists (that is, songs that are on list A AND list B AND list C AND list D). There were 45 such songs. I synced this list to the Razr, and only 35 came across. I played 26 of the 35 songs, deleted the android mediastore, rescanned, then resynced. There are now 29 songs on this test list. So I lost six songs. The test part of this was to make sure that I also lost six songs from the other playlists. They were. The counts went from 488 to 482, 419 to 413, 610 to 604, and 566 to 560.

So I am now essentially positive that for some reason, after resync some songs that have been recently played aren't being properly cataloged as playlist entries.

Here's hoping a clean start helps!

Jeff

[mcow]

By any chance, are any of the criteria for your smart playlists based on the "Last Played"?

[rovingcowboy]

i've just found out that some songs will cancle out the audio if the data info for the songs are some what equal or closely matched, it will also do other strange things if that happens.

maybe the songs you have messing up have some of the same exact data info like file size or album name but different album artists?
i found it to be mmw causing this doing sync.

have not had much of the issues when usb copy and pasting.

[JeffV64]

By any chance, are any of the criteria for your smart playlists based on the "Last Played"?

Good thought, but no. Most are lists generated based on rating and genre criteria, then randomly ordered.

Jeff

[JeffV64]

Last post on this for now. From what I can tell, the fresh start did a lot of good. Over the weekend I did the following:

Used MMW to remove all of the music from the external card
Forced a media scan, then launched MMA so it would "know" that the library was empty
Used the phone's OS to erase the content of the external card
Used MMW to put music on the phone
Forced a media scan
Launched MMA - everything was there

Played about 70 songs over 2 days
Did a USB sync
Forced a media scan
Launched MMA, looked at my playlists - joy! Except for a couple of songs everything seems to be on the playlists!

So perhaps the lesson here is that it is a good idea start with a clean slate every now and then.

Jeff

[mcow]

You should put those steps into the FAQ; some of those steps are not obvious. I think I'll follow that technique next time I have to renew my MMA license.

[sebish]

Hey guys,

i want to say that Mediamonkey does not sync all playlists correctly! It is a bug / program problem.

One playlist is complete and the others are missing a random number of tracks. Techno-Playlist for example has 100 tracks on pc and 83 on Smartphone (Android).
A friend has exactly the same problem and thinks that it could appear, when you have the same tracks in multiple playlists or (like said here) it has something to do with last played songs. I have ~8 synced playlists and lots of tracks are in more than 1 playist. Mediamonkey says 'everything is synced', playlists are fine. (Some?) Tracks are missing in the folder too, copying them by hand does not add them to the playlist, but they can be found by search. The tracks are named correctly without any characteristic symbols or else. Playlists are imported from itunes and work perfect on pc.

Please fix this quickly! The sync function is very important to me and i like mediamonkey very much and bought the app.