MediaMonkey forum

Hi. I have mma pro. All the music on my phone is stored on the sd card. I never used the windows app so I never did any syncing. I recently had to change phone. Had to send in old one for insurance and thus had to wipe it. So I took an android backup for all app data and also copied all the phone contents to my PC, and removed the sd card. Then when I got the new phone, I restored the android backup to it and inserted the sd card. All my music is there but only about 5 playlists are back and they are incomplete. Digging around I find the mmstore.db that I backed up from the phone storage. I tried copying this back to the phone but it seems to get overwritten when next launching mma. Looking through this it points to playlist files under sdcard/Android/data/com.ventismedia.android.mediamonkey/files/Playlists/ as well as sdcard/Playlists. I can see the latter files which happen to be the incomplete ones showing up in mma, but the other ones don't seem to exist.

Where else could the playlists be stored?
How would I go about rebuilding my playlists?
Is there any way of using the mmstore.db file to extract playlist info? I am viewing it in Notepad++ but a lot of the characters look like garbage, is it encoded in some special way?

Would really appreciate any help available here, these playlists took me a LONG time to make.

Hi,
Under you backup files search for MMstore.db file and replace one on internal storage in device. It should backup your playlist.

Hi thanks for the message. I did try that but it looks like the mmstore.db file gets overwritten when I replace it with my backed up file.

But there has been some success, I tried a file recovery program and scanned the sd card, and it found the m3u files under sdcard/Playlists. One was partially overwritten by new files but I can live with that.

I did not delete these files, I simply moved the sdcard from one phone to another. Didn't think it would be necessary to back up the sd card as well as the phone. Would this be something mma would have done? I had a similar problem on my sony xperia phone a couple years ago. On startup the sony walkman app scans the database and playlists, but the sdcard is not yet fully initialised. At that point it cannot find the files mentioned in the playlists, so it deleted them from the playlists leaving them empty. At that point I looked for an alternative player that uses m3u files and found mma.

How is the mmstore.db file constructed? I would like to merge the old backed up file with the new one created automatically by mma, or to update the old one so that mma accepts it. Every time I restore the backed up version it gets overwritten, so all the metadata such as star ratings are currently blank.

I think I solved it!

I originally restored mma from an android backup / LG backup. This meant that all my preferences/layout etc was restored, but not playlists or metadata. This time I went into android app settings and cleared all data and cache data. Then I manually restored all files to:

internal_storage/MediaMonkey
internal_storage/com.ventismedia.android.mediamonkey
sd_card/Playlists

This time when opening mma it all my preferences/layout etc were reset, but playlists and metadata were restored. Only slight issue is all album art has vanished, but I can live with this.

Is there a way to backup/export preferences, metadata, database etc in a cleaner way? I only took this much precaution because I lost all my playlists in the past.

Hi,
I agree added https://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=16871 for future implementation.

Sorry to revive this again, I have just had another somewhat related issue:

I renamed a directory on my sd card (2021 -> Jan 2021),

Songs present in a playlist that were no longer detected could no longer be seen in that playlist on my phone. I would have expected to have a 'file not found' message instead of them being removed from the playlist altogether. Luckily, the m3u file still had the old locations. So to remedy this I had to either move the files back, or manually edit the m3u file with the new file locations.

This worked fine with older playlists containing a mixture of detected and non detected files. With new playlists containing only non-detected files (i.e. playlist with files that had been moved), the playlist was deleted altogether and had to be recreated from scratch.

...
Edit: Upon further inspection it seems the actual files were deleted altogether. I can't tell whether MMA did this or an error with windows when connected to the phone by USB. Annoying that android took out the option to mount the SD card... Regardless, the 'track inaccessible' message would have been useful.