Devices > Androids and other portables

MC Windows Sync with Android Problems

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JustinChase:
I am seeing this issue also, on a OnePlus 12.

I'm asking MC to convert if necessary to mp3 files.  It will start syncing, and sometimes copy files for a couple minutes, sometimes 90 minutes.

When it just suddenly disconnects, it still reports as finished, so it's not a crash.

But, MC doesn't recognize files it did put on the phone.  I have lots of music on the phone, originally placed by MC, but MC is not seeing these files when it connects again, and MC wants to add these files.  This isn't the end of the world, if an existing file gets 'overwritten' by MC upon a re-sync, but if it's a file on the phone, that is NOT in the smartlist to get synced, the file just sits there taking up space and not referenced by any smartlist.

I hope this can get some love soon.  It's nearly impossible to get 5000 files properly synced to my phone without it 'crashing out' and leaving a mess.

JimH:
Android has settings for the USB connection.  So does Windows.  I've had to modify both to get things to work. 

File locations may matter on Android.

Mr Swordfish:

--- Quote from: paragmehta on January 27, 2024, 03:03:14 pm ---Hi folks,

I have had tons of issues attempting to use MC to sync playlists and files from Windows to Android (Samsung Galaxy S23 Ultra).  It has never worked well.


--- End quote ---

I have also found that this feature basically doesn't work. I've tried four different android devices from three different manufacturers and the syncing just doesn't work no matter what I've tried.  I can't say I've tried everything since I found a work-around that meets my needs, courtesy of some other posters on this forum.  Here's what is working for me:

o Create a folder at the root of the C:\ drive on Windows.  I named mine C:\LocalAndroidSync but the name shouldn't matter.
o Add that as a device to MC, set the options, and let MC sync the files and playlists to the local folder. This seems to work reliably and is pretty fast since it's just copying files within the disc.
o Use some third-party software to sync the files between this folder on Windows and your android device. I use Resilio Sync which is about $60 for a license, but there are other options.
o The file formats shouldn't matter, with two caveats: 1) Under Files Formats and more there's list of "supported types" and MC helpfully will convert an unsupported file to whatever format you tell it to. If your file format is not in the list, you can add it, or tell MC to convert to a format your device supports.  2) Depending on the player software, you might not be able to play certain formats, for instance, my player doesn't support .ogg files.

The downside of this is that you wind up using a fair amount of extra disc space to have two copies of everything you sync on windows, but depending on the size of your disc this might not be a problem.  I have a 1tb hard drive and sync about 300gb so the resulting ~600gb still fits. For now, anyway.

It would be nice if MC's sync feature worked directly with android devices, but my observation is that it simply does not and JRiver is busy working on other things so I don't expect this to be addressed any time soon.

JimH:
If there's a problem, we will fix it.

I just tested, with partial success.  Samsung Galaxy S24.

In MC, I found a playlist of ape files.

I dragged it to the Action Window > Handheld Sync

MC said something like "Opening Device" and seemed to hang there. 

I clicked on Details.  Still appeared to hang.

I waited.  In about 3 minutes, it began to work and showed APE files being converted to FLAC.

It finished.

Note that I've had problems doing simple things with Android devices until I set the phone to allow file transfer.  Without doing this, they seem to just charge themselves.  This was new a couple years ago.

On the Android, I used the file explorer to find the file and play them.  It worked.

What didn't work was the playlist itself.  I found it in the Playlists folder, as two file types.  M3U and PLA.

markf2748:
I recently copied about 200GB of my Win11 audio media files, nearly all FLACs, directly to a microSDXC card using Beyond Compare 5 (BC5).  For folders and files the Modification and Creation Dates were preserved, as reported by Windows Explorer.  I then inserted that card into a Samsung Galaxy S9 phone (I realize this is not an option for the OP, but bear with me here...).  All  Modification and Creation Dates remain preserved for the card in the phone.

If I now copy files from Win11 directly to the card in the phone, the dates and times on the phone for the copied files are changed to the date and time of the file copy operation.  There seems to be no satisfactory way around this - it is a fundamental restriction of Android's MTP communication protocol, as implemented by Samsung, when copying to the phone over a USB connection (widely reported elsewhere).  AFAIK, the only way to preserve audio file dates in this scenario is to use file tags which are guaranteed independent of the OS date and time stamps.  To check sync, I plan to work around this limitation by using BC5 to do file comparisons of Windows v.s. phone based on last changed date & time, and then, when necessary, follow up with binary file compares for those files with recent unmatched date & time stamps.  Maybe every few months I'll remove the card from the phone and start afresh to get correct date & time stamps.  Cumbersome, but seems feasible.

Next I tried to make sense of MC's sync functionality - rather difficult.  As a simple test, I highlighted some tracks, then RMB > Send to > Drives & Devices > ...Galaxy S9 card.  That resulted in MC creating a new Music folder on the card with copies of the tracks in it.  But none of those copied files had any date stamp at all in Windows Explorer, BC5, or Windows File Properties!  Nada!  Also, the Windows File Properties was reduced to contain almost no information for these files.

So my conclusion right now is just forget about MC direct Copy and Sync functionality with regard to phone, mainly because neither Windows Explorer nor BC5 show any date information for files copied by MC.

7/29/2024 Minor edits for clarity.

Win11 Pro 64-bit | MC 32.0.58 | Samsung Galaxy S9 Phone with Android version 10 | Samsung 256GB ProUltimate microSDXC Card.

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