Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[risingdamp]

I've been having this problem for several days now with builds 252 and 256 but it could have been introduced earlier 'cos I skipped from 225 to 252.  The iPod sync just seems to get stuck and hang and when it does there is no way to recover from it.  I can't even kill MC via task manager or restart the pc so I have to manually hard boot it.

It's happened about 6 times now with my 60GB Photo so I tried with my friends brand new 60GB photo and the same thing happened.  It doesn't seem to stop on a particular file and I haven't been able to narrow down what's causing it. 

Each time the problem occurs it corrupts the iPod so I have to restore. 

With both iPods I've been able to successfully sync to the same playlists in iTunes. 

[SteveG]

Not sure. Try synching smaller subsets of files and get those to work to try to narrow this down.  If you are switching back and forth between iTunes and MC without reinitializing in between, please stop that for now.

Steve

[risingdamp]

Ok I restored my iPod to do some experimenting.  I hope it helps.  I never switch back and forth between MC and iTunes bTW - I always restore before any experiments.

Here's what I have so far:

I restored the iPod and connected it to my PC.  iTunes fired up because it recognised a new iPod so I went through the wizard, then set prefs so iTunes no longer opens when the iPod is connected then closed iTunes.  I opened MC and started a small sync. 

I have about a dozen playlists which account for about 2500 tracks in total.  I synched playlist 1 containing 52 tracks.  The tracks transferred to iPod and appeared in 'Artists' but the playlist was not shown in 'Playlists'.  I reconnected iPod and synched the next 3 playlists (around 500 more tracks).  These 3 playlists did show in 'Playlists' but the first one still did not show.  Here's the wierd bit.   The iPod was reporting 104 tracks present (i.e. 2 x playlist 1) and all tracks from playlist 1 were duplicated under 'Artists'.  Tracks from playlists 2,3 & 4 were not shown under 'Artists' but were on the iPod because they played if you selected the relevant playlist.

To correct this I initialised with MC and started all over again.  This time it all worked OK.  I carried on synching a few playlists at a time and I've now done all of them (2500 tracks) except the big one that contains all my favourite albums (5200 tracks).  I'm doing that one now.  This is the bit where I keep my fingers crossed.

Hope this helps Steve.

[risingdamp]

Ok.  All successful this time.  Maybe the problem at the start outlined above is a clue to the cause of the crashes I used to get.

[risingdamp]

One final thought - one thing I did differently this time (because I'd prepared my playlists and smartlists for synching with iTunes) was to include any mpc and ogg files.  Could that have been the causes of my woes?  Please don't ask me to try it as it's taken a lot of effort to get all my songs on to my iPod ready for my hols.

[SteveG]

You included your mpc and ogg files and then it worked? Or do you mean the opposite, you excluded them and it worked?


Steve

[risingdamp]

Oops.  Sorry for that.  I excluded them.  Maybe it's something to do with that or it's something to do with the funny stuff pre-initialisation.  I never bothered initialising before after a restore.  Should I be doing?

[SteveG]

You should not need to initalize after a restore. ogg and mpc should not transfer unless you have conversion turned on. Without conversion enabled, you should be alerted to the fact that the files cannot be transferred before they even attempt to go to iPod.

Steve

[risingdamp]

I did have conversion turned on (set to convert if necessary). So I guess we are no nearer an explanation as to why I had so many lock ups. 

[SteveG]

I made modifications today to display conversion failures on the way to Portables, so that may give some more information. Try converting some ogg and mpc files apart from a transfer to a portable and see if you have problems. This can also give us more information.

Steve

[risingdamp]

Ok I have that on my todo list and will report back.  In the meantime, now my iPod has synched Ok I'm trying the same thing with my friends new iPod and so far I've come up against a few hitches.  I tried the same approach i.e. a few playlists at a time, eject and check iPod, then do some more.  I started by doing a restore followed by an initialisation in MC before synching the first playlist.  This is what I found:

Sync 1 - MC reported transfer failed (1 file) and I could see that the progress indicator was saying that it was converting a file.  I found this to be a bit strange since I only had MP3's in the playlist.  After acknowledging the message it carried on transferring.  Unfortunately part way through the transfer the iPod ejected itself (faulty iPod?) and this caused my whole PC to lock up.  I couldn't even get task manager up so I removed the iPod from the dock and pressed the reset button on my PC.  The iPod seemed OK as many of the artists in the playlist were shown but the playlist itself was not shown. 

Sync 2 - After sync 1 I decided to play it safe and initialise again.  Then I synched a smaller playlist.  Again MC reported a failed transfer and showed that it was converting a file (different one this time) that is already an MP3.  I OK'd the message and this time the sync continued to the end.  At the end it reported the file path of the failed file and I confirmed that there is no reason for MC to try and convert it.  I immediately resynched and MC transfered just one more file i.e. the previously failed one, proving that it really didn't need converting.

Sync 3&4 - A few more playlists and all successfull.

Sync5 - in progress.  Sync 6 will be the playlist that I did first time when the iPod ejected itself and if this is successful sync 7 will be the biggest one (5K tracks).

I'll keep you posted.  Hope this is useful.

[risingdamp]

Sync 5 worked Ok but in sync 6 after 795 out of 1319 files I got a message saying 'Out of memory. Upload aborted'.  I was out of the room so don't know how long the message was there but when I acknowledged it the sync continued.  I checked my PF usage in task manager and it was using 324MB out of 2GB.  I have 1 GB of RAM in this machine and task manager reports that about half of the physical memory is in use.

[risingdamp]

Ok I'm on the last sync now and I just got the out of memory error again and this time I noticed that yet again the progress bar showed it was trying to convert a file that doesn't need converting.  This may have been the same last time but I didn't notice.

Does MC have a memory leak?  Last night I got an out of memory error and windows reported low page file usage after tagging 4600 files with cover art.

[risingdamp]

Oh *******.  I just realised I did all this using build 261 and I meant to try out 263.

****
****
****
and ****ing
****.

[SteveG]

******* thanks for noticing. Please let me know how it is going with 263