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[Arbiter]

Hello to all. I recently bought a Nokia N95 8gb edition for my (guess what) birthday present   This cell phone is a blast and appart from all those nice things it can do, it's a very solid and powerfull mp3 player!

Now to the bad things. Syncing n95 with MC is a pain in the ****. First of all, n95 supports 2 modes of connection: as a mass storage device and as MTP device and i tried both ways with no avail. It syncs all the songs i want nice and easy with the encoding options i set, appart from the playlists themselves! the playlists MC creates does not recognised in n95 at all. I tried all the various options in the playlist sync tabs but none of them worked.

So i tried a test sync with windows media player and the device in MTP mode. Everything worked (although i hate WMP and it was a slow slow sync) with the playlists showing nicely in the player's menu.

From some trial and error i did on the n95 8gb, i found out the following:

-The 8gb Memory on the device is being recognised as E:\ on the phone

-The playlists must list the full path for the tracks eg. E:\Music\[Artist]\[Album]\ . The player wont recognise playlists with relative paths or playlists without drive letter.

-The path of the files must have at max 2 subfolders, eg [artist]\[album]\

-The playlists have to contain the full info for the tracks, including #EXTINF: tags for each track.

-The player can sync just as nice in Mass Storage as in MTP mode as well.

Mc12 can already do all the following except the fact that it can't do 2 of the following while in sync mode! I can't sync playlists with extended info on them and there's no way to put a custom Drive letter to match my player's path. As a result N95 wont recognise any playlists created by MC, unless i edit them one-by-one in notepad, change the paths to full paths and enter the #EXTINF: for each song.


I love mc and it's a program i already use for 2years but this is really giving me nuts! Help please!!

[JimH]

In MC's Program directory, take a look at the pdt.xml file. 

It's possible that the playlists are just being put in the wrong location.  You might be able to edit the pdt.xml file.

What happens if you drag a single simple playlist onto the device?

Working with it as a drive may be a better path than MTP.  But if it is MTP and you've told MC that, MC uses MTP and if it fails, it is probably an MTP problem. 

[Arbiter]

Hmm, 2 entries i found in that file you mentioned, are the following

"   <Device>
      <Vendor></Vendor>
      <Name>Memory Stick;Mass Storage Device;Removable Disk;Generic USB SD Reader;Storage Card;Secure Digital Storage Device</Name>
      <ImageName>Storage Card</ImageName>
      <PlaylistBasePath>ROOT</PlaylistBasePath>
      <UseWMDM>0</UseWMDM>
      <SupportedFileTypes>*</SupportedFileTypes>"

and

"<Device>
      <Vendor>Nokia</Vendor>
      <Name>Nokia n95</Name>
      <ImageName>Nokia n95</ImageName>
   </Device>
*
I can't figure out what to edit in that file tho :/
btw, I mostly use n95 as a  Mass storage device, because for some reason MTP is way too slow (maybe nokia fixes it at some point). I did try to sync mc and n95 in MTP mode, but then i had absolutely no control over the playlist sync. Playlist Format in "files and paths" tab was missing.

That's mainly Nokia's prob, that officially supports a gimped player such as wmp, but MC is a powerfull program and that has to be no real challenge! so there must be a way to do it!

Any ideas?

[Matt]

Have you tried setting:
Options > Handheld > Files & Paths > Playlist format

You can tell Media Center to use full paths.  This may only be available in drive mode, not MTP mode.

Does that help?

[Arbiter]

Have you tried setting:
Options > Handheld > Files & Paths > Playlist format

You can tell Media Center to use full paths.  This may only be available in drive mode, not MTP mode.

Does that help?

I did set the playlist format settings to use Full paths. But the problem is that it uses the full paths in relation to what drive letter my pc "see" the n95's memory (eg J:\ in my case). I did try dragging and dropping a playlist as you said but i came up into something else:

1) I created a "Test" playlist with just one track in it, dragged and dropped into the n95. playlist worked

2)Dragged and dropped my "best rock stuff" playlist which has about 140 tracks in it. Playlist worked

3) Dragged and dropped my "Metal stuff" playlist witch counts up to 735 tracks inside. Playlist not recognised by N95 (Same playlist works nicely if i sync with wmp)

*Update*: I tried copying all the tracks in "Metal Stuff" -which is a smart list actually- in a  simple "test" playlist. It now shows fine on the phone's player! Maybe there's something wrong with the smartlists? That was me being too excited:(

[Matt]

So smallish playlists work, but larger ones don't?

That's even more confusing since Media Center writes the safe format regardless.

Is it possible some foreign character is confusing the phone?  There could be a character set / character encoding issue.

Thanks.

[Arbiter]

Please excuse my absence, but i had some tough days at work

Yes my playlists have some unicode names in it, which my Phone doesn't seem to like when i transfer them from mc with the playlists (eg. some characters do translate as ) but if i create the same playlist with the same tracks from inside the phone, everything seems to work ok!


Something even more confusing is that when i sync my phone, mc seems to change the filename, by adding a "(1)" at the end of the filename -some sort of duplicated file, but they are not!-, like these ones:

Code: [Select]

E:\Music\Primal Fear\New Religion\04. New Religion (1).mp3
E:\Music\Forever Slave\Tales For Bad Girls\07. Our story (1).mp3
E:\Music\Dark Princess\???? ??\11. The Key (1).mp3
E:\Music\Theatre Of Tragedy\Storm\04. Voices (1).mp3
E:\Music\After Forever\After Forever\01. Discord.mp3
E:\Music\Xandria\India\01. India (1).mp3
E:\Music\Autumn\My New Time\01. Satellites.mp3
E:\Music\Moonspell\2econd Skin\03. Sacred (1).mp3
E:\Music\Theatre Of Tragedy\Storm\06. Begin and End (1).mp3
E:\Music\Forever Slave\Tales For Bad Girls\01. Dickhead! (1).mp3
E:\Music\Silentium\Seducia\03. Dead Silent (1).mp3
E:\Music\Fl?ur\??\11. ??, ??? ??? ?? ??? (1).mp3

Just a note: the unicode characters are being showed in ?? when opening the playlist mc creates, with notepad.

I start to believe that playlist support in n95 is chunky, but the weird thing is everything works ok when syncing with wmp

[Arbiter]

Ok, i tracked down the cause of it. The problem occurs because of mc doesn't parse tracks with unicode letters (Ukrainian/Russian in my case) correctly in the playlist output. I did a simple test in order to come up with that conclusion:

1)I transfered my huge playlist with all the tracks in it including those songs with non-english letters. n95 can't load the playlist. After opening the playlist mc created with notepad or wordpad, i see that all those tracks with ukrainian/russian letters are being displayed as "??"

2)I transfered my huge playlist without those tracks. n95 loads all 700+ tracks correctly and the playlist shows fine!

What could be wrong with my system or mc to do that? I sent the 2 playlists in question to your email.



ps: That's the second time i experience a problem with non-standard characters with mc,  You have helped me go through a similar problem back in http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=47074.0


pps: Is there any setting i can do from  inside windows to prevent that? just incase mc isn't the bad guy here:P

[goatherder]

Hi. I don't have an answer to your playlist issues, but as an N95 owner I was wondering what sort of transfer rates you were getting. I was hoping to use it for music, but between the worst hissing I've ever heard on an MP3 player and the dead-slow transfer rate in MC (512Kb/sec at best if I'm lucky) I gave up. Still, it would come in handy for podcasts if I could jack up the speed a little.

[JimH]

The slow speed could be a problem with the USB port defaulting to USB 1.  USB 2 is faster.  Try a google search.

[goatherder]

Used with same sockets where other USB2.0 devices sync happily. It's the N95, not the PC.

[Arbiter]

The slow transfer speed, is Nokia's fault. You see, N95 acts as a usb1.1 device :/ Hopefully they will learn (at last) from their mistakes in N96


Anyway i think i found a solution (for now) for my playlist issues. I went into control panel -> regional settings and i chose "Russian" for the non-unicode programs as a conversion table. It seems to be ok now, although the playlists in N95 have some "glyphs" in them (the tracks show fine tho!). The weird thing is that This setting should have no effect on mc, as it is fully unicode?

[Matt]

We write M3U files using ANSI (1 byte per character) encoding since many devices don't support UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Could you send me a sample .M3U from WMP that shows a Unicode filename that _does_ work on the phone?

I think we just need to offer other encodings as an option when saving the playlist.

Thanks.

[Arbiter]

I fwed my previous email to you, which now contains a unicode-only playlist created with wmp.

If mc could have this option you mentioned,it would be totally perfect!

[Matt]

I'm having trouble reproducing the problem.

I create a file:
C:\Сияние.mp3

I put it in a playlist inside Media Center and sync it to a drive-style device.

The M3U that gets created on the device is ANSI encoded using the system's current character set, and looks like:
C:\Сияние.mp3

For some reason, you're getting:
C:\??.mp3

Is it possible your locale setting for the system is set to something that doesn't support these characters nicely using ANSI?  Could you try syncing using both English and Russian locales for the OS and see if it makes a difference?

Thanks.

[Arbiter]

Matt, as i mentioned in my previous reply, switching the non-unicode apps locale to russian using the regional settings, seems to solve the problem i was getting with the playlists. Everything seem to import fine now in n95. But it does create another problem:P The Greek songs show up as "" now not that i listen to any of these songs anyway, but it's still a problem Haven't tried using English locale yet, i'll reply with my results as soon as i do it.

Btw guys, i'm grateful for your support! You have the best support out there! I really hope for that unicode playlist export feature:) (from what i've found out they call it "m3u8" in wikipedia?)