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[paragmehta]

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.

My setup:

* Attempt to sync audio files only with embedded album art.
* Convert flac to MP3 on the fly
* Generate custom playlists
* AudioBasePath: Music\[Grouping]
* SupportedFileTypes: mp3;ogg;aac
* DeviceType:2, DeviceName: USBSTOR; UnsupportedDevice
* ResyncIfDateModified:

Issues:

* It starts off by saying 'Device is fully synchronized' - no, it is not at all synchronized.
* Crashes in between, when it crashes it deletes the playlist files on android or they have been previously deleted.
* Looses connection to android, once that happens, USB on device has to be reconnected.
* Starts "Error" ing out in the media (in details view)
* Recheck Sync - forgets the files it has already synced, and tried to delete them next time.
* Does not look like file timestamp based diff is working.
* DeviceName: USBSTOR; UnsupportedDevice - does this require a different USB driver?
* ResyncIfDateModified - is there a setting for this.
* Sometimes when it completes, only some of the files have been synchronized.
* Does not like dot in folder or file name, hence I have changed the [Grouping] field in my media to not contain . or & characters.
* Once or twice I have lost the sync profile entirely, there does not seem to be a way to back it up.
* Device dump info should be copyable in text format, so can be posted on forums for debugging.
* If have deleted all media on device and attempted a full-resync, the same issues above continue.
* At the end of the sync, would be good to get a list of errored files, again to be copyable in text format to Notepad++.
* After sync is complete or nearly complete, the process gets stuck at 99% for a long time, then often locks up (perhaps during writing the custom playlists).

Perhaps I am doing something wrong.  Any advice would be highly appreciated, including perhaps a better / different app / tool to achieve the same.

Thanks,
Parag

[JimH]

Try MP3 only.  I don't think AAC or OGG would work.

What vercion of MC?

[paragmehta]

Was using 32.0.6 when those previous errors occurred.

I have just upgraded to 32.0.8 and changed SupportedFileTypes to only mp3.

Does not change anything, wants to sync and delete the exact same contents again.

Thanks.

[JimH]

Can you format the microSD card?

[paragmehta]

Hi Jim,

Galaxy S23 does not have a separate micro SD card, it's part of the internal storage.

I had previously deleted the Music folder and let MC recreate it though.  Did not help.

Thanks,
Parag

[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]

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.

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.

[Mr Swordfish]

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

I wish I could be more specific about the problems, but here's what my experience has been:

MC does a fantastic job of syncing the specified files and playlists from my library to a folder on Windows.  I just tell it what to do, and it does it flawlessly as far as I can tell. And I'm syncing a large number of files - 25,000 files, about 300G of storage, hundreds of playlists.  I then use a third party app to sync this to the android.  Problem basically solved, so I've moved on.  (I don't use the conversion options since all my file formats are compatible with the software on the android, but that feature seemed to work the last time I tried it.)

The problem occurs when I try to point MC directly at the android file system.  Sometimes it crashes, sometimes it seems to work but the files are not transferred.  And this is tested with only one playlist with about half-a dozen files in it, so it's not a size  thing.  There seems to be some anomaly with the differences between the Windows  and the android file systems, but I can't say I understand the inner workings of android's file management system or how to make it interact with Windows.  Maybe there's some setting that needs to be configured?

From reading various posts in the forum it doesn't appear I'm the only one with this issue. I'd like to cut out the middleware and save some disc space, but right now this is not a priority for me.  The next step is getting another instance of MC to connect to my main library over the internet so I can use the full features of MC when I'm traveling instead of the limited features on the android, but that's a topic for another thread.

[john_kane]

Swordfish,

Yeah, I've had similar issues, going way way back; probably way back posts along same lines. Different phones many versions of MC, have exercised and enabled all settings... really I open all up all usb comm and function in Android, some in developer options.

  But like you, I found the only method that seems to work is to sync with MC  to a local folder, which is setup in MC as a device. And I then Sync that same folder to Android via other means.  I use a file sync client-server system from my NAS to do that.

[Louis]

I completely agree. I've experienced the same sync issues between PC and phone over many versions of MC and like you and others here, have resorted to that two-step workaround.
Like the original poster, paragmehta, I too have been baffled by the incorrect Action Window sync status.

[Mr Swordfish]

What 3rd party software are you using for the sync?

Resilio no longer supports their home version, and it was a Kluge of a clusterfuck of a disaster of a UI to use anyway.

Looking for something to replace it...

[Mr Swordfish]

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

So, has any work been done on fixing this?

I was running out of space on my C drive with over 300G in the local copy folder. So, I moved it to an external drive, but Resilio is now hopelessly broken and officially de-supported so I'm looking for a new solution.  If the direct sync in MC worked that would be great, but I'm waiting for a message saying "Yeah, we looked at this and corrected it, give it another try."

Now that I have Media Server working (big thanks to Jim and zybex for their help!) syncing to the handheld is less mission critical. 

Seems like a lot of folks were depending on Resilio and now that that option is no longer available it would seem to be a bigger priority now.

[BryanC]

Syncthing.

[Mr Swordfish]

Just in time for the end of support for android OS!

https://forum.syncthing.net/t/discontinuing-syncthing-android/23002

[BryanC]

I've never used their android app, always syncthing-fork: https://github.com/Catfriend1/syncthing-android