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[Mr Swordfish]

I've successfully synched about a half dozen of my playlists to my android device (Sony NW-A306), so I thought I'd try synching the whole thing.  The SD card holds 1TB and I've got maybe 200GB of media to synch.

Yesterday, it ran to completion, but I didn't see everything on the device, so I tried re-synching today and Media Center got about 10% of the way through before hanging and just sitting there for over an hour.

I tried attaching the log file, but it's too large for the forum.  (I had changed the max size for the log file, I'll reset it and try again).

Is there some upper limit to  what Media Center can handle?  I've got about 22,000 audio files and about 220 playlists.

[Mr Swordfish]

I tried re-synching yesterday, it took about ten hours, but it ran to completion and it appears that most of the audio files were transferred.


But the playlists were not, or rather there are only about 5 playlist files in the Playlist folder out of the approximately 200 that I tried to synch.

I'm trying a re-synch, but I'm seeing no progress after about 30 minutes.

Log file attached.

[Mr Swordfish]

And after about an hour, it started processing, with an estimate of 18 hours to complete.

Is this normal?  I understand that transferring 170GB of files will take some time, but once they are transferred to the device updates should be rather fast if there are few or no changes.

Logfile attached.

[timwtheov]

I have run into this problem trying to sync directly to android devices time and again, so I just create a Google Drive folder on an external hard drive, upload all music files and playlists to that (which works seamlessly every time), and then sync that folder to my phone (used to use Foldersync but now use Drivesync as it's much faster).

It's a pain to have to reserve space on an external hard drive, especialy when like you I have a 1 tb sd card, but it makes syncing my nearly 10,000 flac files to my Galaxy Note 20 MUCH easier.

[BryanC]

Yep, I've also sidestepped android sync using syncthing, and it is absolutely fantastic (no cords, ma!). It's especially nice to be 2000 miles from home, remote into my MC instance, initiate a sync and syncthing starts syncing my android device remotely.

Simply create a local directory, add it as a handheld device in MC, then add this folder to syncthing. An additional plus: syncing to a local directory is lightning fast so MC sync operations take a fraction of the time than syncing over USB.

[blgentry]

Back when I had an Android device that I synced to, I also used the "real folder" sync method.  After I used the Android File Transfer tool to copy the contents of that folder to the actual Android device.

Brian.

[Mr Swordfish]

Ok, I'll give this a try....

And the syncing is much faster.

But it's not writing the playlist files.  When I look at tools -> options -> Handhelds -> Files Paths and more

there is no checkbox for "Write Custom Playlist Files" like there is with the handheld and it's SD card.

So, I'm not sure how to tell MC to write the playlist files for the local directory.  Any ideas why this checkbox is not appearing?

[JimH]

Drag a playlist to the device.

[timwtheov]

Also, in addition to dragging, do you see a long list of checkbox playlist files like those on the right hand side of the attached screenshot? I only check the ones I want to sync, and MC sends them.

[JimH]

https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/Sync_Handheld

[BryanC]

Ok, I'll give this a try....

And the syncing is much faster.

But it's not writing the playlist files.  When I look at tools -> options -> Handhelds -> Files Paths and more

there is no checkbox for "Write Custom Playlist Files" like there is with the handheld and it's SD card.

So, I'm not sure how to tell MC to write the playlist files for the local directory.  Any ideas why this checkbox is not appearing?

Have you selected a playlist(s) in the tree to sync? If none are selected then the whole library will be synced and the playlist-specific options will be hidden.

[Mr Swordfish]

Yes, I've selected 3 or 4 smaller playlists to test.  The checkbox doesn't appear.  But it's now writing .m3u files for the playlists I've selected. Or maybe it always was I just didn't see the playlist folder.

[Mr Swordfish]

Back when I had an Android device that I synced to, I also used the "real folder" sync method.  After I used the Android File Transfer tool to copy the contents of that folder to the actual Android device.

Can you provide more info about the Android File Transfer tool?  If I google it, I find this (https://support.google.com/android/answer/9064445?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwindows-computer%2Cset-up-nearby-share-for-windows) which is just drag and drop the files.  That will probably work, but is there a smarter tool that looks for differences and only does what's necessary?

The drag-and-drop approach says it will take about ten hours when almost all the files are already there - it should only have to copy the playlist files.



Thanks.

[comox]

Yep, I've also sidestepped android sync using syncthing, and it is absolutely fantastic (no cords, ma!). It's especially nice to be 2000 miles from home, remote into my MC instance, initiate a sync and syncthing starts syncing my android device remotely.

Simply create a local directory, add it as a handheld device in MC, then add this folder to syncthing. An additional plus: syncing to a local directory is lightning fast so MC sync operations take a fraction of the time than syncing over USB.

I also use this approach and love it. Syncthing is a good product but last time I checked it would not write to microSD cards on an Android phone. I therefore use Resilio Sync which works perfectly.

[JimH]

If we can get your help, we will fix this.  Sorry for the trouble.

[blgentry]

Can you provide more info about the Android File Transfer tool?  If I google it, I find this (https://support.google.com/android/answer/9064445?hl=en#zippy=%2Cwindows-computer%2Cset-up-nearby-share-for-windows) which is just drag and drop the files.  That will probably work, but is there a smarter tool that looks for differences and only does what's necessary?

Android File Transfer was the Google provided tool at the time I was doing this.  Probably 6 or 7 years ago now.  I had a comparatively small storage on the Android, so I was ok with overwriting everything every time.

I definitely agree that an incremental file sync is what you want if you can get it.  Other people here have mentioned a few other tools that may do that.   I know nothing about them.

Jim seems to be offering to get the MC team to help fix this issue for you, so that's extremely encouraging.

Best of luck,
Brian.

[Mr Swordfish]

If we can get your help, we will fix this.  Sorry for the trouble.

I'm more than happy to work with the team to sort this out.

At this point, I have successfully synced MC with a folder on my PC, and did a simple manual copy to the device.  So, my handheld has all music and playlists I need for now.  This means I can stop using iTunes and my ipod. A great milestone!

I'm not at my PC right now, and don't know how long it will be before I am, so I'm not able to work on this for a couple of weeks.

Ideally, it would work just like the ipod/iTunes - plug in the handheld, use the point-and-click UI to tell MC what to put on the device (or just leave the settings as-is), hit sync,  the software figures out what to transfer, and unless there are a bunch of music files to transfer the sync happens very quickly since it only changes the things that need to be changed.

Of course, Apple had the luxury of only dealing with their own devices (and the player software) so dealing with different android devices and the various players is a taller order.

For now, the sync to local folder and manual copy to device is working for me.  It would be nice to automate it, and when I get back to my PC I'll look into that. 

Big thanks to everyone who helped me get this far.

[Mr Swordfish]

I also use this approach and love it. Syncthing is a good product but last time I checked it would not write to microSD cards on an Android phone. I therefore use Resilio Sync which works perfectly.

My experience is that MC will write to an SD card, but it treats the SD card and the "normal" storage as separate devices, which was a bit confusing at first.  IOW, instead of looking at the root of the directory structure and seeing two folders (i.e. what you see when using Widows Explorer) , it sees the two storage "folders" as separate devices.

[Matt]

I'm more than happy to work with the team to sort this out.

Could you provide details on what you're trying that isn't working?  It would be great if we could reproduce the problem.  Thanks.

[Mr Swordfish]

It's a long list, and my travel schedule means I am only at my PC for a few days at a time, so I only have a narrow window to work on it.  I'm leaving again today and won't be back for a week or so.  I hope to carve out some time late next week to delve into it again.

My most recent issue is described at https://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php/topic,136837.0.html

At this point I am doing all syncing manually, other than using MC to sync to a local folder that's on the same hard drive.  That first step sometimes works, sometimes doesn't, throws errors for some specific files (but I don't see anywhere that provides a summary of which files failed to transfer), and has behavior that is inconsistent and unexpected.   I understand that  you need more specific details to proceed, but that will have to wait until next week.

Thanks for getting back to me - looking forward to working through these issues.

[Mr Swordfish]

UPDATE:

I've created a folder on the same hard drive as the music files called "LocalAndroidSync" and set JRiver to sync to that.  It seems to be working reliably, and is fast.

To sync that to the SD card on the andriod, I've downloaded and installed Resilio sync. After a few weeks of puzzling over their unintuitive UI I think I've finally gotten it to work.  More or less.  (Their documentation says to use QR codes to transfer the security keys between devices, which doesn't work very well with a music player a camera)

The thing is it is extremely slow.  I have the device plugged into a USB 3.0 port which in theory would provide 600MBps transfer rate.  Resilio Sync is poking along at about 1 or 2 MB/s.  I tried using Good Sync, and while it had a nice intuitive UI, it was even slower - like 50 to 100 KB/sec.

It appears to be using wifi to connect instead of the nice fast wired USB cable.  When I asked about this, I got this cryptic response:

"It is not quite clear what do you mean by plugging USB port. Resilio Sync peers synchronize data with each other over the network. USB plugging of devices is not used."

So, I can't say I'm very impressed with Resilio sync and would like to come back to seeing if I can get JRiver to sync directly to the device instead of using a local folder and a third party sync tool.  But I'm travelling again starting Monday and assuming Resilio is done syncing by then I'll attack this when I get back. 

[comox]

I've been doing exactly as you for years Mr. Swordfish and it works perfectly for me.

I sync my Android phone via a strong 5 GHz wi-fi signal and it is very fast.

Occasionally, and probably due to me pushing things too hard like modifying folders in the middle of sync, I end up with some empty folders on my Android device that Resilio Sync does not clean up.

A couple times a year I connect my phone via USB and use Syncovery to do an exact mirror sync to clean things up.

Syncovery via USB is a viable alternative to Resilio Sync via wi-fi except the Android USB interface is very slow so scanning many folders for changes takes too long to use USB on a daily basis. I sync over 20,000 files to Android. USB is plenty fast enough if you only sync a few thousand files.

FYI, there are competitors to Reslio Sync however none last time I checked will work with media stored on an Android micro sd card.

[Mr Swordfish]

I've been doing exactly as you for years Mr. Swordfish and it works perfectly for me.

Thanks. The fact that someone is using this method successfully makes me think it will work for me.

I would expect that whatever sync tool I use would take a fair amount of time the first time through to index everything, after which it would be fairly fast.  And that if I try some other sync tool, Resilio would need to start over if I want back to it. So, I'm going to try living with it for a while and see if in everyday use it works adequately well.   

It would be nice to skip the intermediate copy on the local file system, but for now it's not a problem.

[comox]

Resilio under the covers I think is using bittorrent technology which means the initial indexing does take time, however when complete it is super fast at identifying anything that changes and immediately transferring it.

I use Resilio for much more than JRiver media. For example, I use it to transfer photos off my phone, syncing Office documents I like to have on both my PC and phone, and backing up Android app data.