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[lendall]

Sync Handheld worked great on my ancient Samsung Transform with a 16Gig microSD card.  That phone died last week, and they sent me a Galaxy S4, into which I installed a 64Gig microSD and thought that I was ready to rock and roll.  Except: Even if I try to sync only five files to the Galaxy S4 microSD I get 10.8 meg over capacity -- and obviously more if I try to sync more files.  My computer is clearly recognizing the microSD card and shows that 63Gig is available, but MC is not.  I have tried everything. In Windows Explorer I see the Galaxy S4 under my name and SPH-L7, and under that two "drives", one called "Card" and the other called "Phone," but neither with drive letters.  There was a directory called "Music" in the Phone "drive" which I renamed and created a new directory called "Music" in the Card "drive" instead.  Didn't help.  I tried using "Add Device" in the Handheld Options menu, hoping that I could browse and designate the drive path to the "Card" drive, but MC does not see it, presumably because there is no drive letter. 

SO . . . I am very frustrated.  Will someone tell me how to get Sync Handheld to recognize the microSD card on my Galaxy S4 so that I can begin to sync some of my playlists to my new phone?

Thanks.

[JimH]

Under the Handheld options, try "Redetect all devices".

[kstuart]

In one of the later versions of Android 4, they restricted access to the SD card for security reasons.

This may be the issue you are encountering.

[lendall]

Thanks.

Before I wrote this post I tried "Redetect all devices" several times -- seemed the most logical approach.  MC acts as if it is detecting my S4 (which it is calling "Android (1)"), but then is recognizing only minimal space to place the files when I try to run the sync function, even with a minimal number of files.

The S4 manual does not say anything about the SD card being locked.  Under "Transfer Files Between Your Phone and a Computer" it has a very simplistic (lame) set of instructions ("plug the smaller end of your USB cable into your phone . . . and copy the files . . . ")

The experiments continue . . . . As a test maybe I'll try simply copying some music files onto the phone.  This will not do me any good as far as organization, but if it works it will tend to indicate that what I am experiencing is a software issue (MC) rather than any kind of phone issue.

[JimH]

Some phones have two modes for the USB connection.

[lendall]

Jim: Thanks.  Re "some phones have two modes of USB connection":  I've been down that road as well.  The Galaxy S4 has either "Connected as a media device" or "Connected as a camera," with "media device" being the default.  I have confirmed that the phone is in the "media device" mode every time I have attempted to run Sync Handheld.

As an experiment I have manually copied a bunch of files onto my phone via windows and successfully played them using the music app I have installed on the phone (Neutron).  Of course these are for the most part huge FLAC files and OGG files at high bitrates, so this is not a permanent solution; I really want to get the MC Sync Handheld function working.  I have just tried to run it again and I am showing 18.9 GB over capacity, which I suspect is just a little bit over the the total size of the playlist I am trying to sync.

The possibly interesting thing is that when I copied the files onto the SD care via windows, I got a message saying that some of the files were in a format that the phone's media player could not play, and suggesting that I should convert them. I was allowed to override this, which I did.  Of course Neutron will play pretty much anything, which is why I bought it.  So I was wondering if the phone might be rejecting my FLAC and OGG files when I try to use Sync Handheld.  But that doesn't make sense because I have tried to run Sync Handheld specifying both MP3 and OGG for conversion and disallowing FLACs, and also specifying the "convert for high bitrates" option, and I get the same result every time:  over capacity.

Anybody else with a Galaxy S4 (or presumably S5 or S6) out there? (There are millions of them, from what I hear.)

[JimH]

Try creating a Music folder at the root level (if you haven't).

[lendall]

Jim:  Creating a MUSIC folder in the root directory was one of the first things I tried.  Didn't work.  In the directory tree under the phone there are two "drives":  PHONE and CARD.  Under PHONE there was an empty MUSIC folder and also an empty PLAYLISTS folder.  I tried renaming both of those folders after I created the MUSIC folder under the CARD drive.  That seemed like a logical explanation, i.e. that MC was finding the MUSIC folder in PHONE and was running out of space.  But it ran out of space with only five songs, so that also seemed unlikely.  At this point I'm stumped.  BTW I had also tried creating a MUSIC folder under DATA on the CARD drive (that's where it was on my old phone), but that didn't work either. 

It is still looking like MC will not recognize anything on the CARD "drive."  I thought about renaming that drive, but it won't let me. 

BTW Neutron was easily able to find and play the files I copied into the MUSIC folder on the CARD drive. 

[JimH]

Did you try a search for the security changes Android introduced with respect to locations that can be written to by applications?  It happened about a year ago.

[john_kane]

lendell,

So a couple things:  I don't have a galaxy, but an android phone. I think the behavior difference you are seeing from ancient phone to this phone is from the change in android to drop support for USB Mass storage mode (allowing you to mount the sd card by drive letter) and the new android way (which they dropped into 4.1 or 4.2 maybe) to support only MPT or camera transfer modes.

I, like you, had device sync working 'reasonably' in usb mass storage mode.After one of the android upgrades, this was lost.  If memory serves, I encountered some of the false negative space issues that you describe.  I think that this is due to the slow MPT mode and fact that it transfers one file at a time, and is sluggish.  I think that delay errors may get misinterpreted as space errors.  If memory serves, enabling USB debugging on the phone, for reasons that weren't entirely clear to me, did mark a pretty good improvement in MPT transfer speeds and solved this (part of it) for me.

But, after this hurdle, I have found (and I think others have posted some similar findings) MPT mode and MC Device Sync are wonky partners at best.  The device sync works the first time, but subsequent resyncs  fail, get confused, and attempt to re-copy files that are still on the device.  This, I think is due to MPT and the interaction of whatever metadata is getting written on phone to files after the sync.

So truly Android changed and made some of it more difficult.  But some of it I think is related to the sync algorithm used by MC (which uses a combination of meta data fields and filename etc) and the android actions which tend to defeat it.  I have made numerous requests  on giving us(the MC user) control to edit that sync algorithm, to try to find something less sensitive and more workable with the MPT mode that we are stuck with:


http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=93231.0

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=90662.msg663451#msg663451

http://yabb.jriver.com/interact/index.php?topic=90785.0

I put a similar feature request into MC21...

In my opinion, device sync is untenable at this point, and I am currently using a separate file sync system to sync my music files to the phone. I have had to create a manual device in MC which is a synced folder location (and use a separate sync process). It is a little kludgy, but functional. 

[lendall]

UPDATE/WORKAROUND:  I was so frustrated by this yesterday that I gave up and went hiking.  At the trail head I met two cute girls in bikinis.  The second was a Mac person and kind of vague.  The first suggested that I try connecting my SD card directly to my computer via a USB adapter.  After our hike, I went home and tried this.  The 64GB (a SanDisk Ultra SDXC) was recognized by Windows (XP SP3, for which I refuse to apologize), but Windows told me that this exFAT "drive" needed to be formatted.  I read that OS's prior to Vista need a patch to read SDXC cards, but when I tried to download the patch from Microsoft I got a message saying that the patch was older than my OS, meaning I suppose prior to SP3.  However I also noted that there have been issues with some versions of Vista not being able to read SDXC cards.  BTW I tried several different SD card to USB adapters, although the ones I have are all passive devices.

So, in further desperation, I then tried my old SD card from my old phone.  This card is a 32GB Samsung Evo UHS-1.  My computer instantly recognized this card and its contents -- no problem.  I then went into Media Center and in Sync Handheld Options designated this card as a new device.  This worked perfectly.  MC asked me if I wanted to recognize the data that was already on the card, and I said yes.  Then I set all of my other Sync Handheld options (DSP, Conversion, etc.) and ran Sync with no problems whatsoever. 

After I did this I installed the 32GB SD in my Galaxy S4 (which, of course, is an Android phone).  It took Neutron a little while to find and "load" all of the "songs," but after it did everything worked perfectly.  I decided to use the "Normal" OGG Vorbis setting (which results in a bitrate of around 156) but also to convert (compress) for high bitrates.

So I have solved my problem, albeit partially, while leaving several questions unresolved.  One could throw the whole thing back onto my XP fanaticism, but bear in mind that I was able to manually (meaning using Windows and not MC) copy files onto the 64GS SDXC card via the Android function, and then play these using Neutron.  So nothing either in XP or in the Android is stopping me from putting music files onto my 64GB SD.

Personally I would suggest that a fully functional and highly customizable Sync Handheld function should be a very high priority for MC21.  When it works it is absolutely fantastic.

Final comment:  In general I would like more "stats" in MC.  Maybe they are there but if they are I can't find them.  By "stats" I mean, for example, the number of tracks (songs) in a playlist and how  many bytes that represents.

Anyway, any further enlightenment on this topic would be greatly appreciated.  And if anyone knows of an external card reader (preferably USB-3) that will allow my XP SP3 computer to deal with my 64GB SDXC card, please let me know!

[beats_works]

Had similar issue after installing SD card in a Sansa DAP. Solution was uninstalling Sansa player from Device Manager and then Scan for Hardware changes. Now MP shows a Sansa 1 & 2. Not ideal as it doesn't see as one volume but I just created a 2nd playlist to sync.

[JimH]

Like the joke about what dogs here, I read "blah blah blah bikinis blah blah...".  Nice story.  You must live in L.A.

[kstuart]

A Samsung Galaxy will format an SD card as "exFAT", because that is the newer/better system (it supports file sizes greater than 4gb).

You can update your XP to support "exFAT" using downloads from Microsoft on this page:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/955704

[blgentry]

Would there be any drawback to formatting the 64GB card as FAT32?  Sure you can't save any files larger than 4GB, but you probably wouldn't need to on a phone.  That would solve compatibility without having to mess with XP's file system drivers.

Brian.

[BryanC]

Would there be any drawback to formatting the 64GB card as FAT32?  Sure you can't save any files larger than 4GB, but you probably wouldn't need to on a phone.  That would solve compatibility without having to mess with XP's file system drivers.

Brian.

Probably not. People do this with the larger microSD cards all the times to get around the limitations of Rockbox and the OEM firmware on the Sansa devices. Note that you can't do this in Windows. If you don't have another OS or GParted CD handy, you can use this Windows utility: http://tokiwa.qee.jp/EN/Fat32Formatter/

[lendall]

JimH:  I tried living in Minnesota for a year, but . . . Have they finished the repair work on the Coon Rapids Dam yet?  I used to hike there all the time. 

Meanwhile I am going to try the Microsoft exFAT patch and other things people have suggested.