Having Android Sync Issues? Special Characters in Filenames

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frankz
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by frankz »

sirandar wrote:UPDATE: There can be no special charcters of any kind in any field for sync to work reliably
FYI I've got a lot of artists with characters in their name fields and am not seeing the same types of sync problems.

Example...
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Album names, too, come to think of it.
sirandar
Posts: 159
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

You on win10?
frankz wrote:
sirandar wrote:UPDATE: There can be no special charcters of any kind in any field for sync to work reliably
FYI I've got a lot of artists with characters in their name fields and am not seeing the same types of sync problems.

Example...
Image

Album names, too, come to think of it.
Peace through music
sirandar
Posts: 159
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

All I can say is that on win10 I couldn't get a clean sync until all special characters were removed and I tried everything.

A perfect sync is defined by syncing an entire library of 10,000 tracks and having Android catalog it in one pass without stalling even once AND having all the album art show up correctly in the Artist tab.

It is easy to get a sync that requires 5 tries and rebooting your phone 5 times..

When I removed all these characters I got a clean sync the very first try with no fudging.

This does not apply to Win7 as that is a different OS - this applies only to win10
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frankz
Posts: 81
Joined: Tue Jun 22, 2010 12:53 am

Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by frankz »

sirandar wrote:All I can say is that on win10 I couldn't get a clean sync until all special characters were removed and I tried everything.

A perfect sync is defined by syncing an entire library of 10,000 tracks and having Android catalog it in one pass without stalling even once AND having all the album art show up correctly in the Artist tab.

It is easy to get a sync that requires 5 tries and rebooting your phone 5 times..

When I removed all these characters I got a clean sync the very first try with no fudging.

This does not apply to Win7 as that is a different OS - this applies only to win10
I'm on Windows 10 - 64bit. Latest MMW and MMA.
Peke
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by Peke »

Hi,
@sirandar
Your problem is most likely based on fact that NTFS stores file names in Unicode. In contrast, the older FAT12, FAT16, and FAT32 file systems use the OEM character set where issues may arise due the fact that Android (at least by default) file names encode as UTF-8. Reason why I can test this is that my native charset is Cyrillic and/or Latin-2 so if system charset if different than on Android this can make issues but should be handled in Android.

I can't confirm your extra chars in filename issue, as I can't replicate on my PC, but seen the issue in the past using Windows 98SE->XP.
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
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sirandar
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

Hi Peke ..... Thank you for your diligence ..... I have some more info regarding this issue.

It turns out that my Note 4 was on the verge of death during all this mayhem ...... I started getting MMC errors which is the kiss of death for all Note 4s. This could have been part of
the problem.

I now have a LG V20 ...... I am in the process of syncing it.

Also Note that not every special character in my Note 4 casued this issue ..... only about 10% of them

To Clarify:
All my problem albums had special characters
Not all albums with special characters caused problems ....

It may be that the problem tracks have special characters encoded in another character set.

I will test this for you if you tell me how
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sirandar
Posts: 159
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

sirandar wrote:Hi Peke ..... Thank you for your diligence ..... I have some more info regarding this issue.

It turns out that my Note 4 was on the verge of death during all this mayhem ...... I started getting MMC errors which is the kiss of death for all Note 4s. This could have been part of
the problem.

I now have a LG V20 ...... I am in the process of syncing it.

Also Note that not every special character in my Note 4 casued this issue ..... only about 10% of them

To Clarify:
All my problem albums had special characters
Not all albums with special characters caused problems ....

It may be that the problem tracks have special characters encoded in another character set.

I will test this for you if you tell me how
Found another source of syncing mayhem...
Albums with tracks encoded FLAC have a bad issue if there is more than one artist which are properly seperated by a semicolon.

On the first sync of a library onto a microSD card using a reader on a PC all is well after cataloguing in the phone EXCEPT any subsequent artists after the first are truncated. This isn't really much of a problem BUT if you do a wireless sync after this sync tried to put them back in and mayhem results.

I just converted all my FLAC s and any trying again
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sirandar
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

OK .... now that I have a working phone here are some more observations. Most of what I wrote before was related to my phones memory failing.

Any Chinese or other language character that gets put into an actual file or directory name during sync results in an unrecoverable mess. This has been a issue for me for years but I found ways around it so my entire library on my PC and laptop has no non-English characters as these even mess up MM4 for windows. Everything works fine until you try to sync.

The default setting for creating directory structure and filenames at sync location on the Android device uses the field <Artist> <Title> and <Album> which in my case are full of non-English characters. The sync happens and all the files get placed correctly, but the sync is mayhem and Android cannot catalog it, and no ratings get transferred.

Very difficult to address this issue..... you can adjust the sync so <Title> is replaced with <filename>, but <album> and <artist> are not usable unless you painstakingly translate and change every instance.

This is probably Androids fault but in the end who cares .... It doesn't work if you have an international library.

Really the best way is just to copy the entire library to a card on the PC and let MMA catalog it there IMO.
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sirandar
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Re: Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync SOLVED

Post by sirandar »

LOL ..... it is all crystal clear now including all my previous posts.

The root cause is MMA and Android cannot handle even a single special character or non-English character in the filename of any file that gets pushed to an android device.

Even one file getting pushed with these characters destabilized the whole sync. Even MM4 for windows doesn't like to have non-English characters in actual file names and there are issues but they are minor, I painstakingly removed every one from my W7 MM4 library a few years ago.

I incorrectly stated in previous posts that special characters in the <title> <album> and <artist> cause sync issues. They cause no issues in themselves, but cause fatal issues when the sync pushes them to the device with the special characters they contain. It was a case of indirect causation

I would very very strongly suggest that you change the default sync setting and profiles so the MM4 and MMA exactly replicates the PC directory and filename structure and character content in the sync process. A routine to report errors related to this issue or just replace/filter problem characters would also work.

I cannot be the only person with an international multi-language music library. This issue may be wasting a lot of interest in your very good software.
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Peke
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Re: SOLVED !!!!!! Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by Peke »

Hmmm....
Can you try to Add "$RemapASCII({YOURCURRENTSYNCMASK})" and try again?
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
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sirandar
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Re: SOLVED !!!!!! Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

Peke wrote:Hmmm....
Can you try to Add "$RemapASCII({YOURCURRENTSYNCMASK})" and try again?
where would I add this? Some mm.ini


Interesting ..... I thought my PC sd card reader sync worked perfectly but playlists were missing on phone after sync.

Looks like only a wireless sync can get those over which is a bad design limitation

EDIT.... the playlists were messed up by a unwanted phone to PC sync that happened (I probably checked it by accident once)

When I did a wireless sync of 10K tracks after the initial PC SD card sync, as usual after the file comparison stage the sync wanted to delete 978 tracks and resync wireless.
I watched the files delete on my phone ...... every single one had a bracket or other nonletter character in it almost all of 978. Yup checked off and on the vast majority had brackets in the song name

In your comparison process you have an equivalence statement that is not getting parsed properly if there are non-letter characters. it could be that ( needs to be (( or some other control character.
Last edited by sirandar on Mon May 22, 2017 7:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Peke
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Re: SOLVED !!!!!! Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by Peke »

sirandar wrote:
Peke wrote:Hmmm....
Can you try to Add "$RemapASCII({YOURCURRENTSYNCMASK})" and try again?
where would I add this? Some mm.ini.
It is added way back in MMW Due the similar issues.

Option is found at Insert SDCard -> Select it in Tree -> Options -> File Locations and add remap to all paths.
Best regards,
Peke
MediaMonkey Team lead QA/Tech Support guru
Admin of Free MediaMonkey addon Site HappyMonkeying
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sirandar
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Re: SOLVED !!!!!! Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by sirandar »

Peke wrote:
sirandar wrote:
Peke wrote:Hmmm....
Can you try to Add "$RemapASCII({YOURCURRENTSYNCMASK})" and try again?
where would I add this? Some mm.ini.
It is added way back in MMW Due the similar issues.

Option is found at Insert SDCard -> Select it in Tree -> Options -> File Locations and add remap to all paths.
That feature is broken ....it does not remove characters Android doesn't like.

Why would am MMA sync ever let these characters on the device at all... The sync should have built in protection against this. Even with a USB sync things appear to work but really are broken

Any file or directory with .,():;& causes album art issues for any ablum that has more than one artist. The album art is missing when scrolling through artists in the artist tab ......but not when viewing tracks

For example all my 10,000 Maniacs albums had album art issues.... Took the comma out in the directory name to 10000 Maniacs do the problem went away immediately
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Lowlander
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Re: SOLVED !!!!!! Any Way to Avoid Wireless and USB Sync

Post by Lowlander »

I can't reproduce. Files with accents in file name work fine. Albums with multiple Artist and .,: in the filename work fine.
sirandar
Posts: 159
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 1:40 am

MMA sync has the worst kind of Bug

Post by sirandar »

MMA USB, Wireless and SD Card Reader sync are a pretty good tools when they work. They often don't and there are subtle differences between the 3 that add complexity.

Here are my observations:

SDCard Sync: Broken, don't waste your time, metadata doesn't get transferred anyway
Wireless: slow and not worth it for more than a few tracks
USB: On current devices it is pretty quick

Here is the issue:

MMA sync lets characters onto your Android devices that Android and MMA don't like. This causes sync failures and album art to not display when scrolling through the artist tab for multi artist albums. The art is there and it you click on a track or album it shows, but not when scrolling through the list of artists. It may also be causing other mayhem

The list of bad characters ( ) \ , . (except .mp3) @ & and any international


This was tested on two computers, one Win7 X64 and one Win10 ..... the result was the same ........ these characters cause issues and the only way to address is to use the <folder> and <filename> masks and make sure your MMW directories and filenames have absolutely none of these characters.
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