Author Topic: Playlist synchronisation error to Windows Phone 8 device  (Read 5302 times)

paulianharman

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I recently abandoned MediaMonkey and came across to MusicBee - loving the app, it does pretty much everything I need! I've had to migrate my music back from iTunes on the Mac across to PC-based management, and MusicBee has done me proud, just had to do a little hackery on my iTunes exported playlist .M3U files (change the file paths and save with PC line endings) and they all imported flawlessly.

But I'm having problems synchronising playlists to my Lumia 1520.

All of the tracks re-encoded and uploaded fine, but the playlists don't seem to be working. I've told MusicBee to put them into the hidden "Music/Playlist/" folder and it seems to be doing so - browsing to that location I can see zero-length files in the folder, for each playlist (I don't know if that is a bug or a feature, since other playlists I added via XBox Music are also zero-length, yet they have tracks in them - and MusicBee can read those playlists fine).

The synchronisation dialog seems to take an absolute age trying to sync the playlists, and eventually I get 'Copy Failed - Unable to find specified file' and an error about not being able to find the file. On some of the others I get 'Encode failed - Unable to open file (error=BASS_ERROR_FILEFORM))

The playlists themselves seem to have at least partially synchronised to the device though, but overall I get "Synchronisation Failed"

Anyone else have this issue?

phred

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I'm just taking a wild guess here, but it sounds like you've got some dead links in your playlists.  Select the playlist in question, or if you don't know which is causing the problem, start with the first one and work your way down.   Right-click on the playlist and select LIST and then REMOVE DEAD LINKS.  Try another sync and let us know if this cleared up the issue. 
Download the latest MusicBee v3.5 or 3.6 patch from here.
Unzip into your MusicBee directory and overwrite existing files.

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paulianharman

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Yeah - just looked back through some of my playlists - a few of them are rather large (in particular the ones I used to export my iTunes star ratings) and there are a few missed items in the middle of those lists. Hopefully fixing them will cure this.

Thanks!

so_la_la

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If removing dead links effectively kills your playlists by removing too many songs you might want to try this:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/listfix/
Music Bee 3; EAC; MP3Tag; Music on Synology NAS 115; Logitech Media Server on RPI 3; RPI 2 with Hifiberry; Poweramp for Android/Lineage

paulianharman

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I've cleaned up my playlists - no dead links, no exclamation marks anywhere. But they still won't synchronise to my device, even playlists with just one song on them :-(

The first playlist fails with "Encode Failed - Unable to open file (error=BASS_ERROR_FILEFORM)" and the others are all stuck in "Copying..."

All of the songs had previously correctly encoded and copied.

The playlists do appear to be on the device and do also appear to be working, but I get "Synchronistion Failed"

In a possibly related bit of weirdness, when I browse to the Music/Playlist/ folder on my Lumia device, I can see duplicates of my playlists. There are the files put there by MediaBee e.g. Playlist.pla, and then there is a copy with a UUID as part of the filename e.g. Playlist{deadbeef-dead-beef-dead-beefdeadbeef} with no extension. These show up as duplicates inside the Music app on the device.

so_la_la

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I have a Nokia 620 and the duplication of playlists is a problem extensively discussed in many windows phone forums eg on WPC. In fact I am having this problem myself. Some playlists appear three times in XBM, each time with a different number of songs, although they only show up once or twice in the respective folder. I have the playlist format set to .pla.
The problem lies with Microsoft and not with Musicbee. You might want to check whether the playlists double in MixRadio as well. Make sure to have playlists stored in only one folder (Phone/Music/Playlists or Phone/Playlists or SD-card/Playlists. Otherwise you can try and format your SD-card and then sync anew.
Music Bee 3; EAC; MP3Tag; Music on Synology NAS 115; Logitech Media Server on RPI 3; RPI 2 with Hifiberry; Poweramp for Android/Lineage

paulianharman

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Thanks so_la_la. I was wondering if whatever was duplicating the playlists was locking the files or something which was why MusicBee was getting stuck or having errors.

I didn't mean to imply that MusicBee was creating the duplicates. That clearly looks like something odd is happening in XBox Music. I delete playlists from the device but they keep on re-appearing, and the playlists shown in XBox Music don't match the files on the device either. I shall take this up, with thousands of others, on the relevant MS forums ;-)

FYI I am experimenting with Windows Media Player to see if I have the same issues there.

so_la_la

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Each time I think too hard about syncing issues with my phone I feel the urge to buy an android device.
Music Bee 3; EAC; MP3Tag; Music on Synology NAS 115; Logitech Media Server on RPI 3; RPI 2 with Hifiberry; Poweramp for Android/Lineage