Music becomes warbled and full of hiccups after transfer to mobile device?

[crosse]

I'm having an issue where music plays fine within MusicBee on my computer, but when I use MusicBee to sync my playlists onto my mobile device (a Samsung Galaxy S20+ running Android OS 11) many of the songs become what I can only describe as warbled, or full of hiccups. It sounds like when you're listening on a bluetooth speaker and the speaker is too far away from the device so it cuts in and out.

I've tested to make sure it's not an issue with my phone, or the player I'm using (GoneMAD), and as far as I can tell it's not, because the affected songs are distorted no matter what player I use, or what device I transfer them to, while the non-affected files play fine in all the same scenarios.

I believe it must be something that is happening when Music Bee either copies or converts the music for my mobile device, because if I go back to my computer and play the original song in Music Bee, it sounds right. But if I drag and drop the music file from my phone back to my computer and play it, it's all warbled and distorted, just like it is on my phone. My music library is large and comes from a variety of sources, including iTunes, Amazon, and ripped CDs. The issue happens across all the different types, so it doesn't seem to be a problem with just one provider.

My question is: what can I do to prevent and fix this? Why is this happening? I tried deleting everything off my phone and re-syncing everything fresh several times, but the exact same songs keep coming over warbled, every time. I tried removing several of the songs from Music Bee, then re-adding them, removing everything from my mobile device, and then re-syncing, but still the same issue. Not every song ends up like this, but at least a good 1/3 do, which makes it useless for me to try to manage my music this way unless there's a fix.

Has anyone else had this issue? Anything more I can try? Any settings that I should maybe try adjusting or changing? Please help! Thank you!!!

[frankz]

Don't do any conversions when you sync - just sync.  The exact file that's on your computer will wind up on your device.

i.e. in your device settings, turn off "convert to" and turn off "level volume".

[crosse]

Thank you! I already don't have "Convert To" checked under the "On the Fly" menu under device settings and "level volume" is not checked either - is there anywhere else that I need to set these?

My current device settings:

[frankz]

The only other thing I can think of would be the cue sheet thing in the very unlikely case that you have cue sheets that reference a lossy file, maybe those are being reencoded when they're being split.  But cue files usually reference FLAC or WAV lossless files, not lossy files.

Otherwise, your settings indicate that MB is sending files to your device exactly as they exist on your computer, and your device must be doing something to them.

[crosse]

Thank you so much, frankz! You got me looking in the correct direction and I have found a fix … weirdly, it's backwards from what I thought the problem was. If I go ahead and have MusicBee convert all the music it transfers, the issue goes away and everything plays smoothly. So it was something about transferring the original files that was corrupting some of them. Still not sure why - maybe there's something wonky about my SD card. I'll have to look into that deeper when I have time, but for now at least I have a fix that works for my present need. Thanks again!!

[psychoadept]

I'm curious, are all the files that were affected the same format? You mentioned a variety of sources, so I wondered if it had something to do with a particular source.