Author Topic: Sync preview wants to delete and recopy a good chunk of my library  (Read 1372 times)

stuartb3502

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Hi - I'm using 3.4.8033.  Although I have used Musicbee as a player for a long time, I have only recently tried using it to sync to my Android phone (I have used it to sync to an ipod successfully for quite a while).

I deleted all music from my phone and synced.  Now I'm trying to re-sync having ripped a couple of new albums and added them to the library on my server (accessed as a Windows share by Musicbee).

There is 61 GB of MP3s on the phone already.  The sync preview however says that it wants to delete a bunch of files and copy 39.2 GB to the phone whilst only increasing the total used space by 407MB.   

I'm trying to figure out why it might want to delete and copy these files.  My guess is that there is some attribute which it detects as different.  I have not manually changed any of the files, but on my server, the files are in a Synology Audiostation library and Plex also maintains a library of them. 

I've previously had issues where things like folder.jpg have changed size, but this is not that as it's the actual mp3 files.

If I can understand what Musicbee sees different, I can try to stop those things being changed perhaps. 

Thanks
Stuart

phred

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It's possible (likely) that some tags have changed for the files in question. When tags change for a track that is already on the device, rather than overwriting, MB will delete the old track and then copy the new track. If your artwork is embedded in the file and you change artwork, the same thing will occur.
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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stuartb3502

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I'm sure you're right.  Reporting what I've found so far in case it sheds any light....

I have just used MP3TAG, Exiftool and something called Cue Splitter to extract what I believe is all available tag information.  Cue Splitter gave the most comprehensive view including "private" ID3v2 tag info. not visible (easily at least) in the other two tools.

I've just checked one of the files in question so far.

I compared field by field in Excel for the phone version of a file and the server version.  The only differences were in the order that the tags were retrieved by the tool and in the value of one tag called TCON.  On the phone version this had the value "Alternative" and on the server version "20".  The separate Genre tag has a value on both of "(20) Alternative".

I know that this file has not been changed on the server since it was synced to the 'phone unless something on the server (e.g. Audiostation or Plex) has suddenly decided to do this. The file modification date on the server is in 2014.

It looks to me like there's something else going on here, but I'm not sure what yet.  ;)

stuartb3502

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So...I allowed the sync which wanted to delete and copy files to run.  The issue in some cases appeared to be due to tracks bow being tagged with a disc number as well as track number. 

I can't explain why as I don't believe I've changed the affected tracks since last sync.  However - I'll have to put this down to user error for now.

The sync ran.  Had one remaining strange issue with the year on some tracks having changed to an illegal date (0004) leading to a "Copy failed - Not a legal OleAut date." error.  Possible this happened on previous sync but I missed it.  Corrected that year and another sync ran correctly.  So I think I'm all good.