Something wrong with playlist syncing

[psychoadept]

I've noticed weird behavior for a while with playlists not being on my phone when I would expect them to be. I wasn't sure at first whether MusicBee was the issue, but after monitoring a few syncs (wired) today and checking the results, something is definitely not working as exepcted.

There should be 19 playlists. MuiscBee always says it syncs all of them, but it's not. Sometimes it looks like it's adding the playlists that aren't there and removing the ones that are. I started one round with 2 playlists in the folder (the result of the sync before that), and ended with 17. The two that were there at the start were missing.

But on the next run, I removed all the playlists through the phone and synced again. That time I ended up with 1 playlist on the phone. Since then, I've gotten none. I've checked that they're not elsewhere on the phone, but nothing turns up. Any ideas?

...

More follow-up: I restarted the phone, then changed the playlist folder in the sync settings. I got 14/19 in the new folder. Changed it back, synced again, 14/19. Not exactly the same 14, either.

[Mayibongwe]

I'd be interested in seeing a screenshot of the preview window.
For existing playlists, what does it show under the "action" column?

Under the sync settings, you wouldn't happen to have the 3rd option from the top enabled, right? (the "delete files that are not...")
Are these autoPlaylists by the way?

Still on the device settings, maybe a screenshot of the Music section and the 'playlist storage' too.

[psychoadept]

I'll see if I can get a screenshot later. It's a mix of static and auto, I can't tell that that makes any difference. It's set to delete files, and it does that correctly for audio files. It always claims to have synced all 19 playlists. Makes me wonder if the phone isn't communicating updates correctly.

The computer is Windows 11 and the phone is an S22 with Android 14, for what it's worth. All internal storage on the phone.

[psychoadept]

A sync preview shows 19 playlists that all say "Copy." They range in size from <2k to >38k.

Here's the settings:



I can't say exactly when this started, but I first noticed it at least a couple of months back.

[Mayibongwe]

Sorry, I can't say I have a clue what's going on. Best thing would be to isolate things a little bit:

- Fresh portable installation.
- A small sample of 5 tracks or so
- About 5 playlists maybe, each with a single song
- Then turning off the ...delete files... setting mentioned earlier
- then rerunning the sync on a playlist path outside the music files folder

[phred]

What happens if you change the path to the playlists from MusicBee\Playlists to MusicBee\Music\Playlists?

Personally I want my playlists (on my S22) to be in their own directory, but I've found that starting with Android 14 (or maybe 13) I had to have the playlists directory under the music directory. I didn't want to do it, but it cleared up all playlist syncing issues when I did.

[FeronStost]

This is similar to the issue I'm having.

[BoringName]

I'd say it's probably a device issue more than a Musicbee issue.

Maybe try a different USB cable and plug it into a USB 2.0 port instead of USB 3.0

[psychoadept]

I'd say it's probably a device issue more than a Musicbee issue.

Maybe try a different USB cable and plug it into a USB 2.0 port instead of USB 3.0

I don't have a choice between 2.0 and 3.0 but I do have a choice between A and C. I'll see if switching helps. If not, I'll try phred's suggestion.

[BoringName]

Personally I want my playlists (on my S22) to be in their own directory, but I've found that starting with Android 14 (or maybe 13) I had to have the playlists directory under the music directory. I didn't want to do it, but it cleared up all playlist syncing issues when I did.

Android 13 is when scoped storage was fully implemented and you couldn't add a flag in your app to ignore it anymore. The all files access permission gets around it but google is very strict on what apps it will allow on the play store with that permission. I don't think it has a good time when you mix different media types in the same folder which is why the version of the wifi sync app on the play store has issues with artwork that isn't embedded.

But all of that should only effect apps on the phone, it "shouldn't" interfere with wired file transfers. Once you set your phone up for file transfers your PC has full read/write to the external storage on the phone.

Maybe it has issues with folders created by the PC and not on the device. Scoped storage usually just allows apps access to folders\files created by the specific app so there could be some quirk with folders created by the PC.

[psychoadept]

Well, I tried changing USB type and got 13/19. Tried phred's sunfolder suggestion and got 17/19. 🤷🏽

I guess I will try a new installation and see if that makes any difference.

[basseken]

@Psychoadept what do you use to play the playlists on your phone? I use VLC for Android and have a similar problem:

I tried syncing playlists to my Samsung S10 and only half of them appeared complete on my phone (in VLC). For example: MusicBee has 200 songs in one of my PC playlists, my phone only showed 116.

After creating a new playlist and renaming it, but putting the same 200 songs in there, it synced more, but still not all. (131/200)
I repeated this test and it's still 131/200.

When I open the playlist on my PC with a text editor, it does show that all 200 paths to the files are there and are all the correct format.
When I view the playlist on my S10 as a file in VLC (so via the 'browse tab' in stead of 'playlists'), it says that there are 200 songs in there. (But I can't play it from there.)
Only when I look at the playlist on the 'playlists' tab, it says there are only 131 songs, and only shows that many when I press play.

I re-installed VLC on my phone, but it still has the same problem.

[psychoadept]

I use gone mad music player, but the issue isn't the player. I've been checking the actual folder in the file browser while testing. I haven't noticed any problems with the playlist contents, I just can't get all the playlists to sync at once for some reason.

[Steven]

are you saying that if you check with the android file explorer some of the playlists are not there? and if they really are all there and you edit the .m3u file, do the music file paths look ok?

[BoringName]

This probably isn't the issue but figured it's worth mentioning.

I found quite a few posts where file copying would just cut out with no errors. They were all related to the path length. From what I can find the max length for android is 255 bytes. Which makes the max character length somewhere between 127 and 255 depending on the encoding. Unicode characters are 2 bytes.

And don't use any of these in the path - |\\?*<\":>/'

edit: actually some utf-8 (default) characters can use 4 bytes so the range is actually 63 to 255. It would be a pretty funky file path to use all 4 byte characters though....