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MukiEX

Newbie
Mar 23, 2010
11
0
Okay, I know 5000 songs is a lot. It's not as much as the song count for anyone I know, but it's a lot nonetheless. However, it's still less than an iPod from 5 years ago could handle, so why is it too much for the Droid?

Every time I try "syncing" my library (read: Copying over the music folder, because the Droid doesn't have a syncing app and DoubleTwist is outright broken in its sync method) I end up missing like half of it. Usually it takes me a smidgen of time to realize an album is missing, but immediately afterwards I notice a LOT of albums are missing.

I try re-naming the artist name folder, and the Droid them makes some attempt to locate the new music. First it gives me the spinning "loading" icon in the upper-right of my albums list view, and then it "resets" the view to the main four icons (Artists, Albums, Songs, Playlists). However, it still doesn't load the new material. I'm assuming at this point that the Droid has an outright song limit that hovers around 3,000. Either that or the "compilations" folder is killing its library search function.

Anyone know if this got fixed in 2.1? At least then I'd have something to look forward to. An alternate music player with cover art support would be fine, too. I don't mind paying extra if it's well-made.

Randomly stopping mid-track on HE-AAC files is also incredibly annoying.
 
At 32 kilobits, the whole collection falls in at around 7.5 gigs, far short of the 16 in the Droid's default men card. All the files are there; it's just that the Droid refuses to add any more of them to its library. I wish I could at least see a song count so I could figure out if there's a verifyable limit.
 
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Several years ago, I discovered that the length of the filenames for jpg files that I was loading onto a memory card was limiting the number of files I could load. When I changed the length of the filenames from 6-8 characters to 3, it greatly increased the number of files I could load. Apparently this was a limitation of the file system used on the memory card, and since it was a standard sd or cf card (I don't remember at this point) you may be running into the same problem here, of course assuming that you haven't simply exceeded the storage capacity on the Droid's stock msd card.

EDIT: I did a little checking. The msd card uses the FAT32 file system. A FAT32 directory can have 65,536 directory entries. Each file and subdirectory takes from two to thirteen entries, depending on the length of its name, so those entries can disappear long before you think you've used them all up.
 
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But wouldn't that stop me from copying the songs in the first place? The songs make it fine. I can open all of them from Windows. And the Droid even tries to detect them (I get the loading cycle in the upper-right if a change the name of one of the folders). However, after attempting to load, nothing changes.

Keep in mind, nothing's wrong with the songs. If I delete everything else in that folder, the Droid will recognize the remaining songs it couldn't see before. It's just that overally, there's some sort of limit the Droid hits where it can no longer detect any more songs.

In addition, in case it comes up, the sudden abrupt stopping of music playback has nothing to do with accidentally hitting a button or a corrupt file. Not only is the Droid already locked when this happens (I hit the lock/power button), but it can happen in different spots on the same file.

However, the Droid's library database might have a size limit. I'm going to try to shrink down song filenames in hopes that it'll fix this (only the Droid's copy, the originals will be fine)

After a test: Okay, after essentially rebuilding the file structure (every song is "disc number - track number.m4a", so something like "01 - 05.m4a"), the music program started re-adding everything to the library from scratch.

As the program loaded the songs one folder at a time, nearly everything was there. Then, as soon as it finished, every song by an artist before "Konami" (I bought a single DDR soundtrack a few years ago) in the artist list suddenly vanished (with the sole exception of "The Black Eyed Peas", which show up before K but, filename-wise, are technically after it). The albums were there before, and I was, in fact, playing a song John Powell from The Bourne Supremacy soundtrack. Suddenly the song got cut off and I was presented an album view without that album.

Something is horribly wrong with the Android's music program. My kingdom for a log to find out exactly what's wrong with it. However, its generic name makes it impossible to look stuff up for it.
 
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... seems to download just about any album art ...

Getting another music app probably wouldn't help much (if GOOGLE can't make an app that handles all this music, just who will?), and I assure you, my collection won't show up in any auto-searching program.

A lot (a LOT) of my music comes from games 'n anime. As such, a LOT of it has Japanese characters in the Album/Artist/Song titles. I'm guessing at this point that this has more to do with songs not showing up than anything else.

I tried Tune Wiki and it seemed even worse than Google's app. Is there a support site for Google I can visit or someone I can e-mail? I didn't realize for a while that this is essentially a user-run site. I don't mean to lash out at any one of you if it sounded that way. =(
 
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You'd be surprised. Maybe I have crappy ears, maybe the music in my preferred genres is just easily compressible (read: simple, crappy) but HE-AAC sounds AMAZING. (tho in all honesty it's probably just that I relegate HE-AAC songs to headphones. They're actually stored/archived in Apple Lossless, and batch-converted in iTunes explicitly for my Droid)

Keep in mind that if you wanna test this (AND you have Apple Lossless music already from CD sources), make 100% sure that iTunes keeps the 44khz sample rate at 32kbit. 32 is the lowest bitrate it will keep the sample rate at, and even then you have to make sure, as it tends to auto-drop to 22.
 
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You'd be surprised. Maybe I have crappy ears, maybe the music in my preferred genres is just easily compressible (read: simple, crappy) but HE-AAC sounds AMAZING. (tho in all honesty it's probably just that I relegate HE-AAC songs to headphones. They're actually stored/archived in Apple Lossless, and batch-converted in iTunes explicitly for my Droid)

Keep in mind that if you wanna test this (AND you have Apple Lossless music already from CD sources), make 100% sure that iTunes keeps the 44khz sample rate at 32kbit. 32 is the lowest bitrate it will keep the sample rate at, and even then you have to make sure, as it tends to auto-drop to 22.

Why don't you spend $10 a month and subscribe to Rhapsody? They have just about everything you'd ever want to hear, and you can create play lists of precisely what you want to hear and you can listen to entire CDs of music (streamed, of course). This takes up NO storage on your SD card, and most everything is streamed at CD quality. You can't do any better than that.
 
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Like I said, my music tastes mean that's unlikely.

They'll probably have all the alternative, dance, and movie soundtrack albums in my collection. That amounts to about a dozen albums out of 300. The rest comes from Squaresoft, Nintendo, or a variety of anime soundtracks. Not the best taste in music, I know, but it also means that the grand majority of my collection probably doesn't fall under Rhapsody's library.

And then again, that's $120 a year to listen to (profanity replacement: music) I already own? To save space on a memory card whose contents are my 5 gig collection and 9 gigs of free space? In all honesty, from my perspective, that's a horrible use of that money.

I might just pounce on Pandora's premium service ($36 a year), if only because they've done a solid job of leaving me with new music to look for. Now if only they'd understand that my "dance" radio station doesn't need any songs without lyrics >_<

Giving it a reasonably thorough look, it seems that the info I'd be looking for is probably in the phone's internal memory.
 
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