Is This an Android, or Samsung Problem, or What?

[George Lea]

Hey Gang, riddle me this. I just downloaded about 110 mp3 files to my SD card phone after re-mixing them with Cakewalk/BLab and Audacity 3.2. The problem is ALL of them play fine when I play them on OneDrive. But ON MY PHONE ONLY, for a handful of RANDOM tunes some don't play AT ALL. They play fine on Audacity on my Desktop. Then, I loaded the VLC Android App, since it's probably the highest rated media app on the market, and tried to play some of those same files that WOULDN'T play on my usual app, Music Player. The same songs still wouldn't play.
I recorded every one of these songs the exact same way with Audacity 3.2 to my Desktop. I've never had this problem before. There's no rhyme or reason that I can think of, and I may not have an engineering degree, but I DO know a thing or 2, but I've never seen anything like this. ANY suggestions? BTW, I DO HAVE ALL PROPER LICENSES! But even if I didn't, that still wouldn't make sense because ALL of the other 1500 tunes I have on my SD card play just fine. It's ONLY SOME random tunes that I put on there yesterday.
All reactions:
11

 

[AugieTN]

Off the top of my head I would guess DRM might be causing the problem

 

[George Lea]

As in licensing? How do I fix it? Why would it rear it's head now, and not before?

 

[AugieTN]

As in licensing? How do I fix it? Why would it rear it's head now, and not before?

It's just my best guess. I could be 100% wrong. I have seen DRM cause some crazy problems even when you buy a song or video and try different players.

 

[Hadron]

If it's DRM it would appear on those files that had it and not others. Though a lot of major music stores stopped applying DRM years ago, so it would depend where you got it from (solutions would involve playing through something that can handle the DRM or removing DRM - the legality of the last depends on where you live, so I'm just saying that logically that's a solution, and neither advocating nor suggesting a method).

I can think of a couple of other possible causes. In all of this I'm assuming that this is an actual SD card, and not the part of the phone's internal storage that they call "/sdcard".

First: is it possible there was a problem when copying the files to the card? What happens if you take one of the tunes that won't play and copy it onto the card again? Does the new copy play? If it does then we can rule out DRM and conclude that there was a problem with the copying (but perhaps not exclude what's below, as that could be the cause of a bad copy).

Second: is the card faulty? If there's a problem developing with the card then that could corrupt files apparently randomly.

A nastier version of this is the "fake card" problem: people buy what they think is a high-capacity card but it's really a low-capacity card that's been hacked to tell the device it is larger than it is, relabelled and sold as something that it isn't. Since the phone or computer thinks it is bigger than it is it won't realise when it's full and will carry on copying data to it, resulting in files being corrupted. This doesn't quite fit as what usually happens is that the newest files are fine but older ones are corrupted, but "card works fine at first then suddenly starts corrupting files" is the normal sign of these things so I can't rule it out. If you bought the card from somewhere like eBay or AliExpress (dodgy sellers also pop-up on Amazon marketplace), and especially if it seemed inexpensive for a high capacity card, this is a real risk.

 

[George Lea]

Can YouTube impose DRM restrictions, even on a random basis? I've used Audacity and CWBL for YEARS, and never had this problem.

 

[Dannydet]

What file format are they?
Double check that your player can play them.
If they are mp3, they should play just fine

 

[George Lea]

If it's DRM it would appear on those files that had it and not others. Though a lot of major music stores stopped applying DRM years ago, so it would depend where you got it from (solutions would involve playing through something that can handle the DRM or removing DRM - the legality of the last depends on where you live, so I'm just saying that logically that's a solution, and neither advocating nor suggesting a method).

I can think of a couple of other possible causes. In all of this I'm assuming that this is an actual SD card, and not the part of the phone's internal storage that they call "/sdcard".

First: is it possible there was a problem when copying the files to the card? What happens if you take one of the tunes that won't play and copy it onto the card again? Does the new copy play? If it does then we can rule out DRM and conclude that there was a problem with the copying (but perhaps not exclude what's below, as that could be the cause of a bad copy).

Second: is the card faulty? If there's a problem developing with the card then that could corrupt files apparently randomly.

A nastier version of this is the "fake card" problem: people buy what they think is a high-capacity card but it's really a low-capacity card that's been hacked to tell the device it is larger than it is, relabelled and sold as something that it isn't. Since the phone or computer thinks it is bigger than it is it won't realise when it's full and will carry on copying data to it, resulting in files being corrupted. This doesn't quite fit as what usually happens is that the newest files are fine but older ones are corrupted, but "card works fine at first then suddenly starts corrupting files" is the normal sign of these things so I can't rule it out. If you bought the card from somewhere like eBay or AliExpress (dodgy sellers also pop-up on Amazon marketplace), and especially if it seemed inexpensive for a high capacity card, this is a real risk.

Thanks Hadron. IT IS a SEPARATE SD card that I purchased at Walmart. I tried your 1st solution, downloading the replacement from my OneDrive, which played fine before I downloaded it, but as soon as I tried to play it after downloading it wouldn't work. And as I mentioned, I downloaded the VLC media app, and it did the same thing.

 

[George Lea]

What file format are they?
Double check that your player can play them.
If they are mp3, they should play just fine

Thanks Dannydet. I originally recorded them in FLAC at 96k/24Bit. Remixed them at the same rate. Then, converted them to 48k/24Bit WAV, and finally, to MP3 320.

 

[Hadron]

Thanks Hadron. IT IS a SEPARATE SD card that I purchased at Walmart. I tried your 1st solution, downloading the replacement from my OneDrive, which played fine before I downloaded it, but as soon as I tried to play it after downloading it wouldn't work. And as I mentioned, I downloaded the VLC media app, and it did the same thing.

OK, purchased from a bricks and mortar store greatly reduces the risk of a fake card (doesn't completely eliminate, they sometimes get into supply chains, but a big, big reduction in probability).

So what app do you use when playing from OneDrive? Though if you recorded them and then remixed them I don't think it likely that the output of that somehow has DRM in it (in fact if you recorded them why would it have DRM in the first place?). But that leaves the question of what is going on unanswered.