Music. Lots of music.

[BlueEchoes]

Calling music lovers that don't stream, but listen to their own music on SD card:

I have a 640. I have a fast 128gb micro SD card with 110gb of music. Roughly about 50000 songs +/-. All are metadata tagged perfectly with imbedded album art. I plugged MicroSD card into the old laptop and ran a Robocopy of all songs onto card. All my music (45k CDs and LPs) were burned to FLAC and I then I used a software to automatically create a copy at 96bit. They still sound great at the reduced size and allow me to put a boat load on a card.

Folder structure:

Genre folder/Artist Folder/Album Folder/song files.

I have tried Groove, Music player, Listen and VLC and each and every one of them locks up, never fully loads all songs or albums, etc... and if I do play, I can get about 10 songs played and then the phone locks up. I let Groove load songs for a day and it completed, but if I scroll down to say P in artists, it is missing bands (16 Porcupine Tree CD's and not one showing. Come on now!)

So, where is the limit on local music amounts? Should I eight-six the Genre Folder and Artist Folder and just heap into the Music folder? Why are all of these not seeing Metadata album art? There is a Folder.jpg in every album folder as well. What are the best practices for loading up a Windows Phone with music?

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Bigfireq]

I have a similarly sized collection, and while Groove can take an agonizing amount of time to load it (sometimes requiring several sessions, none of which I can manually trigger) I haven't run into the freezing problem, either loading the music or playing it. I use a combination of FLAC and MP3. Sadly, I had to convert all my lossless WMA into FLAC because Sonos doesn't support lossless WMA (??!!) and Groove is terrible at putting up tags for Flac.

 

[BlueEchoes]

I was hoping this was not going to be as agonizing as using iTunes (the worst software I have ever used and I am in I.T.), but so far, it has not been smooth. With the smaller file size, I would have thought that the Windows Phone would pick them right up.

I am going to try putting all folders into the root Music folder. I know Groove is not going to see the correct Genre for some reason (I have seen a few that are wrong already) but if I can get it from not crashing and actually play an 11th song, I would be okay with it calling Steven Wilson alternative avant-garde instead of Progressive Rock.

 

[Bigfireq]

I use MediaMonkey to copy over my files. The big advantage is that I can keep it in lossless on my PC, and instruct MediaMonkey to create reduced versions on the fly as it copies them over. I'm not sure what the folder structure it uses.

 

[Ma Rio]

There probably isn't a hard-coded limit, but do you really expect the app to work well on a mid-range device while pulling tones of data (50k songs) from an SDCard while using an unfinished app on an unfinished OS.

And come on, explain to me why would you need that much songs? I have like 300 songs, and I'm starting to delete them because I don't like them all anymore (while adding new ones, so I'll kinda float around 200ish). Also, I rarely have a chance to listen to more than 10 songs in a row, and more than 50 during the day. 300 songs is 25 hours of continuous play. 50k songs is nearly 200 days. It's your decision what you want to do, but if I were you, I'd fix it on my end.

And the last thing is, Groove (and most other apps actually) still sucks. Album art will never display correctly in portrait mode (works in Landscape though), and as you can see, it will start bugging out from time to time.

 

[BlueEchoes]

I listen to music 4-10 hours a day, 5 days a week depending on my projects at my place of business. Headphones most of the time. If an old 128gb iPod can run that amount of music, why not a much newer phone with a way better processor.

 

[920Walker]

I have about 15k songs on OneDrive, read-only mp3s with embedded artwork directly in the Music folder, no subfolders, synced to Groove. 22GB of those are also synced offline to my 920 via USB using the Windows Phone desktop app for W7 and W8.1, it works fine with W10. I'm not sure how it works with SD cards, don't have one in the 920. The option is there to sync all music between phone and PC, I use the option that allows selection of artists and albums. It's easier than managing files in Explorer. It looks at all music in your library. I manage that with MusicBee, 3 genres max for each song. Groove pulls the first and only the first genre tagged, which isn't great. All files in the library are stored in artist then album subfolders, no genre subfolders. Looking in File Explorer on the phone the folder structure is the same, automatically. No problems. After each W10M build and hard reset I first sync all music online by simply opening Groove, let it do it's thing, and then connect USB to PC to sync the reduced offline group, stuff I listen to the most. An SD card seems way easier, if it will work. Is your card a higher speed/class model? I get no duplicates and all cover artwork that I chose, wish I could say the same for artist photos. Not a fan of letting programs mess with metadata.

My 2013 Pioneer car stereo /video unit plays music fine after creating it's indexed database from a 128GB Usb drive, same lot as in OneDrive, and it is nothing compared to a fairly new phone and updated software. It's not as fast as searching, but all tags and art are flawless. Groove should be capable of the same, up to the max specified, if any, number of files.

I do have problems sometimes streaming Groove, but it may be WiFi related. Random pausing, buffering, then works ok. Rarely stream though, unless using music discovery apps. Only used MixRadio with WP8,1 for offline and discovery.

 

[John Hardy IV]

Hi there, I have a Lumia 950XL w/ Sandisk Ultra 128GB SDXC. ~33K songs (VBR *.wmas) on the SD, 1/7 of my local collection. Well tagged, at least 600px embedded album art.

Windows Mobile 10 1058.29, Groove Music 3.6.1577.

I found that after a hard reset, Groove will interrogate my collection on the SD card and add it all, this took some time. I am able to play them and see them. However, I've now found the system does not recognize when new music is added to the internal storage or the external SD card (though the files are there, added via file explorer or sync through WMP12). There is no way to kick off it's interrogation and see the 'adding music to device' (or similar) message. Which is very frustrating.

When I brought them over (initially a combo of file explorer copying and then an autoplaylist based on genre from WMP), the system creates and likes an 'artist / album / songs' folder structure.

MSFT should really have done some better load/limit testing on this.

 

[BlueEchoes]

Thanks for the info John. I am still struggling with this. I actually brought my old iPhone with me today so I can listen to music. Didn't think it would be such a fight to get music to show up on a Windows Phone, but I guess I am not the only one struggling with users with large collections. My hate for iTunes is strong, but if I am going to struggle like this just to get more than 500 or so songs to show up, then back I go. #ShuttersAtTheThought

 

[John Hardy IV]

They're basically taking the rest of the year off, so likely don't look for any updates until 2016.