How to get Groove to read 200GB of music from sd card?

[John Hardy IV]

New Groove build is out in the store folks. Supposed to help our issues if I'm reading her first bullet point correctly.

An app update is headed to the Store for the Groove app on Windows 10 Mobile. This release (version 3.6.1719.0) includes the following:

We made a significant improvement to the way we find your local music and sync your cloud music collection that makes this process much faster. This will cause a one-time rebuild of your collection when you first launch the app after this update.
•We also simplified our logic for hiding duplicates so managing your collection is easier. We’ll no longer match local MP3s to similar ones in OneDrive or your Music Pass collection.
•To make it more clear where your music is coming from, songs are now labeled as OneDrive, Purchased, Music Pass, or Local Only. We show you these in Select Mode (long-press, then Select) to catch you when you need them most.
•We also added the ability for you to see the full set of details on any track with long-press, then Properties.
•We brought back autosuggest when searching in the app and the ability to see everything you’ve searched for since you launched the app.
•We heard your feedback about the ability to see album art in Now Playing so we added a toggle in Now Playing to allow you to choose either album art or artist art.
•We added the ability to sort albums by release year.
•We made playlist editing easier - you can now select multiple items in a playlist and drag them to another spot in the playlist.
•We added better scaling so that images look better on larger devices.
•We added the explicit tag to the list of songs in Now Playing so that it’s easier to see when a song in your queue isn’t playable because it’s explicit.
•We also updated a few things so that the app works better on Continuum: ◦Playback will continue even if the screen locks when using Continuum.
◦We've continued to improve layouts of Groove at high resolution (ex: Explore Galleries & Search Results)

•We fixed a number of reliability issues – including the one that temporarily required us to disable ‘sticky pivots’. With this release we will once again remember what you were doing last and bring you back to the right place the next time you launch Groove.

 

[John Hardy IV]

Unfortunately this didn't work out well for me. I updated to the new Groove, it found my 23,000 songs on the 128GB SD and 400 on my internal storage of my Lumia 950XL going 100 at a time instead of 10 at a time. Once it finished I closed Groove and connected phone to PC and dragged an Amazon 99 cent classical album with 189 songs into the SD card. Started Groove back up and it never found the new songs on the SD, nor did it find new music I synced from WMP via autoplaylist to the internal storage after that.

Back to the drawing board. I'm on production builds though, maybe the new firmware would help in conjunction w/ the new Groove build.

 

[pcwilliams]

i have a 64Gb SD card, and after updating to the newest version of groove, i added 4 new albums to my SD card by dragging them from my PC. As soon as a i launched groove, it found the new albums and added them. So i was pleasantly surprised. it seems like something was done to somewhat fix this gap, but ultimately, i would like to see a way for the user to initiate a scan.

BTW i am on 10586.71

 

[EricJennings]

?We made playlist editing easier - you can now select multiple items in a playlist and drag them to another spot in the playlist.

Anyone managed to do this? I can select multiple tracks in my playlist but can't get them to become moveable

 

[John Hardy IV]

And hope springs eternal, we'll see what happens when mobile gets the current PC build pushed out today. From its change log:

Updates for Windows 10 Version 1511
February 9, 2016 — KB3135173 (brings system to 10586.104)

This update includes quality improvements and security fixes. No new operating system features are being introduced this month. Key changes in this update include:
...
•Fixed issue that delayed the availability of songs added to the Groove Music app in Windows 10 Mobile.

 

[Brian Stobbe]

Just checked this discussion again the other day and was surprised to see there's actually progress of any kind. I confirmed my Groove on the phone is at version 3.6.1719.0. I decided I would let Groove start over with my library so I selected all the songs in its library and deleted them. As soon as that completed it started Adding music again. OK, that seems new, lets go with it... the song count is indeed incrementing 100 songs at a time now instead of 10 although I don't think its actually processing them any faster. In other words the count just updates 10 times as slow now. I don't have exact time comparisons on this though, just my observation. The progress still stops when your lock screen comes up though so its still a PITA to keep in going. I started it yesterday and have been keeping it on here and there when I can but I do have a life so I'm only a third of the way through my library. Hopefully it makes it all the way through the entire sd Card before mysteriously stopping like it has in the past.

 

[Brian Stobbe]

No dice still. Got to about 25,000 songs, then the count seemed to reset, counted up to about 350, and then seemed to change to a completion sort of message like "350 songs added". All my music did not get indexed. I tried deleting a song to see if that would trigger the indexing proccess again but it did not. So same problem as before... how to get the indexing to complete. Need a way to restart that process.

 

[Josh Harman]

I don't know, last Groove update forced a re-sync of my collection (about 120 GB) and everything went fine.

I updated the app, opened the app, plugged in and layed my phone down.

The next morning my entire collection was synced.

 

[Josh Harman]

... I decided I would let Groove start over with my library so I selected all the songs in its library and deleted them...

You may run into issues doing it like this. I found in the Xbox Music days of Windows Phone 8/8.1 that trying to fix the collection in multiple ways only led to a cluster duck.

Only getting it right the first time really worked for me. It just flat out works for me on Windows 10, so I can't really offer you a magic bullet. All I can say is have your metadata correct and your files are organized.

The way I do it...

1. Make sure your collection is complete and correct in Groove on your PC.

2. Format your SD card in the phone.

3. Start fresh on your phone so current Groove libraries don't interfere. This would mean resetting your phone since you've already began syncing your collection, probably multiple times.

4. After formatting your SD card in the phone, remove it and connect it to you PC. Drag & drop you music files onto the card in the premade Music folder.

4. After you've reset your phone, let everything load up - back ups, apps, settings, etc.

5. Only after the phone has stabilized, insert your SD card. Go to your storage setting and make sure they are how you want them in regards to your SD card.

6. If you have photos, movies/videos or any other files on your card, open those respective apps first and allow them to load because I would assume they'd be much smaller collections.

7. After that finishes and stabilizes, open Groove and let it do it's thing, plugged in and overnight.


Just my suggestion. It's how it works for me.

 

[Brian Stobbe]

I will try this start fresh technique not because you've listed anything different than what I've done in the past but because I agree the best bet of getting things working for each new release of Groove is to start clean rather than hope a new version can un-mangle what a previous flawed version has mangled and Groove has updated on the phone since last i started fresh. So are you claiming your Groove continues adding songs even after the lock screen comes on? That seems to not be anyone else's experience. Also, your method dictates not using Phone companion app to load up your SD card but rather a card reader and regular old file explorer. I've tried both ways personally and for reasons already mentioned earlier in this thread I find the latter to be a more promising approach.

 

[Josh Harman]

I will try this start fresh technique not because you've listed anything different than what I've done in the past but because I agree the best bet of getting things working for each new release of Groove is to start clean rather than hope a new version can un-mangle what a previous flawed version has mangled and Groove has updated on the phone since last i started fresh. So are you claiming your Groove continues adding songs even after the lock screen comes on? That seems to not be anyone else's experience. Also, your method dictates not using Phone companion app to load up your SD card but rather a card reader and regular old file explorer. I've tried both ways personally and for reasons already mentioned earlier in this thread I find the latter to be a more promising approach.

Yeah, I let it sit over night, plugged in - I open the app and just let it do whatever. I remember in an old update to Xbox Music they made it so that it would sync\re-sync your collection "while plugged in and not in use", I don't know if this still how it's supposed to work but it works for me.
I've never tried Phone Companion, maybe it's better, I used the old Windows Phone App on Windows 8 that was a disaster... but yeah I just used drag & drop with Explorer.

 

[hotphil]

This thread makes depressing reading. I can't believe that after what seems like many, many years and several name changes that MS can't get the basic music playing app to actually be useful.
I was considering giving a 950 a spin, but I won't if these kind of issues remain.

 

[Josh Harman]

This thread makes depressing reading. I can't believe that after what seems like many, many years and several name changes that MS can't get the basic music playing app to actually be useful.
I was considering giving a 950 a spin, but I won't if these kind of issues remain.

Read the whole thread, it's not a problem for everyone. Works fine for me.

I've fought with Xbox Music since it's inception and it sucked even worse for a while after it started over for Windows 10, but Groove works great now... for me anyway.

 

[Brian Stobbe]

This thread makes depressing reading. I can't believe that after what seems like many, many years and several name changes that MS can't get the basic music playing app to actually be useful.
I was considering giving a 950 a spin, but I won't if these kind of issues remain.

I'll drop a little knowledge here for anyone getting discouraged with Windows phones... For the casual music listener Groove most likely will seem like a great app. It's only the audiophile like myself who pushes the technical limits which is going to find showstoppers. I'm not trying to sound badass or belittle anyone, that's just the way it is. Also I'd be remiss not too add that the best music player out there for the Windows phone is a little app called Plex. You can stream music from your desktop or sync it to the phone. Unfortunately the latter also has its flaws with large music collections. Only for this reason am I even messing around with Groove. For anyone somewhat tech savvy who just wants to stream music do yourself a favor and just look into Plex. I know a lot of non Microsoft apps try and get attention in these forums but most of them are just not developed by more than one person which means, well, they're subpar. I don't know Which app will better address large music collections first, Groove or Plex, but you can be sure whichever one does first will be the one I use and evangelize to others.

 

[v535]

Is Mixradio available on w10m? If OP has Itunes, he/she can convert mp3 into eaac++/HE-AAC v1 with 32kbps quality and sample quality 44.1kHz, also check high efficiency.

 

[hotphil]

Yeah, Plex is OK feature wise. But for quality, i'm not going to beat my Fiio x5 - no matter how good an app is, it won't beat proper hardware.

 

[Brian Stobbe]

Is Mixradio available on w10m? If OP has Itunes, he/she can convert mp3 into eaac++/HE-AAC v1 with 32kbps quality and sample quality 44.1kHz, also check high efficiency.

Thanks but not interested in converting 45,000 mp3s to another format.

 

[Brian Stobbe]

Yeah, Plex is OK feature wise. But for quality, i'm not going to beat my Fiio x5 - no matter how good an app is, it won't beat proper hardware.

Sorry, I'm only an audiophile in the sense of quantity, not quality. I have a Zune if I wanted to carry around an entire additional device solely dedicated to playing music. When you compare the size of a 200GB sdcard and an 80GB Zune that hardly seems logical.

 

[Seisteve]

This has been frustrating me for some time with 20K tracks on a 128Gig Sd card on my Microsoft 950XL, I followed the suggestions through this thread with the addition of charging the phone and playing music.... it has sync 750 songs in about an hour and is climbing steadily.

I agree thought that I do not want to do this every time I change the SD content.


ALSO does anyone know where playlists are stored on the phone/card. I cannot find the playlists displayed.

 

[anon(5383410)]

This has been frustrating me for some time with 20K tracks on a 128Gig Sd card on my Microsoft 950XL, I followed the suggestions through this thread with the addition of charging the phone and playing music.... it has sync 750 songs in about an hour and is climbing steadily.

I agree thought that I do not want to do this every time I change the SD content.


ALSO does anyone know where playlists are stored on the phone/card. I cannot find the playlists displayed.

From my experience the playlists seem to be the last thing it indexes, like VERY last. I have the same issue as everyone else in that it only indexes while the app is open and I think it's just as ridiculous and unacceptable as everyone else.