What the hell is wrong with Groove Music

[Lumious]

Now this, for me, is a very frustrating problem and I am 99% sure that I am doing nothing wrong here to cause this.

I have loaded a ton of music on to both my 950 and 650, I took several hours setting up playlists on just one device, I forget which. All of these songs are in MP3 format from my Surface Book which came from my onedrive folder on the pc stored LOCALLY. They are actual real mp3 files that are also stored on OneDrive. Everything seemed ok at first, now, sometime later it is saying for every playlist "some of these songs are hidden by your filter" Now when I show these files it has a little circular dot next to them indicated they are available online only as streaming songs. Now this makes NO sense since I manually put all of these files on both devices and it was fine just a few hours ago. I want them offline so A) I don't have to use my data to stream them B) so I don't have to worry about having an internet connection or service to be ABLE to stream them and C) because I don't want them skipping or pausing to buffer! This is ridiculous.

And what is even more messed up is my 650 is showing different amounts of files being available offline than my 950 XL which have the EXACT same files put on the device. For example my 650 says I have 2 songs for podcasts but my 950 says 4 songs when in actuality both devices have 6 songs stored locally for the playlist podcast..

And what is EVEN MORE messed up than that is it will randomly change every so often, a few hours, a few minutes whatever and say more songs are available offline than before. For example my playlist "Above & Beyond" says 17 songs at 8:30PM today then at 9:30PM 24 songs then at 10:00 19 songs, and I am not doing ANYTHING, wtf?? Not sure what is going on or how to fix this, if someone could give me some info that would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance.

 

[Bobvfr]

I think the clue is in the word "Tons", from my experience Groove doesn't seem to like thousands of songs being put on at once.

Groove is a database, but unlike a lot it has multiple sources, so local mp3's, OneDrive, stuff you have purchased, stuff you have added to your collection through a music pass and also it's own master collection of all the songs available on Groove and it checks all of this for maybe instances of multiple songs etc.

When you add songs (I tend to do albums rather than songs) in OneDrive or with the music pass to your account (More later) they are shown as streaming, but you can then download them so they are available locally, so no data is used.

You say the files were from OneDrive on your Surface book but only stored locally!!!!!!!.

Why would they be in OneDrive and only be stored local or do you mean you have them in the OneDrive folder and they are on OneDrive and are both local as you have synced OneDrive and stored in the cloud?

If so why copy the songs locally to the phones, would have been easier to just have them on OneDrive and then download them to each device using Groove.

I used to have a lot of albums local (That I originally had on a MP3 player), but since I have been a Groove user with a music pass (I still have the originals on a back up device) I have replaced most of those with music pass versions as it's easier, but my collection still has several albums that aren't available on Groove, so it's a mixture of OneDrive, Music pass and a couple of purchased albums, I have deleted a few recently so down to 500+ albums (About 7000 songs) and each device has the same amount of albums and songs. All of them then downloaded so available to listen to without a data connection.

So I get the impression (Based on this post and a couple of others about the same subject) that you have confused the database as it is searching for multiple songs on multiple places and then each device you have is trying to sync with the master database and getting more instances and then trying to sync again.

To me the whole point of OneDrive is to save you from all of this, you get your stuff sorted on OneDrive, then when you get a new device it all gets added to your collection and then you can choose to download them.

This is what I meant about your "Account" earlier. With cloud based computing and then doing local as well it would be a bit like trying to re-invent the wheel but not knowing that wheels have hubs to fix the spokes into.

In my opinion you would be better off using OneDrive, then syncing each device to that rather than also adding them locally, do one or the other but not both.

You can always check your collection by looking at Groove on the web and using this as your "Master" list, and maybe try to not dump "Tons" of stuff in one go, that way it's easy to work with.

This should show you your collection as seen from Groove online, but it wont show MP3's that are only local to a device if you haven't used OneDrive:

https://music.microsoft.com/collection?target=web


So I think the best thing you can do is:

1 Use OneDrive (But if you do, don't add confusion by copying local files as well).

2 Try not to dump thousands of songs in one go.

3 Give it time when you make changes as especially with slower devices like mobiles, all of this syncing can take some time and your phone will probably run hot as it's working it's way through.

 

[Bobvfr]

Sorry for a second post, but two examples of how to do it.

I just dug my retired 1520 out of the draw of honour and put it on as a test phone for Insiders, but being a pedant I still wanted it set up like my 950 XL with all it's songs etc.

So I opened Groove and within a few minutes it showed me the exact same collection as I have on all my devices, both my music pass, purchased and OneDrive music, I can then download them for local playing if I use the 1520 and don't have Wi-Fi.

Couple of weeks ago I bought my wife a 950 to replace her 830, her birthday isn't for a few weeks yet so I have been seting it up so it's ready to go once I put her SIM card in, so again opened Groove, let it settle for a minute or two until her collection was all showing, then downloaded all the albums so again all ready to go and be played locally, yet I haven't added any files directly to her phone, they of course are now stored locally because I downloaded them using Groove, but I haven't had to open file explorer and copy files.

Far easier to work with the system rather than try to fight it.

 

[Lumious]

I think the clue is in the word "Tons", from my experience Groove doesn't seem to like thousands of songs being put on at once.

Groove is a database, but unlike a lot it has multiple sources, so local mp3's, OneDrive, stuff you have purchased, stuff you have added to your collection through a music pass and also it's own master collection of all the songs available on Groove and it checks all of this for maybe instances of multiple songs etc.

When you add songs (I tend to do albums rather than songs) in OneDrive or with the music pass to your account (More later) they are shown as streaming, but you can then download them so they are available locally, so no data is used.

You say the files were from OneDrive on your Surface book but only stored locally!!!!!!!.

Why would they be in OneDrive and only be stored local or do you mean you have them in the OneDrive folder and they are on OneDrive and are both local as you have synced OneDrive and stored in the cloud?

If so why copy the songs locally to the phones, would have been easier to just have them on OneDrive and then download them to each device using Groove.

I used to have a lot of albums local (That I originally had on a MP3 player), but since I have been a Groove user with a music pass (I still have the originals on a back up device) I have replaced most of those with music pass versions as it's easier, but my collection still has several albums that aren't available on Groove, so it's a mixture of OneDrive, Music pass and a couple of purchased albums, I have deleted a few recently so down to 500+ albums (About 7000 songs) and each device has the same amount of albums and songs. All of them then downloaded so available to listen to without a data connection.

So I get the impression (Based on this post and a couple of others about the same subject) that you have confused the database as it is searching for multiple songs on multiple places and then each device you have is trying to sync with the master database and getting more instances and then trying to sync again.

To me the whole point of OneDrive is to save you from all of this, you get your stuff sorted on OneDrive, then when you get a new device it all gets added to your collection and then you can choose to download them.

This is what I meant about your "Account" earlier. With cloud based computing and then doing local as well it would be a bit like trying to re-invent the wheel but not knowing that wheels have hubs to fix the spokes into.

In my opinion you would be better off using OneDrive, then syncing each device to that rather than also adding them locally, do one or the other but not both.

You can always check your collection by looking at Groove on the web and using this as your "Master" list, and maybe try to not dump "Tons" of stuff in one go, that way it's easy to work with.

This should show you your collection as seen from Groove online, but it wont show MP3's that are only local to a device if you haven't used OneDrive:

https://music.microsoft.com/collection?target=web


So I think the best thing you can do is:

1 Use OneDrive (But if you do, don't add confusion by copying local files as well).

2 Try not to dump thousands of songs in one go.

3 Give it time when you make changes as especially with slower devices like mobiles, all of this syncing can take some time and your phone will probably run hot as it's working it's way through.

First, I appreciate you taking the time to read this and make this long post, thank you.

I did not read through the whole two posts yet but I wanted to stop right here when I read (in bold) what you wrote. I was trying to say that those songs are in my one drive folder and so they are stored locally to the machine and in the cloud. I really don't keep any of my files ONLY in the cloud. I use OneDrive as more of a sync engine than just cloud storage. Which I like because it keeps all my machines duplicated with the exact same files all the time.

And to answer the last bit of bold there...the reason is quite simple why I didn't just download them from my phone. I have over 10,000 MP3 files of various genres, they are all sorted very precisely in different folders by genre, artist, album, year, download source, singles, mixes, podcasts, etc. I wanted to take the songs I wanted which was easy to do by going into each folder on my PC (SBook) and loading them onto my phone. If I was searching for those songs on my phone from the 10,000 files (EVEN after organizing them AtoZ, artist, album, etc) it would be a task that would be painfully slow, it would probably take me 12 hours? 18 hours? to find all the songs I wanted on my phone and put them into playlists rather than easily finding songs that were already organized by folder, drop them in the phone, and then take the phone and make playlists. I hope that makes sense? If there is a better way or I sound crazy please let me know I am open to suggestions.

 

[Lumious]

Thank you for the long reply and taking the time to read my post, I will read through yours in a bit.