Brand New 520: Severe Lag when Starting Music - Phone or SD Card Problem?

[misterpunn]

Hello,
I just bought a new 520 yesterday along with a Kingston 64gb class 10 micro sd card. I have a 920, so I bought the 520 for the sole purpose of playing music.

So far, I am very disappointed with its performance, as whenever I start to play music, the phone freezes for several minutes. The music will play immediately, but the phone itself freezes and then resumes after several minutes (literally, it played an entire song before the phone became responsive again.) I've noticed this only happens when I start playing music by clicking on a song (rather than an artist or album.) Whenever I start playing music from an artist pinned to the start screen or a downloaded Nokia Music playlist, etc... the phone has no lag and does not freeze. Additionally, if I already have music playing and I go back to the individual song selection screen, the issue happens all over again.

Do you think this is a phone problem or a micro sd card problem? I'm not sure if the phone or card is defective, or if that just "is what it is," given that it is a lower-end phone. I can't imagine this would just be the reality of the phone, given how many people are using this as a media player, and I haven't seen too many consistent complaints. I have 40gb of music loaded to the card. I have zero non-stock apps installed on the phone.

Any insights are much appreciated!

 

[ttsoldier]

Have you tried playing the music directly from the phone with the sd card out?

 

[misterpunn]

Thanks for the reply! I was planning on trying that when I got home from work.

I am guessing it'll play fine directly from the phone, but from a practical sense (I will never be using the phone without the card because of the size of my music collection,) I'm not sure if that will pinpoint the problem. Meaning, if it plays fine without the sd card, that doesn't necessarily mean the phone is still not defective; I still won't know if it's a lag from the phone reading the sd card, if the sd card is faulty, or if that is just how all 520s are.

 

[Jimmy Jangle]

What file type / sizes are you playing?

I did have some minor lag issues with wma lossless on a 4gb micro SD card, but haven't had it happen for a good while now....:eck:

 

[Smyrna5]

I have an old Sandisc 8G SD card from my previous phone, and my 521 always complains about it when I reboot, but I have the same issue as you. The music app takes a long time to start up. I will have to try it without the card and see if that solves it.

Update - I took out my card, and there is still quite a delay before I can get the music up and playing. I am not sure its faster not having to read the card, but it still took 30 secs from the time I started to app to get it to play. It wasn't freezing up, but I had to tap several buttons, as always. Part of the delay may be that the app has to establish a radio or WiFi connection to access the music server (lots of handshaking?). Once the app is up, it will start a new mix in about 10 secs without the card in and start playing automatically.

I put the card back in it took 35 seconds from app start to playing a Nokia mix. to get it to play. It did seem to freeze up momentarily (seconds only), but I am not sure there is enough difference in times with and without the card to draw a valid conclusion.

I am on Amber btw.

 

[xumit]

Try resetting or/and upgrading the phone to amber. Maybe its just a software issue? Music for 520 is definitely slow for operations, but it never freezes for several minutes for me.

 

[misterpunn]

Thanks to everyone for the replies.

I have mp3, wma, and a very few m4a files on the card.

Because I just bought the phone two days ago, it came with Amber pre-installed.

 

[n3on]

I have the 520 and 14gigs of music on an sdcard, there are a couple seconds of lag (3-4) when I go from the album list to the song list but that's all. Files are all 320kbps mp3.

It seems like there is a problem with the phone itself if there is that much of a delay even if songs are on the phone.

 

[misterpunn]

I went to the Microsoft Store today and they switched-out the phone, so now I have a new 520.

The lag is still there. The first few hours that I had the phone, it only froze for about 10 seconds, but now that I've fully charged the phone and tried it again, the phone freezes for a few minutes again.

I guess that's just how it goes, unfortunately.

 

[anon(5973126)]

which player do you use xbox music or nokia music? Think it has something to do with the player and format of music. I use the stock music player with the music from store. It seems to work fine, not too much lag.

 

[Smyrna5]

I am using Nokia Music version 3.11.25.0 when l get the excessive lag. XBox has almost no lag, unless I tap on the Nokia Music button on it. The fact that XBox doesn't have much lag for me (starts right up and plays songs from my card withing a few seconds) suggests that its probably not my card, since that is where I have my music stored. I think its definitely something to do with Nokia Music having to establish a connection with Nokia's servers to download the music.

 

[misterpunn]

Yeah, I've discovered that the problem isn't there when I go in through Nokia Music. However, since I primarily use this while driving, I need to use Xbox music (because of the swipe controls.)

 

[Smyrna5]

I think I figured this one out. I went into the Nokia Music settings and found that there is a location permission setting that is used to display local gigs near you. I turned that off, and now my Nokia Music no longer has the big lag. Apparently the location feature was searching for either my GPS data, or triangulating cell towers when I turned on Nokia Music. Since I am inside, this took some time. Just turn it off and you shouldn't have the huge lag anymore. There will still be some lag when connecting to streaming music, of course.

 

[misterpunn]

I got excited at first, but then realized that you were talking about Nokia Music.

Unfortunately, my phone (both the old one and the replacement I got yesterday) freezes-up on Xbox music...Nokia Music works perfectly fine with no lag. Thanks for the suggestion, though!

 

[Ron Ross]

Old thread but persistent problem. I think the OP had two problems that are difficult to work around at the moment. First he's using a Class 10 card and I believe anecdotally that Class 10 cards read more slowly than Class 4 cards. However all 64GB cards are Class 10.

Also he has a *lot* of files for the player to scan before it's ready. If you want to prove to yourself that the phone is not at fault, put the sd card in an adapter and read the directory in Windows Explorer. It will take just as long as the phone to load the metadata for all those files.

That said, the Windows Phone OS is at fault in my opinion. WP should cache the metadata between starts and only check for changes. This is another example of the OS not really being very well thought out from the user pov. And of course independent developers are relatively hobbled in creating apps that compete with the WP or Nokia native apps.

The slowness in loading a large music collection is one of my biggest disappointments with my 521. I tried cutting my 30GB song collection in half and loading it onto a 16GB card but the improvement was negligible so I went back to the original card. I'm sure songs would load faster from the EMMC but as we all know it's too small for any significant media collection. So I think this is just one of those things we'll have to hope MS gets around the fixing (via a cached database system).

BTW - per the above poster's suggestion regarding turning off location in Nokia Music, I have never turned it on and have the same "lag."