Music Storage on External Storage Card

[dizzydevil78]

I'm not sure if it's too many songs or just the layout of the files but I am unable to get the phone to mount to a PC most of the time. Windows claims there is a problem with the driver and it doesn't show up for browsing. I use the MTP searching a lot to get rid of duplicate songs (keeping the largest / best quality which doesn't show up in the music player. Reinstalling driver, restarting phone / pc doesn't help. I have a lot of albums that have 1 (or 2) songs that are any good and do a lot of deletions over time. Pulling the card out or deleting the music from the phone allows it to mount again without any problem. I'm looking for some ideas for it to handle all of them as my testing seems to be folder structure is the difference here; or maybe there is a MTP setting to allow larger sizes.

Lumia 920 - Never had the problem when full of music but the device is very slow when searching the standard folder paths (Artist>Album>Song) where it would take an insanely long time to search the whole device. Found out that less folders is better and put all the songs in one folder with no organization. Worked fine.

Lumia 830 / Lumia 521 / Lumia 635 - Tried same format but had a 64GB card so more songs were loaded. Nothing could see the phone anymore. Every device behaved the same when I placed the card in it. File managers on the phone had no problem browsing the card but the MTP driver wasn't working anywhere. I ended up taking the entire music collection and throwing them in folders by the song title. Same amount of songs worked fine. Eventually, got all 28 folders (# and no data folders too) to fit on the device and then the phone / card was stolen.

Lumia 635 - Got a 128GB card to just fit the entire collection as I had to start over in the deletion. Using the song title folders, I was able to copy the folders to the device through the MTP connection but the device hasn't been seen since I loaded it. My Gen 1 Surface Pro with Windows 10 still mounts it but 5 other machines running windows 10 or 7 can't see it and all report a 'problem with the driver'.

The music player seems to see it fine which makes me think it's something with the MTP. The collection is currently a bit over 16k songs with the largest folder containing over 1700 songs.

 

[pdaneophyte]

Did you format the card at your phone? Such large size card usually formatted with exFAT file system which might be slightly incompatible with the phone exFAT system.

 

[dizzydevil78]

Good question. I'm not sure of the file system but the card was formatted from within the phone. I'll verify it and try loading it again if it's still in exfat.

 

[dizzydevil78]

So the phone formats the card in exfat. I attempted to force format the card in fat32 using 3rd party utilities but they kept failing on me. A new idea came to mind of just creating folders with 1000 songs and made sure the xbox music app was empty of songs before reloading. I only have a couple folders on the device and am now getting errors saying I don't have a network connection or rights to play the file. Every song through the xbox music app is only playing 30s like it's in scan mode. MixRadio plays fine but is sooo slow.

Digging the hole even deeper........

 

[pdaneophyte]

Don't format in FAT. Exfat filesystem is used for large capacity memory card. So the problem is does your computer & card reader support exfat?

 

[dizzydevil78]

it does (surface pro) but I think the app to format in Fat32 didn't like Windows 10. I think this will work to make sure each folder only holds 1000 tracks each but it takes a long time to reload it.

 

[pdaneophyte]

1. Let the phone format the card.
2. Does your surface pro have the phone companion application installed yet? I don't know if it works in win 10.
3. Connect phone to computer via usb cable, on phone go to setting, USB. What does it says? Try to set phone as storage. On computer go to Devices and Printers, is the phone listed?
4. I am not familiar with what you mean by MTP. I always use the companion program.

 

[dizzydevil78]

MTP is the super slow protocol used by devices these days. Wiki has some info but I can't link.


The companion app was installed automatically with my 10 Upgrades I think but not used. I did open it once and thought it told me to use file explorer to copy music to the device which is what I've always done since 8.0; but I'll try it again. The device manager lists the device as a Lumia 635 or standard MTP device depending on the PC. If I remove the MTP device and rescan it shows up as the Lumia 635.

I don't have a USB storage option in my settings. It has notifiy whether to use the data cable (unchecked) and notify if slow charging (checked).
After reformatting the card again after trying to use Fat32, all windows 10 pc's are able to mount the device where it still throws errors on Windows 7. The folder structure is now 17 folders with a max of 1000 tracks on it.

The music player now throws errors on shuffle collection about the media rights, won't play or only plays 30s of each song. I just traded one problem for another. Oddly, my car stereo can play xbox music just fine and will continue to play the songs all day without the car as long as the car is the one that started the playlist. Directly launching the same music file plays fine. And they play fine in mixradio if you wait long enough to find them. Searching the internet for it makes me wonder if the ID3 tagging is bad. Most have been tagged via Zune or ITunes though. Maybe it'll correct itself as tracks are deleted. The Xbox music player is still missing around 6k tracks based on the playlist so maybe it's hitting something it doesn't like.

 

[dizzydevil78]

The companion app does say to use file explorer to move music. However, it shows I have 116GB under 'other' on the storage card when it's all music. Maybe that's related to my rights issue. Storage Sense on the phone reports the same thing.

 

[pdaneophyte]

Right, I'm sorry. What does the little text shows you when the phone is connected to the PC? The ones above the checkboxes?
Yes, do use the file explorer to move / copy your music to the phone. It's just plain old copy paste in windows explorer. Just delete the previous files before you do it.

 

[pdaneophyte]

PS try to find another music player which do not care so much about DMCA.

 

[dizzydevil78]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'checkboxes'. Could you post a screenshot of where you are referring?

I've tried other apps but the best one I've found so far is core music player. Unfortunately, it reboots when scanning the folder and has on multiple cards. Another clue that I may have invalid ID tags on something.

I think the older Windows Phone app for Windows 7 did music sync so I'm going to try and push everything through that instead of file explorer. It'll take days to get the stuff off, and then back on again but I will post the findings when it's done. It'll also let me load things slower to narrow thing down more.

Thanks again for your ideas.

 

[dizzydevil78]

I found the problem. All of the music was deleted by deleting the folder from within the files app provided by Microsoft. This doesn't trigger / notify the music app that something has changed and all the music was still present in the app. I found thousands of hidden files related to all the music Xbox music thought it had still running. The files are not removable via file explorer. I could delete them one at a time via the xbox music app. Trying select all + delete crashed the app. Trying to play these threw the errors I was recieving about media rights / can't find the file. I gave up and reset the whole device.

Prior to the files app, I used the file explorer to delete music or the sync app. These seem to be the safer route for music files.

 

[pdaneophyte]

Good going.