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Posts Tagged android

Clearing out deleted playlists in android

Jul 23

Posted by rory in everything else | 10 Comments

Since I got my HTC Hero I’ve gone through 3 software revisions and been relatively happy with it except for one frustrating problem. Playlists synced to the device and then delete from the SD Card are left on the systems internal MediaStore SQLite DB, which all music applications use. In plain english, this means that when I deleted playlists I didnt want anymore, they were still showing up. I tried several apps and posted on several forums asking for help, but no-one could give me a solution.

About 3 days ago I decided I’d had enough and was going to write an app to fix the problem. In a dramatic break from Rory tradition, I actually did write the app, and it actually does work!

PlaylistPurge is a simple android app which deletes any playlists from MediaStore which do not have an associated playlist file on the SD card. You can download the APK here, or the source here.

I hope it helps someone else with the same problem!

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Syncing Music to an Android device on Windows

Jul 10

Posted by rory in android, freeware | No Comments

I’m trying to sync music to hero. Big pain. I want this path ‘Music/AlbumArtist/Album’, so that I can accommodate soundtracks and compilations without fragmenting them by individual artist.
J River Media Jukebox – won’t accept AlbumArtist as a field in the customisable path, just ignores it or creates a folder called ‘[AlbumArtist]‘ – FAIL
DoubleTwist – won’t let me change the path the music is stored in at all – defaults to Music/Artist/Album – FAIL
Songbird – lets me set AlbumArtist in Path, but forgot I did it when I closed and re-opened program. Once I had synced the playlist once, my only option is to delete the playlist from the device, which doesn’t delete the music. Even after physically deleting MP3s on disk, songbird thinks they’re still there and will only re-sync the actual m3u file. SongBird also locks up for about 10 seconds every time I click on the handheld device – FAIL
iTunes – is proprietary spyware that installs all kinds of bullshit I’m not happy with, so I’m not touching it. – FAIL
In the end I decided songbird was closest, so I tried a little harder. Ejected the device, closed Songbird, reconnected device, re-opened songbird. Settings screen screwed itself up, took a while to show me my saved settings again. But in the end, it worked – synced the music to the device in the format Music/AlbumArtist/Album.

I’m trying to sync music to hero. Big pain. I want this path ‘Music/AlbumArtist/Album’, so that I can accommodate soundtracks and compilations without fragmenting them by individual artist.

J River Media Jukebox – won’t accept AlbumArtist as a field in the customisable path, just ignores it or creates a folder called ‘[AlbumArtist]‘ – FAIL

DoubleTwist - won’t let me change the path the music is stored in at all – defaults to Music/Artist/Album – FAIL

Songbird – lets me set AlbumArtist in Path, but forgot I did it when I closed and re-opened program. Once I had synced the playlist once, my only option is to delete the playlist from the device, which doesn’t delete the music. Even after physically deleting MP3s on disk, SongBird thinks they’re still there and will only re-sync the actual m3u file. SongBird also locks up for about 10 seconds every time I click on the handheld device – FAIL

In the end I decided SongBird was closest, so I tried a little harder. Ejected the device, closed Songbird, reconnected device, re-opened songbird. Settings screen screwed itself up, took a while to show me my saved settings again. But in the end, it worked – synced the music to the device in the format Music/AlbumArtist/Album.

All in all, it took about 40 minutes to sync one f**king album to the phone. I really wish the guys behind ImgBurn would take a crack at making music software, I bet there’d be none of this bullshit.

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