Database Info

Media Player Library?

Hi everyone, I'm not sure if this is the best forum to post this, but here goes.
I use Windows media Player on my WM6 phone, well Duttys 6.1 actually, but i don't think that will change anything.
I know its not generally the preferred player, but I like it. Anyway, my question, is there a way to tell it to ONLY scan a specific folder to add media to the library, or does it have to always scan then entire memory card.
The thing is, I use my TyTN II as my portable MP3 player, so I have alot of music stored on my memory card, but I also have newsbreak download all my pod casts to my memory card too, and media player adds these podcasts to the library too.
So is there a way I can tell it to just scan my Music folder so these other audio files don't get mixed in with my music library.
Thanks to anyone who can help.
ps. if your solution is 'use a different player' please don't bother.
thanks...

Has nobody any idea's.
Even a 'No, give it up' would be better than nothing.

I will like to know too also a way to keep my radio streams easy to play

Bump, this is actually a good one. It's such a hassle when you add one or two songs or videos and then have to tell WMP to update and watch it re-read and re-add 500 files. I have a 4GB micro and that can take awhile!

Please, somebody, anybody.....

Make playlists that is what I do. I have oodles of audio books on my memory card and to avoid them get scrambled in when I shuffle I just load a playlist.
As for the using a 2nd media player I do that also when I don't want to load navigate to find the playlist and change settings from shuffle to consecutive playback. I just use HTC Home with HTC Audio manager for in a hurry playback of music. Hope this helps.
Edit: Just wanted to add I decided to play with WMP a little more after posting and fund that If you use the ID3v1/ID3v2 tags and sort that way it is really useful too. But to simplify a solution again I recommend a playlist. You can create and edit you playlists right on the phone. If your tags are accurate you can make a proper playlist in no time.

Playlists are the things I really wanted to avoid, I add and remove songs and albums pretty much everyday and having to recreate the playlist everytime seems silly.
Thanks for the contribution though.

Best Audio Player?

Is anyone working on a S2P type audio player for Android? One reason that I regret going to Android is the lack of any good audio players. Using Nemoplayer and it is alright...but I want my S2P!
Until then, can anyone recommend an audio player that DOES NOT scan then entire SD card for audio files? As much as I like my 1 second audio clip for notifications, I don't want it to be included in my playlist.
S2P was ideal because all music needed to be in the /music directory. Thanks ahead of time!

You can put an empty file named .nomedia (the dot is important!) in the directories you don't want scanned.

You have just made my day! Thanks very much.

Well, that fixed my audio player issue, but now that essentially is preventing android from seeing my ringtones. So now I can either have my ringtones or an audio player that will not play my ringtones. Any way of having both?

My ringtones don't show up in the Music application, are you doing something differently?

Try Mortplayer. You can even find info about it in this forum. It doesn't use the Android media database. It scans only the folder and subfolders you designate.

guags99, mortplayer is exactly what I am talking about. Thanks for the information!

For all those who prefer other players, try to put a file named .nomedia in the directories you don't like to have scanned for Android's media library.
MortPlayer doesn't handle that file since I think it's enough to point it to the correct main folder, so you could even use .nomedia to omit audio books from your favorite tag based media player and play them with MortPlayer Audio Books.
(Of course I hope many like MortPlayer, but of course folder based navigation isn't for everybody. And I didn't like to code the 5,000,000th iTunes clone...)
Edit: Oops, skipped an important post... I think ringtones in /media/audio/ringtones (resp. .../notifications or .../alarms for those) should be regarded even with .nomedia.

brummiesteven said:
My ringtones don't show up in the Music application, are you doing something differently?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Mine don't either. Maybe it's a difference between different versions of Android?

Careful
Hey guys - be careful with .nomedia - you can loose all your media files due to a silly bug in Android...
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=6782845&postcount=1

I quite like btunes. You can specify which folders for it to look into. Ive just got all my mp3s in my music folder.
Audiobooks ive got in another folder and use an audio book reader for them so btunes works pretty well for me. Also like the interface.

The key to keeping ring, notification,and alarm tones from showing up in the media player is to have them in the correct folders. And there is where the "why didn't I think of that" comes into play.
At the root of your sd card:
alarm tones go in the "alarms" folder
notification tones go in the "notifications" folder
ring tones go in the "ringtones" folder
Now your phone will be able to see the tones and use them properly, but they will not show up as media files in any media player unless you tell it to look for them (some players, such as Meridian for example, allow you to exclude folders in the application setting).

Android Delight has a great comparison between Cubed and DoubleTwist. (can't post links yet)
Those are my two favorite music apps. Cubed was my fav but for reasons in the article (syncing, ease, etc.) DoubleTwist is taking over.

I'm using btunes right now. You select the folder with your music manually. I used to use Meridian where you also selected the folders. I changed because of a bug after an update, but that might have been fixed now. I like them both becaus you can skip, fast forward by swyping (best on meridian)

one of the best audio player is deadbeef. simply to use, GUI is perfect, sound is clear.

Restrict Sense Music Player to play music from one folder?

All,
I've searched the forums and I've seen that people are asking how to exclude certain folders from the search path of the htc music engine. While this approach may work for some, it doesn't work for me, because I would have to know all the folders where music is stored to exclude them, and that can be a pain if you have several programs installed on your device.
What I've been trying to do is I've been trying to find out how to restrict or "force" the htc engine to search for music in one folder that I can configure and only in that folder. I save all my music to
\Stogare Card\Music\
But i have audio books in \Storage Card\My Documents\My Books\Audiobooks\
and when i go to the music tab, it tries to play my books (very annoying) and also, it plays the system sounds from the \Windows folder and any other sounds that it finds from the \Program Files\ folder, etc...
Does anyone have any idea how to tell the player to ONLY scan the \Storage Card\Music\ folder for music?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!

ZaidSenall said:
All,
I've searched the forums and I've seen that people are asking how to exclude certain folders from the search path of the htc music engine. While this approach may work for some, it doesn't work for me, because I would have to know all the folders where music is stored to exclude them, and that can be a pain if you have several programs installed on your device.
What I've been trying to do is I've been trying to find out how to restrict or "force" the htc engine to search for music in one folder that I can configure and only in that folder. I save all my music to
\Stogare Card\Music\
But i have audio books in \Storage Card\My Documents\My Books\Audiobooks\
and when i go to the music tab, it tries to play my books (very annoying) and also, it plays the system sounds from the \Windows folder and any other sounds that it finds from the \Program Files\ folder, etc...
Does anyone have any idea how to tell the player to ONLY scan the \Storage Card\Music\ folder for music?
Any help will be greatly appreciated.
Cheers!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Dunno about Sense Music Player (I stay away from HTC bloatware and only use third party or MS apps), but some decent 3rd party media players that allow for excluding dirs when building up their library. See the "Library scanning: ex/including folders?" row in the chart in my dedicated article at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=415063
btw, my article has a lot of other goodies you may find extremely useful

Menneisyys said:
Dunno about Sense Music Player (I stay away from HTC bloatware and only use third party or MS apps), but some decent 3rd party media players that allow for excluding dirs when building up their library. See the "Library scanning: ex/including folders?" row in the chart in my dedicated article at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=415063
btw, my article has a lot of other goodies you may find extremely useful
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've tried using third party players (TCPMP, Nitrogen, Mortplayer) but i can't control any of those with the forward/back buttons on the HD2 hands free, and when I lock the phone with the end key to put it in my pocket, the only player that keeps playing music is the Sense Music Player, all the others stop playing and i have to unlock the phone and hit play again.
Also, with Sense Music Player, I can be reading something on the internet, or using my GPS and I can still change songs without having to go to the music tab or switching applications by simply using the forward/back buttons on my hands free, so i prefer to skip the files i don't want to listen to (little annoyance) to having to switch applications or to not being able to lock the phone (big annoyance)
So in my opinion, the only thing that the Sense Music player is missing to be perfect is the ability to tell it which folders to scan for music, like Mortplayer does, for instance.
I use mortplayer for audiobooks, the ability to add bookmarks to mp3 audiobooks is great, no other player can do that as far as i know. (there is Overdrive Media Console, but you have to use THEIR audiobooks)
thanks for your reply, though... as i said, all help is appreciated.

ZaidSenall said:
I've tried using third party players (TCPMP, Nitrogen, Mortplayer) but i can't control any of those with the forward/back buttons on the HD2 hands free, and when I lock the phone with the end key to put it in my pocket, the only player that keeps playing music is the Sense Music Player, all the others stop playing and i have to unlock the phone and hit play again.
Also, with Sense Music Player, I can be reading something on the internet, or using my GPS and I can still change songs without having to go to the music tab or switching applications by simply using the forward/back buttons on my hands free, so i prefer to skip the files i don't want to listen to (little annoyance) to having to switch applications or to not being able to lock the phone (big annoyance)
So in my opinion, the only thing that the Sense Music player is missing to be perfect is the ability to tell it which folders to scan for music, like Mortplayer does, for instance.
I use mortplayer for audiobooks, the ability to add bookmarks to mp3 audiobooks is great, no other player can do that as far as i know. (there is Overdrive Media Console, but you have to use THEIR audiobooks)
thanks for your reply, though... as i said, all help is appreciated.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
btw, as far as button assignment problems are concerned, did you try third-party tools? see my dedicated article at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=337602

Create a file named .nomedia in the directory in which you don't want them to show up. This works on Android, not sure what OS you're using.
Edit: You're using sense. It will work. Worked for me anyways. I have "Better Keyboard" installed and it stores all sounds on SD Card so I created .nomedia and viola, it's all gone from my music player. File needs to be blank, just needs to be named .nomedia.
Another edit: I guess you're not android. I thought you were talking about Android Sense. I'm sorry, but I can't help on this matter. Very sorry. However, if you ever get Android, there's a trick for you.

will check this out and see what I can do with it.
Menneisyys said:
btw, as far as button assignment problems are concerned, did you try third-party tools? see my dedicated article at http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=337602
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Tried it, but windows doesn't let you create a file with only an extension and no file name... it would have been great if it had worked! There's got to be a registry setting somewhere! if only somebody knew it and shared it!
thank you for your help, though! I appreciate it!
r3s-rt said:
Create a file named .nomedia in the directory in which you don't want them to show up. This works on Android, not sure what OS you're using.
Edit: You're using sense. It will work. Worked for me anyways. I have "Better Keyboard" installed and it stores all sounds on SD Card so I created .nomedia and viola, it's all gone from my music player. File needs to be blank, just needs to be named .nomedia.
Another edit: I guess you're not android. I thought you were talking about Android Sense. I'm sorry, but I can't help on this matter. Very sorry. However, if you ever get Android, there's a trick for you.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse

One workaround i found is making a playlist with all the songs on the device and skip all other audio files, but this is annoying and takes a lot of time...

try using A_C S2P AND S2U2

S2P will only detect play/pause. It will not detect track forward/backwards.

iam also looking for this solution on my omnia 2 with sense 2.5, went to the registry with no luck

Another option is to hide all folders you don't want SENSE to scan. Read more here: http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?p=5504259

I have the same problem... I can't believe HTC didn't think about this issue!

In old version of windows mobile a dummy "ignore_my_docs" file use to do the trick.
Don't know if it is still effective in wm6 or if it works with the sense media player....

+1 i have the same question

The .nomedia works
This is what I did, I followed the advise of the .nomedia, but since windows does not allow a nameless file I created a "a.nomedia" and pasted into the folder I wanted to exclude.
Then with ES File Explorer in the phone I did a rename and removed the "a". It worked like a charm!! Now I can use HTC Sense Music and no third party.

.
Thread moved to Q&A due to it being a question. Would advise you to read forum rules and post in correct section.

The .nomedia worked however how do i remove it if I wanted to?
Hidden file?
Es file explore doesn't find it

Why is it so hard to find a decent music player?

It's things like this that makes me frustrated about Android. There is so much noise about hotspot, or tethering, or other geeky stuff that are pretty useless for regular users. But the music player, a standard feature for every phone nowadays, is really bad.
All I want is to transfer the damn songs with playlist and play on my phone!
Well, the stock player doesn't recognize playlist.
So I have to use other music apps.
I have tried doubleTwist. It doesn't recognize playlist created by its own desktop app. And also, you have to use its desktop app to sync music. And the syncing is not so good, lots of Artwork is missing.
I then turn to Cubed (superscript 3). It's cool. It reads my playlist. But it creates duplicated ones. In other words, every time you sync your music, it creates new playlist. I did a little research, it turns out it's the problem of the OS. If you copy your songs to external SD, the OS will scan them and then create duplicated list. Music players just read the list from the OS.
Another problem of Cubed is, if I manually copy music to SD card, all my artworks are gone.
I have tried other *free* music players on the market. None of them works perfectly. And I am so cheap that I don't want to pay for a feature that a smartphone should easily have.

mwxiao said:
It's things like this that makes me frustrated about Android. There is so much noise about hotspot, or tethering, or other geeky stuff that are pretty useless for regular users. But the music player, a standard feature for every phone nowadays, is really bad.
All I want is to transfer the damn songs with playlist and play on my phone!
Well, the stock player doesn't recognize playlist.
So I have to use other music apps.
I have tried doubleTwist. It doesn't recognize playlist created by its own desktop app. And also, you have to use its desktop app to sync music. And the syncing is not so good, lots of Artwork is missing.
I then turn to Cubed (superscript 3). It's cool. It reads my playlist. But it creates duplicated ones. In other words, every time you sync your music, it creates new playlist. I did a little research, it turns out it's the problem of the OS. If you copy your songs to external SD, the OS will scan them and then create duplicated list. Music players just read the list from the OS.
Another problem of Cubed is, if I manually copy music to SD card, all my artworks are gone.
I have tried other *free* music players on the market. None of them works perfectly. And I am so cheap that I don't want to pay for a feature that a smartphone should easily have.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are you coming from an iTunes? Many of the problems with artwork deal with the way the artwork is embedded. AAC files do tags poorly and I had to rerip all my files to MP3 and make sure that the artwork was embedded in the tags and not in a folder. I used MediaMonkey to sync my music to my phone. I don't use playlists - I just put about 2GB of music on and pick what i want. The stock music player works great for me in this regard.
The stock music player allows local playlists, but so far doesn't import them. I think it is a matter of discovering name and format.

alphadog00 said:
Are you coming from an iTunes? Many of the problems with artwork deal with the way the artwork is embedded. AAC files do tags poorly and I had to rerip all my files to MP3 and make sure that the artwork was embedded in the tags and not in a folder. I used MediaMonkey to sync my music to my phone. I don't use playlists - I just put about 2GB of music on and pick what i want. The stock music player works great for me in this regard.
The stock music player allows local playlists, but so far doesn't import them. I think it is a matter of discovering name and format.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for your reply. I have a relatively big library in iTunes so playlist is kinda of necessary for me. It really sucks that the stock music player can't do it.
I didn't know about the iTunes artworks problem. All my song files are .mp3. I thought artwork was embedded in the file.

I've had pretty good success using an app called "isynchr" available in the market. It's not free, though! But it allows you to take your playlists from iTunes, copy them (and the songs) over to your phone and play everything using the music player that came on the phone.

Try this:
hxxp://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=751429
It works great for me and along with the mp3tagger pro app that lets you edit the ID3 tags and download artwork, its been a huge timesaver for me.

I feel your pain; I've had trouble finding a music player I really liked too. As of now, I'm just using the stock Samsung Music Player.
...which actually isn't that bad. It works well enough and the 5.1 feature is awesome.

check doubletwist. very good GUI and has itunes compatibility but I have not used that personally

DoubleTwist is a good music player and can export your playlists from itunes. They syncing is a bit slow tho.

I really had a hard time with doubletwist, and it took forever to start up on the pc.
I would recommend 'Songbird' on the desktop. It's built on top of a Mozilla Firefox framework, has great plug-ins and extensions, and via MTP can sync playlists with M3Us to the captivate, and then mixzing as the player on the captivate.

noidd said:
Try this:
hxxp://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=751429
It works great for me and along with the mp3tagger pro app that lets you edit the ID3 tags and download artwork, its been a huge timesaver for me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks a lot. The Android music player is much better than the Samsung one. Though I have a few bugs for just 10 min of try. Well, it's actually not a big of a deal. Playlist works fine, album art works fine. And that's all I am asking for.

closeshave2 said:
I've had pretty good success using an app called "isynchr" available in the market. It's not free, though! But it allows you to take your playlists from iTunes, copy them (and the songs) over to your phone and play everything using the music player that came on the phone.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
+1 on this app, you can use the stock samsung player, and double twist recongizes the playlists as well. it was much easier and faster on my computer as well. syching around 6 gigs of music only took around 15 mintues as opposed to over 2 hours with double twist.

ANOTHER good and easy to use apps is called "itunes agent". All you have to do is plug in the phone as USB drive and use it to sync you songs. Check it out. I use it for my WinMo phone and it is probably one of the best tool for sync songs to my phne.

mwxiao said:
Thanks for your reply. I have a relatively big library in iTunes so playlist is kinda of necessary for me. It really sucks that the stock music player can't do it.
I didn't know about the iTunes artworks problem. All my song files are .mp3. I thought artwork was embedded in the file.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I had all my music in iTunes (many files were AAC - ripped that way before i knew better) and I learned the hardway that iTunes some funky things. I actually used MP3tag to fix the tags - lots of Android phones don't like the tags if some fields are empty - this has the effect of showing uknown artist and maybe empty album art. iTunes added some funky stuff to some of the tags, so once i got it all cleaned up and made sure the album artwork was embedded in the tags all was good.
As for playlists - you could try Samsung Kies - it does sync with the phone and allows you to make playlists. I have not tried it for syncing yet.

Music and Android?

I think this is the one area Apple beats Android, you connect your iPhone it syncs no hassle, On android its all a bit of a nightmare.
I've tried Double Twist but the damn thing is painfully slow to sync, can't edit duplicates and whatever else, it looks good but thats about it.
Winamp looked good on the surface, I made my playlist went to sync it took forever, then when I added more songs to a particular playlist and went to sync again rather than adding to the original playlist on the phone it created another playlist, so you actually have 2 playlist of the same playlist old and new.
So basically I need a way to sync and a player on the phone. I appreciate you can just dump all your tracks on the music folder but its impossible to organise 1000+ MP3's this way, so they would need organised prior to going onto the phone.
Any advice?

Nothing easier than put the mp3's in the media folder. Why do you think, syncing with ITunes is easier. I hate that software.
I'm organising my mp3 with mp3tag!

em.20 said:
Nothing easier than put the mp3's in the media folder. Why do you think, syncing with ITunes is easier. I hate that software.
I'm organising my mp3 with mp3tag!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Lol same here, mp3tag owns.

Winamp works fine for me; no duplicate playlists. Maybe give that another shot? I love winamp on the PC though, so my perception may be skewed a bit by fanboyism. You could try the Google Music Beta as well. I thought I wouldn't like it, but having my entire 200 GB music library streamable is pretty handy. Personally, I prefer to manually sort and tag my tracks on my PC.

Combo Winamp + mp3tag.
But i do'nt sync with winamp, putting mp3 on the folders is much faster...

i've been using google's music beta service to stream music to me laptop/phone. works great. only issue is the new music app has no controls in the notification center or lockscreen.

slugger09 said:
its impossible to organise 1000+ MP3's this way
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I don't understand. Your music app will automatically find your mp3's and categorize them for you. Just put your MP3's anywhere on your SD card and you're done.

Make music folder, drag and drop
I hated how ipods have to sync, like if I go to my friends house want want some songs then delete my songs then put all of his songs grrr iTunes...
Sent from my Nexus S 4G using XDA App

drag and drop to SD card. never used 3rd party... seems silly.

em.20 said:
Nothing easier than put the mp3's in the media folder. Why do you think, syncing with ITunes is easier. I hate that software.
I'm organising my mp3 with mp3tag!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Unfortunately and I can't speak about mp3tag, but dragging and dropping at least doesn't compress the audio file to save space at no reduction of quality. Itunes does this, and Itunes really isn't all that hard to use either.
Audio from Apple devices are better quality most times, but multimedia is one of Apple's strong parts.(Although also a lot of times you won't notice a difference) The original music app for Android is okay for just music, HTC's is okay, Miui is pretty nice, and the new music app from Google is pretty nice too. The audio support for Android is getting better.

I originally used doubletwist but it kept doubling, trippling, and even quadrupled the number of times a song was in my library. Finally went to ISYNCR &isyncrwifi. Works great, fast.
Sent from my SCH-I800 using XDA Premium App

rumblee1 said:
I originally used doubletwist but it kept doubling, trippling, and even quadrupled the number of times a song was in my library. Finally went to ISYNCR &isyncrwifi. Works great, fast.
Sent from my SCH-I800 using XDA Premium App
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
It did that to me as well and that's the problem with most of these syncing solutions, there is no common sense.
And as for putting all on 1 folder in the SD card, Now say I want song 3 from album A on a playlist followed by song 6 from Album E and so on there is no easy way of organizing this on the phone which is why I like it done on the PC, I have various genres of music, I don't want a hardcore trance song followed by country.
Google music doesn't work in the UK either

Great post and some really useful tips there. I love resource lists like this. Have social bookmarked it in the hope that others can also benefit.

thanks for the tips

I also do drag and drop, but yes apple is smoother in this area.

slugger09 said:
It did that to me as well and that's the problem with most of these syncing solutions, there is no common sense.
And as for putting all on 1 folder in the SD card, Now say I want song 3 from album A on a playlist followed by song 6 from Album E and so on there is no easy way of organizing this on the phone which is why I like it done on the PC, I have various genres of music, I don't want a hardcore trance song followed by country.
Google music doesn't work in the UK either
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
What you are describing here is what I do on "PowerAmp". I have folders (has option for folders or library), then if I want I use the built in "Que" to select songs from different folders. You can also edit tags in PowerAmp.

Wow. And here I thought I was the only one who uses mp3tag.

mp3tag , is a great

+ 1 mp3 tag
Sent from my GT-i9100 with MIUI 1.7.8 - xda premium app

Gorship said:
drag and drop to SD card. never used 3rd party... seems silly.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
i use meridian only to play mp3 for a single directory