Database Info

o2 xda Orbit II.....AAC Files

Please could someone help or explain.I purchased the orbit II last week,I am still getting used to its power and capabilities.
In the manual it says it can play AAC files.I have downloaded some onto the storage card and the touch flo player hasnt recognised them, nor has the windows media player.
It recognises and plays MP3 files.The aac files are not protected they are ones that I downloaded myself from my own cds.
Also why can I not see photos that I have just taken that are saved to my storage card,in the photo viewer on Touch flo.
Thank you in advance for any help,
Peter

pocketmusic can play aac

Thansk for that,but I was looking to find out what the situation was with the phone rather than get a programme that will do something that the manufacturers are saying the phone should do.
I have noticed that the windows media player does add the tunes to its catalogue but files them under ARTIST "UNKNOWN" (as though the tags arent working).The touch flo or HTC player however doesnt even do this.
Does anybody know of a solution to this other than spending money on a progamme to do something that the phone should do already,
many thanks
Peter15965

It's really wierd. I have the same problem and also had this problem with my previous phone which was an O2 XDA Orbit 1 (i.e. rebranded HTC Artemis).
I'm afraid that I never found a solution that didn't involve third party software. I think the problem is that, although HTC have included the decoder to play AAC and AAC+ files, neither of the built in players seem to be able to read the tags from the m4a container format so, although they can play the contents, they can't incorporate the tracks in a meaningful way into the library (I also saw Windows Media Player putting everything as unknown).
I know it's not what you were hoping to hear, and I'd love for someone to prove me wrong, but right now I think you're stuck with going the third-party route.
If you don't want to spend money then I initially used TCPMP. It doesn't have any library browser built in but I found that by intelligent choice of the directory tree structure I used to store my files (My Music/<Artist>/<Album>/<Tracks>) then I could use the file browser in TCPMP to browse my collection in a fairly convenient manner. I now use Conduits PocketPlayer because that has a fantastic library browser and reads the m4a tags perfectly; the program is pretty resource hungry but for now I'm keeping the faith in the hope that they'll address that at some point in the future (their support is good).
- Julian

Thanks Julian at least I know its a common problem(does 2 handsets constitute common).
I will look into pocketplayer as a solution for the timebeing.I was hoping I wouldnt have to put other apps on that would slow the phone down.
Thanks again
Peter15965

peter15965 said:
Thanks Julian at least I know its a common problem(does 2 handsets constitute common).
I will look into pocketplayer as a solution for the timebeing.I was hoping I wouldnt have to put other apps on that would slow the phone down.
Thanks again
Peter15965
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You're welcome.
In most cases putting other apps on shouldn't slow down the phone. The reason apps can slow down the phone (and/or drain battery) can be because they have a Today plugin which, if not well written or if it needs to keep accessing the network, can slow things down. If an app does have a Today plugin (as PocketPlayer does) then you can often disable it (as you can for PocketPlayer).
The other reason for third party apps to slow down the phone is because Windows Mobile default behaviour when you click the top-right "x" button is to minimise the app (i.e. leave it running in the background) rather than close it down completely. Again, in this case an app that does anything significant when it is running in the background can slow down the phone. Clearly a music player needs to keep running while it is playing music but, once finished, you can make sure it is out of memory completely by selecting Exit from the application's menu.
In short, if you're careful to fully close apps when you don't need them, then you shouldn't slow down your phone at all (except so far as having a music player running in the background, whether built in or third party, will always put a drain on the CPU and make other apps run more slowly while the music is playing).
- Julian

Oops. One big thing I forgot to mention. If you do look at PocketPlayer then don't download the latest version (3.51) from their web site. There is a nasty problem in that build specifically related to playing AAC files on HTC devices that I reported to them and has been fixed in an internal beta for 3.52 which, as the reporter of the bug, I have been given to test. You should email [email protected] and say that you want to use it for AAC on an HTC device and hopefully they (Carrie) will let you try out a beta build with the issue fixed.
The issue by the way is that 3.51 doesn't correctly detect end-of-stream when an AAC track has finished so (a) it doesn't auto-advance to the next track in the playlist because it thinks the current track hasn't finished yet and (b) even worse, if you forget to explicitly turn off your device after you've finished listening then PocketPlayer thinks it is still playing your last track and so the device will not put itself into standby and can drain the battery. The issue is fixed in the latest beta build and as an added bonus it also parses m4a tags natively (in 3.51 you could tag your collection by using an option in PocketPlayer to infer the tags from the filenames used in your folder structure but it now reads the real tags in the latest beta).
There is also one other more obscure problem I'm trying to help them diagnose related to AAC on HTC devices but I've been a bit busy recently so am due to give them some feedback and check status on that today or tomorrow. This may or may not be fixed at this stage, I can probably give more feedback in a couple of days so personally I would hold off until I give you an update. If you definitely want to go ahead with a beta build then I can give you a workaround that works most of the time.
- Julian

Thanks again Julian, a fantastic answer by all accounts.I will hold off until you get an answer back about the problems you mention.
Thanks again for a most comprehensive answer.How will we know when the fix is through?
Peter15965

peter15965 said:
Thanks again Julian, a fantastic answer by all accounts.I will hold off until you get an answer back about the problems you mention.
Thanks again for a most comprehensive answer.How will we know when the fix is through?
Peter15965
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I emailed them this afternoon and got the answer. They've fixed the problem and I'm about to install a new beta to check it's OK. Apparently it was a Windows Mobile bug that they've managed to work around. I'll play with this new update pretty extensively tomorrow so you should get an answer from me in about 24 hours.
- Julian

peter15965 said:
I have downloaded some onto the storage card and the touch flo player hasnt recognised them, nor has the windows media player.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I found out some interesting thing: Some files are playing correctly but others refuse to work. I think that has to do with the bitrate of the files. All my m4a-files are bought from Apple Music Store. Most times my files are the unprotected ones with higher bitrate, but I have a few files which were protected (unfortunately I must have lost the copy protection somewhere, I'm really sorry for that ). The protected ones were encoded in a lower bitrate. What I found out is, that all my former protected files are played correctly. So maybe Windows Media Player can only handle files up to certain bitrate which obviously should be lower than 256kbps.
Further test: I created a playlist within windows mobile, but the Audio Manager (Touch Flo) wasn't able to read it. I managed that the playlist was recognized by the program, but it couldn't find any files.
So it is possible to play aac files (up to a certain bitrate) and to create playlists in Windows Media Player without any issues (yet). But I couldn't get it working in TouchFlo.
So, ok, I made half the way. Now it's up to you to make it fully functional.

have the same issue, I see the AAC file in the explorer and can play them from there but they are not loaded in the catalogue. anybody any other idea how to make the visible there? is buying pocket player the only solution?
thanks for the help in advance to everybody

JulianL said:
I emailed them this afternoon and got the answer. They've fixed the problem and I'm about to install a new beta to check it's OK. Apparently it was a Windows Mobile bug that they've managed to work around. I'll play with this new update pretty extensively tomorrow so you should get an answer from me in about 24 hours.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The news isn't as positive as I'd hoped. The latest build has improved the problem (so at least they've identified it and found the right area to make changes) but it hasn't fixed it completely.
The player is still usable with AAC files but there is one glitch. After it's been playing for a while, say about 2 hours, then something seems to get corrupted in the image or via a bug in Windows Mobile itself such that thumbnails of the artwork for the album covers no longer display properly when browsing your music library. With the previous build the device would lock up at this point and require a soft reset so at least they've fixed that problem but there is still some sort of issue unresolved.
The workaround seems to be to just fully exit PocketPlayer every couple of hours and then re-launch it again so it's not too arduous and shouldn't prevent you playing with the trial version (although this partially-fixed beta isn't publicly available so you will need to contact support to see if they'll give it to you and given that it still has a known issue they might just ask you to wait a bit).
I'm obviously still working with them to try and 100% nail this issue.
- Julian

Solutions for music?

Hi Guys
Now that the voodoo sound kernels are out i would love to use nexus as my main music player but i simply cant fit my libary on.. all my music is 15gb. Ive seen some apps like subsonic but u need to leave your computer on all the time..
Are there any better solutions like shrinking the music or something like that? Really bugging me

Moved to Q&A

Guitarfreak26 said:
Hi Guys
Now that the voodoo sound kernels are out i would love to use nexus as my main music player but i simply cant fit my libary on.. all my music is 15gb. Ive seen some apps like subsonic but u need to leave your computer on all the time..
Are there any better solutions like shrinking the music or something like that? Really bugging me
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I've mentioned this before, and I'd hope it'd be launching today but it did not: Google Music, as it is currently known, will search your computer for music and then give you access to the music you already own to be streamed to another device while also allowing you to buy more music.

Yeah i heard about that It really sucks though, spotify is ok but they dont have everything i want lol

Guitarfreak26 said:
Yeah i heard about that It really sucks though, spotify is ok but they dont have everything i want lol
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I understand the issue...I have 65 gigs of music which I've trimmed down to 32gigs for my iPod and now I would rather use the most convenient solution of my phone but I don't know how I can cut it down that much.

How did you cut down to 32? Just didnt transfer all of it?

Guitarfreak26 said:
How did you cut down to 32? Just didnt transfer all of it?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
...pretty much? Its an iPod. You can fill it with however much you want you just have to turn off autofill.

I do love the nexus s but for the life of me wish it had a card slot.. lol..

Guitarfreak26 said:
I do love the nexus s but for the life of me wish it had a card slot.. lol..
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Ya...I'm starting to understand the complaint =/

Two of the best options that I have tested that are available now are Audiogalaxy and Subsonic.
Audio galaxy is extremely simple to setup and is a pure streaming option as it does not cache the songs to your device. It has an option to stream the music in high quality or in lower quality if you are in a non 3g/wifi area. Also, its 100% free.
Subsonic is more difficult to setup because you have to enable port forwarding on your router. Some people do no like to open up ports on their router because of the potential security risk. Subsonic not only streams the music to your device but it also cache's to your internal storage which comes in handy if your signal drops. Another feature is via a web page you can download any song in your library, my brother downloaded have of my library from his pc at his house. The web service is free but after an initial 30 day trial the android app costs, cant remember how much atm.
Overall I prefer audiogalaxy for its simplicity and ease of use.

Do you find it heavy on your data usage?

The main issue I have with audiogalaxy and subsonic is that you need to have your computer (source) constantly on or else you wont be able to stream it to your phone.
mspot is a good choice to put your music directly onto its servers so you can play it from the cloud. however it only offers 2gb free and if you want 10gb+ of online storage you have to pay per month.
I have decided to go with grooveshark and rdio for my music streaming. at least i get an endless selection of songs and I can download the songs and albums Im interested in listening to at that point in time.

Bronk93 said:
Two of the best options that I have tested that are available now are Audiogalaxy and Subsonic.
Audio galaxy is extremely simple to setup and is a pure streaming option as it does not cache the songs to your device. It has an option to stream the music in high quality or in lower quality if you are in a non 3g/wifi area. Also, its 100% free.
Subsonic is more difficult to setup because you have to enable port forwarding on your router. Some people do no like to open up ports on their router because of the potential security risk. Subsonic not only streams the music to your device but it also cache's to your internal storage which comes in handy if your signal drops. Another feature is via a web page you can download any song in your library, my brother downloaded have of my library from his pc at his house. The web service is free but after an initial 30 day trial the android app costs, cant remember how much atm.
Overall I prefer audiogalaxy for its simplicity and ease of use.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
There is an easy setup guide for subsonic. Just search subsonic here and it should show up. I'd prefer subsonic over audiogalaxy simply because it supports folder structures. I don't use playlists much because all of my music are organized via folders.
Guitarfreak26 said:
Do you find it heavy on your data usage?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Subsonic only uses data if the music isn't cached on your phone already. So if you find yourself listening to different music every single day, then it might use a lot of data. Otherwise, if the music is already saved in your storage, it will just play it from there rather than streaming it again. You can also set up the storage size you want it to take up on your internal storage. I set mine up at 500 MB.
Also, subsonic is supporting videos. Not all formats yet since they are still working on it, but they are supporting one video format (forgot what it was).

[Q] Music Sync

Hello there,
After my 16 Gb SD card decided that after I removed my phone from the PC in USB Hard Drive mode to become corrupted in some way, I decided that I'd check out HTC Sync to see what I could do to make sure that I kept my collection of photos as up to dat as possible.
Picture synchronisation is great. Works fine and takes mere seconds to hook up.
My problem comes down to music... and it's probably because I'm an awkward so-and-so.
I use FLAC for all of my music, with the exception of any iTunes and Amazon MP3 music I buy. It might be bulkier on the capacity requirements but I prefer it over MP3. HTC Sync won't sync up .flac files it seems and it would mean switching to MP3 or finding another way of doing this.
Anyone got any suggestions on how to sync flac files? The best I can think of is renaming .flac to .mp3. AFAIK, it should not change the file content or quality and should play normally through an app (PowerAMP in my case)

I use a very handy app called Syncness. It automatically copies all new files (regardless of format) in nominated folders to a specified spot on my pc each time it sees my home wifi ssid, or when I manually hit the 'sync now' button within the app.
It's a bit tricky to set up at first, but the developer is without doubt the best I've encountered on android marketplace and responds to questions extremely quickly.
Sent from my HTC Desire S using XDA Premium App

Thanks for the tip!
App costs and is 4 stars, but a lot of negative reviews lately. It does not inspire me.

Elcs said:
Thanks for the tip!
App costs and is 4 stars, but a lot of negative reviews lately. It does not inspire me.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hey. WinAMP can manage and sync your music library to Android device (even without WinAMP mobile app) and you can use default music player.
Sent from my HTC Desire S using Tapatalk

Syncness seems to work flawlessly on Wifi. I've only run a test sync so far but I'm confident that it will work just as I need it to.

[Q] MP3 Files do not show up on music players - CM10 9/23

Hi Guys,
My phones media players no not show any MP3 files stored on my memory card or internal memory. I have them in the music folder. I have tried wiping cache, flasing the ROM. also tried deleting the .nomedia files that i could find. so far the music players i have tried are
winamp,doubletwist and Apollo
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks!

I had this problem once upon a time. I use Poweramp and that played mp3's, only bad thing is you have a trial period then have to buy it. What ROM are you running? When I got to JB for some reason most music players couldn't read mp3's. I could use a file explorer and open it up, but it would tell me the file type is not compatible, or something like that.
Sent from my SGH-I997 using xda app-developers app

yeah.. pretty much the same story for me.. file explorer can open it up with winamp sometimes... havent tried poweramp yet... im currently on CM 10 (JB) with the 9/23 build.

okay so i did a factory reset, wipe cache, wipe davlik cache and reinstalled the latest CM 10 version (thanks for that scott ) but still the same problem... i cant seem to figure out how to fix this. :S

Again, if you haven't tried poweramp I would suggest trying the trial version to see if it solves your problem. I just opened up the Apollo music player and it didn't list half my songs. Some of these music players just are not compatible with .MP3 files.
Sent from my SGH-I997 using xda app-developers app

mrhaddan said:
Again, if you haven't tried poweramp I would suggest trying the trial version to see if it solves your problem. I just opened up the Apollo music player and it didn't list half my songs. Some of these music players just are not compatible with .MP3 files.
Sent from my SGH-I997 using xda app-developers app
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thanks for the TIP... I actually did try poweramp. since it is folder based it plays the songs without any issues. My problem is that all the other players (winamp,apollo, etc..) used to play all my songs till just a few days ago... that's why im trying to figure out where it went wrong. and just FYI i tried other folder based players and they all seem to play the songs.
I believe its something to do with the media scanning on android.

If you're on Jellybean and use Camera360, the C360 files in your DCIM folder don't play well with JB media scanner. Delete or move them to your computer. You can't change the file name and get rid of C360, you have to just put up with your photos being gone...
Sent from my SGH-I997 using xda premium

could be media scanner derpage, are you having lag or battery life issues?

Plagued Will said:
If you're on Jellybean and use Camera360, the C360 files in your DCIM folder don't play well with JB media scanner. Delete or move them to your computer. You can't change the file name and get rid of C360, you have to just put up with your photos being gone...
Sent from my SGH-I997 using xda premium
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I didnt have C360 installed. but i do have the photos from an older version that i had saved on my memory card. I will check it out. Thanks
Dani897 said:
could be media scanner derpage, are you having lag or battery life issues?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
mmhh... i dont have any noticeable lag. Actually since the latest cm10 release its been pretty darn smooth.. But im getting around 10 to 12 hours of battery with moderate use. on 2G only and wifi enabled. Im not so sure on how that is comparatively

tjalendran said:
I didnt have C360 installed. but i do have the photos from an older version that i had saved on my memory card. I will check it out. Thanks
mmhh... i dont have any noticeable lag. Actually since the latest cm10 release its been pretty darn smooth.. But im getting around 10 to 12 hours of battery with moderate use. on 2G only and wifi enabled. Im not so sure on how that is comparatively
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
battery life can be all over the place depending on the cell signal and the modem, but that's less than i get with 3g and hspa on, it's not necessarily less than others get. if you get a logcat and see media scanner throwing errors it can be the battery life issue (assuming there is one) and the missing files issues. you might have broken files or if you have a ton of files the scanner might just be locking up when the phone sleeps. if mediascaller is throwing errors on a logcat try a fresh flash and set the phone to stay awake while charging, put the phone on a charger and walk away till the media scanner finishes. (a half hour should be more than enough) but if you have broken files you might have to do some cleaning.

mediascanner issue? my music is invisible

So I installed jelly bean when it came out. (Codename Android 3.6.0 at the time of writing, but the problem persists regardless of the specific rom I'm using). I noticed that none of the music players available in the play store can find my music on my sd card. They are all in a folder named mp3, but I even tried renaming it to music - no luck. Also, the only pictures I can see in my gallery are the ones that have been made since the installation of the current rom. Does anyone have an idea how to force the mediascanner to actually scan my media? Damn, I want my media so bad

lowert said:
So I installed jelly bean when it came out. (Codename Android 3.6.0 at the time of writing, but the problem persists regardless of the specific rom I'm using). I noticed that none of the music players available in the play store can find my music on my sd card. They are all in a folder named mp3, but I tried renaming it to music - no luck. Also, the only pictures I can see in my gallery are the ones that have been made since the installation of the current rom. Does anyone have an idea how to force the mediascanner to actually scan my media? Damn, I want my media so bad
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have no idea why your music isn't being picked up. That's usually never an issue. Maybe someone else can chime in.
As for the gallery pictures not showing up. Just download Quick Pic from the Play Store. The default Android Gallery has been crying to be put of out of its misery for awhile now. It's terrible and slow. Yes, you can transfer pictures to your device and the gallery will take 5 minutes to eventually display them. Quick Pic is superior and will instantly pick up any pictures you add. No waiting involved.

styckx said:
I have no idea why your music isn't being picked up. That's usually never an issue. Maybe someone else can chime in.
As for the gallery pictures not showing up. Just download Quick Pic from the Play Store. The default Android Gallery has been crying to be put of out of its misery for awhile now. It's terrible and slow. Yes, you can transfer pictures to your device and the gallery will take 5 minutes to eventually display them. Quick Pic is superior and will instantly pick up any pictures you add. No waiting involved.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for the tip, QuickPic actually solved my gallery issue, what still remains is the music list not showing up in any of the players I have tried... (Winamp, Google Play Music, Apollo, just to name a few)

check if one of the apps in use is the media scanner in a constant state of reboot.
media scanner problems often are caused by malformed jpeg file, the bug usually lies in the Exif information, you can use this tool (http://www.digitalconfidence.com/BatchPurifier.html) to remove Exif information from the file, 95% chance that everything returns to work including music and video because the media scanner is shared and if it hangs on jpeg images then can not catalog other multimedia files.
you will lose data such GPS position but the photo itself will remain intact, many have pointed at Camera360 as one of the sources of these corrupted files and I can confirm that.

I got a similar issue before and is solved by copy all media to a pc, delete the files in the phone, then move them back, see if it can help you
Sent from my Nexus S using xda app-developers app

That's an old issue that happened to some when they updated to JB back in July. So, welcome to July.

lostman.it said:
check if one of the apps in use is the media scanner in a constant state of reboot.
media scanner problems often are caused by malformed jpeg file, the bug usually lies in the Exif information, you can use this tool (http://www.digitalconfidence.com/BatchPurifier.html) to remove Exif information from the file, 95% chance that everything returns to work including music and video because the media scanner is shared and if it hangs on jpeg images then can not catalog other multimedia files.
you will lose data such GPS position but the photo itself will remain intact, many have pointed at Camera360 as one of the sources of these corrupted files and I can confirm that.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thank you for the suggestion, it helped me!
@madd0g you had better stay off the forums, you are completely useless...

If it's not fixed completely, run a search on your sdcard for files named ".nomedia" and delete them.

polobunny said:
If it's not fixed completely, run a search on your sdcard for files named ".nomedia" and delete them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
actually, I do use .nomedia files for... hiding my stuff you know

lowert said:
actually, I do use .nomedia files for... hiding my stuff you know
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Alrighty. Just make sure there are none at the root of the SDcard or in folders where you want pictures to appear. Clockworkmod ROM Manager had a bug back a lil while ago where it put some .nomedia files in wrong folders, making people unable to find their music/picture.

polobunny said:
If it's not fixed completely, run a search on your sdcard for files named ".nomedia" and delete them.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This tip helped me and my Note. Thanks a lot. There were a lot of useless .nomedia files in my SD card.

I already had similar question posted. Got no resolution....
http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=1882847

Anybody have the solution? I am able to see pictures in gallery and videos on my MX player but no music?
I deleted nomedia (found one) and got rid of rom manager but still my music files don't show up with all the players. I can go directly to media/music via root explorer and play it though.

Go to your apps, find Media Storage, and then clear data & cache.
Download Rescan Media from the play store and run it. Wait for a bit (5 minutes should be good) and if you check in your music player(s) you should be able to see your music.

database or cache that the media scan builds is gone
polobunny said:
Go to your apps, find Media Storage, and then clear data & cache.
Download Rescan Media from the play store and run it. Wait for a bit (5 minutes should be good) and if you check in your music player(s) you should be able to see your music.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I have done that and everything works fine. BUT! after a battery change or charge (plug in USB cable) the database or cache that the media scan builds is gone. Deleted or corrupted by something. Its back to the same state, no music, video, added ringtones or pics show until a rescan. What could be deleting it?