Hi all,
Newbie Archos 70 250Gb owner here - back with Archos after a long period in the iPod wilderness
I'm generally pleased with the A70 but there's one thing which is a bit of a showstopper for me at the moment. I specifically bought the A70 with the big disk because I'm a music junkie - I have 150Gb or so of mp3s, and I add 3-4 albums per month.
I've copied all my music to the A70's hard disk (something like 22,000 songs), but the media scanner has only found a small fraction of them. I can sit and watch it run, and it gets to about 3200 files before quitting. This is repeatable - if I rerun "update multimedia library" it never gets beyond this point.
Anyone got any clues as to how I can track down the problem? I'm wondering if I have one dodgy mp3 which is causing it to fail perhaps? Without knowing which one it is, it's going to be tough to fix this - I can't manually remove each one of 22,000 files and keep retrying! Are there some system logs somewhere I can check?
I beginning to wonder if I'm going to have to roll my own media scanner - I'm an experienced Java programmer but very light on Android skills so it might take me a while.. so I'd rather not if I don't have to - I'm not even sure if I get that level of access to the system.
Keith.
According to several folks over at the ArchosFans forums, the media scanner has a problem with tracks that have a "#" symbol in the name. Since I cannot post links yet, go to forum dot archosfans dot com, and search for "media scan hash pound #" and that should take you to the right thread.
That said, a custom media scanner might not be such a bad thing; it seems to be a source of unhappiness for a number of folks.
Hi,
Same problem here, i found that doing a 'rebuild media database from scratch' option in repair&fornatting menu did eventually (after about 1day of scanning) found all my files.
Be sure to keep your archos awake during the scan, use for example the pictureframe app so the device stays awake.
Hope this helps
Sent from my A70H using Tapatalk
Thanks guys - that's two things to try, I'll let you know how I get on.
Status update: clearing out the media library and re-running the scan didn't work - it still fails, and this time leaves me with an empty library.
So, i rolled a very simple scanning app, which I can point at a single directory (i.e. a single artist). It imports some things fine, but guess what - when importing files with a "#" in them the media scanner apparently falls over - silently, unfortunately, nothing gets reported to my little app when it happens. The thread referenced above also mentions issues where the "artist" tag doesn't match the "album artist" tag - I'll keep an eye open for those too.
This is the built-in Android media scanning service that is failing, as far as I can tell - it's not clear to me if Archos modified it or not, but it's pretty shoddy not being able to handle a valid filename.
So, I'm going to keep going with my little app (maybe this thread needs to move to the dev forum?) but right now the best I can make it do is to not scan files with a hash in them, or perhaps rename the files on disk (but that would really screw up my synch mechanism, as I don't want to have to rename a whole bunch of stuff in iTunes which I also use..)
This is all disappointing - I was an early adopter of Archos stuff with a JB6000 and JBR20 (still got it somewhere!) back in the day and they've always been pretty decent at the music side of things - this is not what I would expect from them and makes it difficult for me to know what to do next as this is my primary use of the device...
EDIT: for info: the # problem only occurs with the filename, not the tags - so renaming the file appears to solve the problem while leaving the tags intact - I'll go down that route for a bit, see if I can fix things that way.
Keith.
20,000 song limit(!)
So it turns out that the scanning problem is all about hash symbols in filenames - once I removed all the hash symbols from file names the scan got all the way to the end, but hung on "Finishing scan" indefinitely. I realised I still had playlist files referencing the original filenames with hashes. Once I got rid of those, the scan completed just fine, but presented me with this:
Maximum multimedia library size reached: Only the first 20000 audio files have been indexed​
Well that's a bit of a showstopper isn't it. I'm struggling to understand why someone would ship what is basically an enhanced media player with 250Gb of space, and then restrict the media library so you can't make use of it all. Even my iPod Classic 160Gb can take more songs than that!
I'll take this over into the developers forum to see if there's any way around this limit - I'm assuming it won't be anything simple. Argh!
Keith.
Related
I asked this question on another forum (ArchosFans) but it was never solved or even remotely figured out. Anyways, I have a very large music collection (about 26,000 songs) and I bought the 250gb model of the Archos 70 so I could hold it all on the device. However, once it scans the media (which takes around an hour for that many songs) it mentions it can only index 20,000 items. Is this a limit by Android or Archos? Have any of the custom ROM/Kernels changed this limit, or is it possible by editing a system file with a rooted device?
There's also the problem that some bands don't even show up in the library but do in the storage, has this been solved in any way? Is it because of the ID3 tag type? Most of my tags are IDE3v2.3 (IDE3v1 IDE3v2.3) or something along those lines.
Thanks for your time and I hope this wasn't already asked/answered somewhere, I did a few searches but didn't find anything.
I have exactly the same problem with the 20,000 limit - I contacted Archos tech support about this yesterday (saturday) and they replied today (sunday - good service guys!) saying that they're working on a solution, so I'm hopeful that this limit will get removed, or at least extended - but I don't know how long it will take them to find, implement and ship a solution. It's also still not clear to me if this is a core Android issue, or something Archos did. I can well imagine that this is the first, or one of the first Android devices with enough storage to actually exceed 20,000 songs.
As far as files not appearing after scanning - I've found that files which have a different "artist" tag to the "album artist" tag seem to get indexed under artist "Various Artists" rather than either the artist or album artists tag - so perhaps some of your files are in there, and not where you're expecting them? Other than that, maybe they were amongst the 6000 songs that didn't get scanned, as clearly only 20000 of your 26000 will have been indexed.
Hey thanks a lot for sharing this info with me, if they are looking for a solution I'm assuming it's an Android limit, probably implemented before companies expressed interest in Android on tablets, and especially with that 250gb limit. I'm also assuming there's a possibility Archos didn't have over 20,000 songs to experiment with.
I ended up going through and removing a bunch of songs, and I think it put me somewhere around 19,000, but the device still indexed 24-25 thousand files, which is weird, I don't have any pictures or videos on the device, and I made sure to delete every folder.jpg file in the music collection. Any ideas which folders and file extensions it scans for?
I might toss Archos a quick email regarding the issue like you did. I'm not expecting a different reply, but I'm hoping they're the kind of company that will prioritize features/fixes that are more often reported since they know it's an issue more users are experiencing.
Thanks again for the reply, I'd appreciate any further information you find out if you for some reason remember this post.
Hey !
I've searched the web as well as the forum but i didn't find any solution and it seems i'm not the only one wanting to do that.
Is it possible to see hidden folders of internal sdcard through MTP ?
I really talk about hidden folder like ".android_secure", not the photos that aren't yet scanned by the media scanner service.
In my windows environment i already set the view all hidden files/folders as well as view system files.
If i have to change folders permissions through terminal what are the correct permissions i should put ?
Thanks for the help !!
Am i the only having that problem ?
Do you guys see the hidden folders through mtp connexion ?
If you'd bother reading a bit before asking questions, you might have the answer already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
MTP and PTP specifically overcome this issue by making the unit of managed storage a local file rather than an entire (possibly very large) unit of mass storage at the block level. In this way, MTP works like a transactional file system - either the entire file is written/read or nothing.
More or less, it is designed to keep hidden what should be hidden stick to USB storage or FTP/SCP.
PS: can't believe we're using a transfer protocol designed by Microsoft in a Linux-based system mastered by Google. The horror, the pain... no wonder it doesn't work on my Mac!
VAXXi said:
If you'd bother reading a bit before asking questions, you might have the answer already.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_Transfer_Protocol
MTP and PTP specifically overcome this issue by making the unit of managed storage a local file rather than an entire (possibly very large) unit of mass storage at the block level. In this way, MTP works like a transactional file system - either the entire file is written/read or nothing.
More or less, it is designed to keep hidden what should be hidden stick to USB storage or FTP/SCP.
PS: can't believe we're using a transfer protocol designed by Microsoft in a Linux-based system mastered by Google. The horror, the pain... no wonder it doesn't work on my Mac!
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Thx for the link ! I knew what mtp is but its always good to refresh things up
I read the whole article and unfortunately it doesn't answer my question.
I understood that its the same for all of us meaning that we are not able to see hidden folders.
But the main question is if there is a way to bypass this behavior ? Where is this defined exactly ?
It seems according to the article that its not on the file permission layer ? Should it be at partition level ? How can mtp know what to share with the host ?
It's not a "behaviour" per se, but more/less a database. Remember that media scanner program which wakes up every time you change something on your SD card, be it internal or external ? it simply keeps a "database" of files which are presented to the MTP client (your computer) and hides away the phone's internal folders which are not supposed to be seen by the end-user.
Theoretically, this is done in order to have the iPhone-like behaviour: seeing the entire device memory as one big unified storage which you can fill as you want (no more of those partition size limitations which brought us the app2sd hacks). In my opinion, it's more or less just a small step done in order to "secure" phones for DRM protected content.
Studios and media companies require devices to have such measures of protection in order to allow you to sell media content (like movies, books, etc) and since Google wants to push its business further with the Play Store, it needs to cave in to the studios' demands. In the future, it will probably even become illegal (DMCA-style) for me to give you the information below
Back to the technical part of our show now.
At the first boot in the life of the device, Media Scanner will look under /system/media and index everything there. After that, it will scan everything under /mnt/sdcard (hence your external SD card too, if you have one, as it's mounted under /mnt/sdcard/external_sd). On some devices, you have an "internal.db" file and one "external-123xyz.db" file; that's a unique ID of the SD card which was scanned. The idea here is you might have 2-3 SD cards which you swap often, and it's not nice to do a full rescan each time you change the SD card. These databases are in /dbdata/databases/com.android.providers.media (on my phone, there is only one "external.db" for example).
So what you're looking for is a way to populate this database with all the files found by the Media Scanner. But Media Scanner doesn't want you to see the hidden folders you mentioned above. So, you get an application which doesn't ignore them, like Rescan SD Card! or SDrescan.
Happy now ?
Thank you very much i really enjoyed reading the explanation as it answers completely my questions and it makes sense !
Ill give a try to the apps but i'm also curious to investigate on those files
Cheers
PS. Is this a disguised way to support non open source protocols ?
Well, you could poke around inside the database with sqlite if you want. But don't really see what's so interesting about them.
It is just another protocol which is supported, which happens to be designed by Microsoft (and probably licensed/paid by Google to be used in Android). I understand the technical explanation behind this decision, but I'm also wary that someday UMS will be disabled by default and enabling it will disable content purchasing for that device (just like having a rooted phone now disables some "sensitive" apps, like banking and online TV).
As a system admin its interesting to know whats happening on my system
As a hobby its interesting for my personal knowledge
And from a development point of view it gives me some ideas for maybe future apps
You say that its just another protocol which is supported but to my understanding there are not so many of them ! So i would say that Google was kind of forced to use the MTP method, first from a hardware point of view and second to be compliant with the rest of the world.
Is there any other protocol that could suite their needs ? Since USB mass storage is not usable on some devices and MTP is well spead.
.HiddenAndroid folders in Win - Here Yesterday, Gone Tomorrow
<Win 7 and GN2>
What's curious and a bit frustrating to me is that, yesterday, when I mounted my device ALL of the hidden (.folders and .files) were visible and searchable. Today, when I went to explore some more, all are gone. I understand that I can use a 3rd party app, just can't figure out why it was visible yesterday and not today.
Hmmph
Did you ever resolve this issue? I really hate MTP for several reasons but this is one of the reasons why! I need to back up all my directories on the SDCard because some apps store them as hidden files in hidden directories. Furthermore, I came across the Play Store bug that requires me to delete a "temp.asec" file in the ".android_secure" directory, but of course it is not visible.
In a post further up it was suggested to use a "Rescan" app to force the DB to include hidden files/directories, but I have tried no less than 4 of these apps, and all they do is trigger the built-in android media scan, which is the problem in the first place!
So has anyone ever been able to access hidden files and directories using MTP?
EDIT: I have an HTC phone that actually shows hidden files and directories, so they have obviously implemented their own media scan. The problem I am currently having is on a Samsung phone (Epic 4G touch)
It may depend on the implementation. For example, using stock rom for the phone doesn't show some files and folders, for example folders starting with dot. But if you use Neatrom Lite it will show all files and folders.
Flash forward about 6 years and Samsung still does not show hidden folders/files when viewing the phone contents in Windows File Explorer, but HTC does.
The reason this is still a problem for me, is that I want to backup the contents of a particular directory (WhatsApp) which contains some hidden folders, so I can restore it anytime on a new phone or the same phone.
I recently switched from HTC to Samsung and alas, it seems the problem with this implementation still exists. Anyone found a workaround to this to allow File Explorer to see the hidden folders?
Update: It appears that hidden .nomedia files (and probably others) appear under regular folders, so the problem is limited to hidden folders themselves
So i got myself an OBD bluetooth scanner and the Torque app...bloody brilliant.
So much information!
anyway, i cant seem to get it to upload data logs to the web viewer?
i have my account created and setup correctly but nothing in the web viewer when i log in.
Does anyone use the app and have any ideas on how to get this to work?
Secondary i have e-mailed myself some data logs and cant get them to open properly?
I cant seem to get Track Recorder to work with Torque Sync software, it stucks at Searching for Torque
Valiceemo said:
So i got myself an OBD bluetooth scanner and the Torque app...bloody brilliant.
So much information!
anyway, i cant seem to get it to upload data logs to the web viewer?
i have my account created and setup correctly but nothing in the web viewer when i log in.
Does anyone use the app and have any ideas on how to get this to work?
Secondary i have e-mailed myself some data logs and cant get them to open properly?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I imagine the particular posters have found answers to their problems seeing as this thread
dates from 2014 but I thought it might be worthwhile answering all the same as I ran in to the same niggles when I began using this app so if anyone searching these issues subsequently may find some worth from my reply.
First of all as a far as experience and knowledge is concerned. Firstly with cars;fixing,modifying, engine management tuning, obd2, diagnostics. Basically my auto knowledge is extremely wide and extensive from approx 35 years of obsession and getting stuck in an the deep end whereas my knowledge and experience of computers and smart phone tech is on much, much shakier ground
In fact, for those of my vintage. i.e late 30s,early 40s remember when we were kids. and programmable VCRs were the height of cutting edga technology. Well I'm like the way our parents and grand parents were then. i.e pretty much baffled by it and even following the instructions it was hit and miss whether you actually managed to record that film rhat was on at 4am lol.
So for the second issue brought up by the OP it doesn't matter whether you email yourself the log file or not (I found the few times i tried it that the file wouldn't attach and when it did the problem was the same anyway) you need Microsoft Office or any other type of office suite to view the files. On the pc i have Microsoft office but had to download an app to my phone to view. csv files. Again an office suite that not only displays. csv files but puts them into a spreadsheet format is required.
As for the first issue it's preferable in every way to view the site. on a pc because on the phone display the actual box to sign into is off screen and takes a little bit of zooming out and seaching to find, the same goes after you have signed in when another box appears with a list of the logs files recorded and the tab to choose it. This is where my lack of fundamental computer/web knowledge comes in. I can't tell you why it doesn't sit nicely inti an easily accessible mobile format but it doesn't. Once you've found the first sign in box/pop up it becomes simple, annoying but simple.
As for there being nothing after signing into the webview site successfully all I can assume is either you've no log files to view which you should have if it's all been set up correctly, including choosing which PIDs to send to logfile or the pop up/window where you click on your logfiles is right off screen and has to be looked for. Of course you don't get that problem if accessed using your desktop.
Hello XDA community!
I'm not quite sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I couldn't quite find a forum suited for this type of question. In any case here goes: is there any way to identify someone's email address or Google account from his/her Google Play Music ID?
Here is why I'm asking. Recently, my wife and I stayed in a hotel and at the end of our stay, my wife brought back a USB key which she assumed was mine. The USB key must have belonged to a prior patron as it was not mine. On the key, I saw that there were several family photos which seemed like they would be quite important to the owner. However, I could not find a single shred of identifying information on the key, with the exception of an "Android" folder with a "com.google.android.music" sub-folder containing a file named "._playmusicid" in it. This file contains a string of characters which appear to be a unique identifier for a Google Play Music account.
I would like to be able to identify the owner of the USB key so I can send him his data. From the photos on the card, I can only assume he is now quite far away from me (I am in Canada, he is likely in Asia somewhere), so I would send the information online. I've called the hotel, and they can't tell me who previous renters were (quite strange, given the nature of my request).
If anyone knows how to accomplish this, please let me know. Thank you!
What is this file ? Little Off Topic but my Sprint Sammy Note 4, Stock ROM, v5.1 LoLPoP with No Root, puts this file on any media I attach to it to include Micro SD Cards, USB Thumb Drives and small portable Hard drives.I will rap it up with the path oh yea, if the end file leaves the path it is auto replaced so it stays with you, would be perfect way to spread something. Any way the file is a hidden one so most people wouldn't even notice unless your looking for anything.
This is on any removable media. Google Play Music File that replaces itself if moved, removed, or renamed from initial location. Can be removed once disconnected from phone, does not remove itself.
( REMOVABLE MEDIA NAME HERE ) > Android > data > com.google.android. music > files ( Hidden In Here ) > ._playmusicid ( Hidden File )
Is it saying You Were Here, here is your invisable ink stamp saying you bumped uglies with my phone?
That is all.
Sent from my SM-N910P
Today I noticed something very strange and disturbing on my daughter's phone. The music library is suddenly filled with empty tracks with names (artist, album & track) that seem to be auto-generated. They are readable and sound some how Italian or Romanian like this "Pamideta Nani", "Tivifala Lavi" or "Abfa de Mamobra". They are certainly no data garbage from flipped bits / destroyed file system. There is always exactly one album per artist and each album has exactly ten tracks. These tracks exist only in the music app and in the file browser under "Music". Detailed information reveals that it's only meta data (tags) in the media content provider without any corresponding (mp3) file.
The phone is a Galaxy 4 running LOS 16 with microG. It has no SIM card. Recently there were some problems with the SD card being "lost". The SD card used to be formatted as external and now suddenly is formatted internal. But I suspect this is unrelated and indeed a hardware problem (card or connector) and my daughter pushed a wrong button one day, maybe when the SD card was "rediscovered". My daughter has some apps (games) installed via aurora store and she does it by herself when ever she has Wifi. So, I am not sure if the dubious "music" is due to some new app. But I doubt it. What malicious app would make itself being noticed in such an obvious way? Also, the only other (unresolved) occurrence of this phenomenon, that I could find, reports (in 2018) that he didn't change much on his phone (LOS 14) and was almost never online. I cannot post the link but its on androidpit and can be found with these keywords: "ploetzlich, unbekannte, ordner, musik, virus", unfortunately it's in German.
What could this be? It's definitely cause by some deliberate action. But what app would do this? Is it maybe some code to fill the library for testing purposes. But why was it triggered?
Any serious comments or hints welcome. Please no speculation about viruses unless it's proven that a virus exists that does this or concrete advise how to find out more. I will probably clean install the device in any case. If I can supply any further info, please let me know.