Empty playlist problem partially resolved!

[kvedt]

Had my htc incredible for 10 days now and been hugely vexed with the music player and synching iTunes. Used a couple of apps and was able to sync everything (cover art sync is weirdly hit or miss though), but pressing a playlist returned the message that the playlist was empty. Any other view (artist, song, album, genre) displayed all of the info, and the songs played fine when you selected one. Trolled a bunch of forums and sent notes to app developers, but no fix.

I found one. It's a little work, but not much. The problem is that some hidden feature in the way android is implemented in the incredible causes the playlist feature to have trouble with capital letters. [I felt like I accidently clicked on an easter egg when I figured this out]

Here's the fix then. You have to manually delete all the playlists in the incredible, which requires "x"ing each one. After that, mount the sd card and manually delete all the music files and folders, and you must delete any app stored data as well (e.g., userprefs, ratings, xml, etc.). Reinstall your sync program if you have to (I didn't, using Syncr). Then unmount the phone (very important! do not just pull the USB plug!).

Next, open iTunes and click on each playlist, changing all upper case letters to lower case. Then mount the phone back on the PC and sync. When it's done, unmount the phone (don't just pull the plug) and wait for the phone to remount the sd card for its own use. Open the music app and you may or may not see your old playlists, albums etc. for a few seconds, but they'll go away and a song will show up. Play it for a few seconds, pause it and set the phone down, go get a sammich or nice piece of fruit and give the phone time to fully rescan the sd card. Go to playlists, and they'll all work.

Note - you only have to remove capital letters from the iTunes playlists. Capital letters everywhere else are fine.

Hope it works for you like it did for me.

Peter

[blake]

im going to try this when i get home, thanks for the tip

[kvedt]

I found one other thing that seems to be occurring on a periodic basis: after you sync music a number of times, the microSD becomes corrupted. It's happened more than once, and I read about it in some other forum (can't remember where though). The first tip off was a disk error message when mounting the SD that you can choose to fix or ignore. Doesn't matter which choice you make, and you can still read the disk. But what's happening is the file names in a sector end up being too long to read, and using the PC to "fix" doesn't work. I end up needing to save everything on my SD, except music which is where the corruption always is, reformat the SD using FAT32, the loading everything back on. Then resync my music and it's all fine until the next time it hits.

Might be confined to the incredible, but I know it happens regardless of which SD card I use. If I can't figure out how to stop it for good, I may end up just copying music folders over and use a commercial player to create the playlists (I use Mixzing now, but have also used 3 and bTunes).

Good luck.