Sony Ericsson Aino

[kalleboo]

I got an Aino a few days ago, and I synced my 10 GB of music to a freshly formatted MicroSD card using Salling Meda Sync in MTP mode. After I had done that, the phone would continually get stuck at 97% in its updating process and slow down the phone something horrendous.

I formatted the card again, and this time I just dragged my iTunes library onto the card, keeping the directory structure intact. Now it indexed the same 10 GB library quickly and completed it.

I'll try to sync with salling again tomorrow to see if the same thing happens again, but until then has anyone seen this behavior? Before the Aino I've been syncing the same collection successfully to a C905 with no slowdowns.

My first instinct is that the phone is choking on a single directory with thousands of files in it, and when I copy manually there's a directory structure that keeps it from going out of hand. Is there any option in Media Sync to organize the music in a directory structure similar to iTunes? This would also make it a lot easier to create playlists on the phone itself..

[salling]

In my experience, when phones crap out, there's usually no simple explanation for it... ;-) So I'd really appreciate it if you could run the test again.

As for the folder structure, that's an interesting theory. I went with a 1-level structure for the Sony Ericsson phones, as that caused far fewer phone crashes in earlier 2007/2008-models. Especially in more advanced sync scenarios.

It'd be easy to test your folder theory. Just let me know how your 2nd run goes.

Best.
--
Jonas

[kalleboo]

I formatted the stick and resynced with Media Sync, and I once again the phone hangs at 97% updating.

Also I tried my half-baked theory by once again clearing the memory stick and then putting all my music files in a single folder, and the phone didn't have any problem with that.

So I'm not sure what Media Sync is doing "wrong" to cause the problem. The only differences between syncing and copying manually I can think of are (1) the former is done through MTP and (2) maybe Media Sync is copying over something that I'm missing manually?

[kalleboo]

OK, after a lot of testing I've figured out the problem, the Aino just really hates long m3u playlists. If I remove all my playlists with more than about 5-800 items it updates its index fine in about 15 minutes. If I have more than that the time it takes seems to go up exponentially, and a 2000 item playlist never finishes indexing.

This makes it kind of annoying to sync a limited subset of my iTunes library since I can't just make a smart playlist that excludes music I don't want and sync that. Some way to use a playlist as a basis for what gets synced but without actually creating the m3u on the device would be a welcome addition to solve this (altho I guess it would be awkward UI-wise).

[salling]

Wonderful...

I can try a different playlist approach for Aino in the next beta build of 1.1.5.

Best.
--
Jonas

[kalleboo]

Sony Ericsson released a software update for the Aino last week (R7AA071) which seems to have resolved this problem for me and a friend who was seeing the same thing.

I successfully synced a 900 song playlist onto the phone without any slowdowns. I also cleared the memory card and did a clean sync to make sure it wasn't something that had happened to my library.

I've only been using this version for a few hours so I'll report if this behaviour keeps up or if it's just some fluke or the slowdowns are just delayed or whatever. With Sony Ericsson firmware updates are usually one step forward two steps back...

[b]edit:[/b] happiness may be short lived, seems like after updating half my music is showing up as filenames and not title/artist. going to try to resync etc

[b]edit 2:[/b] wiping the card again and syncing again seems to have solved it. sony ericsson phone is buggy, news at 11