Synchronizing Music between W10 and W10M?

Durahl · 21 Jul 2016

Greetings!

Ever since migrating my slightly aged Lumia 1520 from W8.1 to W10 ( Insider Program ) I'm plagued with Playlist and Playback issues.

Some of the issues in detail:

After creating a Playlist in the Groove Music App on the Desktop I have it automatically sync to my Phone where some Music in the Playlist would appear as not available on this Device despite this clearly not being the case.
On the Phone I then manually add the missing Tracks to the Playlist which ends up with a duplicate of missing and existing Tracks.
After removing the missing Tracks on the Phone's Playlist the problem then shifts to the PC where the Playlist, now synced back to the Desktop, will show the just removed Tracks as missing like what happened before on the Phone - Interestingly enough, it's ALWAYS the same Tracks.
Songs not playing to the end - For some reason some Songs just stop playing like halfway through the Song.
Problem is I can't repeat the error... Sometimes Songs play just fine for like 9/10 times and then bam... the 1/10 it stopped halfway and then continues with another Song.
Playlist not continue playing - Not sure if this is related to the Songs not playing but whenever this happens I have to go into the Music app and manually continue Playback.

These Errors only happen when I move my Phone to W10M, no problems on W8.1M.
Reverting back to W8.1M solves them all.

The Errors also appear to be unrelated to the Hardware as testing it on a brand new 950XL has shown the same problems.
Music Playback on an iPhone 6S is also without Problems.

Tried every possible method in moving Music from PC to the Phone:

Copy/Pasting using the Windows File Explorer ( won't copy DRM Protected Music )
Having the Windows Phone Desktop App do the File Transfer ( appears to be discontinued!? )
Transferring Music from PC to OneDrive and from there to the Phone ( ugh... )

None of these appear to solve the issue.

Any ideas? As it looks like I'm probably stuck with iOS just to be able to listen to music as my Lumia 1520 is about to kick the bucket and all the new Windows Phones only support W10 thus downgrading them isn't an option >_>

Any ideas?

paulsalter · 21 Jul 2016

Hi,
Not sure on the playback problems, but for playlists and keeping music in sync i find the best way is to fully use Onedrive for it (assuming you have access to unlimited data and enough storage space)

If you store the music in the Onedrive folder on your desktop, this makes no difference to playback on desktop, its just stored in a different location
Then on your other devices this should all be available
If you want it playable offline on other devices, download it from Onedrive using the make available offline option in Groove on the phone

Doing it like this for me very rarely causes issues and sync playlists perfectly

Durahl · 22 Jul 2016

Mhh... I usually store my Music on a different Drive... Maybe adding it to the OneDrive Folder WILL actually solve these issues.
I guess I'll give it a try.

paulsalter · 22 Jul 2016

Might be worth a try with just a couple of albums, see how it goes

With playlist i can see it messing up if they are stored locally

eg
If you create a playlist with 10 songs from e:\music
the playlist should sync fine across devices, but when it looks for the music, the phone will think, what is this e:\music, dont recognise this
so then if you add the files stored locally on the phone to the playlist, the PC will then get confused over where the music is
causing duplicates and music not to be found

if the music is stored on Onedrive, both devices have access to this and will see everything, only difference will be that some is streaming only unless its downloaded, and playlists will look at this master list of music

Thats how I understand it as working, if that makes any sense