re: Re: re: Copying music from zune to computer won't work properly

I accidentally wiped my music collection off my computer so I am trying to recover it from my zune- which luckily I recently synchronized with.  

As per other suggestions, I connected the zune to my computer, clicked on devices, highlighted all the songs and hit copy to collection, however it breaks the meta data of some files, and some files simply refused to copy over.  For instance my zune shows 4175 songs however only 4165 songs will copy over.  None of the files have any sort of DRM or protection of any kind.  

When I try to copy them to my collection, in the status tab, the software acknowledges that I want to copy it, however it simply skips over the file with no explanation or error.

If you guys could help in anyway, I would greatly appreciate it, I've spend hours and hours properly tagging all my music and I am still in disbelief over the stupidness that caused me to delete the files off my computer in the first place :(.  

run the media collection reset tool.  it's possible they don't copy over because the software may think they are already there...

I gave that a try, I ran the tool then tried to recopy but the same problem occurs.

I then tried to deliberately delete all the music off the computer, run the tool then try to recopy from the zune, but same problem again :(  

 zomnomnomosaur wrote:

I gave that a try, I ran the tool then tried to recopy but the same problem occurs.

I then tried to deliberately delete all the music off the computer, run the tool then try to recopy from the zune, but same problem again :(  

Can you find the specific missing 10 songs?  Is it possible they are dupes?  I see all sorts of issues with copying from the PC to the device, but this is the first time (that I can recall...) seeing this refusal to sync in the reverse direction.  I'm also wondering if those files refuse to copy because they have become (somehow...) corrupted.  Do they play OK on the device?

The songs are not duplicates, and they worked perfectly fine on the player.  

I know what four of the missing songs are, but the other 6, I would have to go through album by album to find.  Four of the ten are from the same album (coincidently, I realized because it is my favorite album).  I own the cd, so I have no problems replacing it, but it worries me that such a bug can occur.  Now, I just need to figure out what the other 6 are.

The library resetter you suggested earlier helped a bit acutally, it sorted out the metadata problem, and re- associated album art, album, artist, etc with the correct files (it looks like at so far).

 zomnomnomosaur wrote:

The songs are not duplicates, and they worked perfectly fine on the player.  

I know what four of the missing songs are, but the other 6, I would have to go through album by album to find.  Four of the ten are from the same album (coincidently, I realized because it is my favorite album).  I own the cd, so I have no problems replacing it, but it worries me that such a bug can occur.  Now, I just need to figure out what the other 6 are.

The library resetter you suggested earlier helped a bit acutally, it sorted out the metadata problem, and re- associated album art, album, artist, etc with the correct files (it looks like at so far).

OK- so that's a big clue.  That tool actually does absolutely nothing to any of your content files.  It just backs up an index file that the software creates and maintains to keep track of your collection.  If someone (for instance) makes a lot of content tag changes and/or moves a bunch of content files around to new or different folders, and then starts up the zune software, this process sometimes gets confused and loses track of some content.  And you get weird results like refusing to sync some song onto the device, or repeatedly sync'ing the same song over and over...  

So, the fact that the tool cleaned up some of your metadata suggests one and possibly two things.  1) you definitely had some file corruption in that index file.  2)  you may have had (or still have?) some files or folders that are marked read-only.  If they are, then metadata changes made with the software (including associating album art) are stored externally by the zune software.  All of this could easily explain a sync problem...the issue is how does it explain a reverse sync issue?  My only guesses at this point are file corruption in the content (but the fact it plays on the device argues against this...) or a write protect issue.    Does any of this give you ideas?

I had a closer look, and I think I came across something.

I'll start with a picture of the album where I noticed I was missing files:

http://imgur.com/gq2Bu.jpg

The songs that would not reverse sync don't have file sizes listed.  (1) 

The track titles are incredibly long (2)

Going by this, I looked referenced another item that had a ridiculously long title, and surely it was missing as well.  To double check, I connected the zune again and checked device> music, and again I can't see the file size.

http://imgur.com/1v2R0.jpg

I think, I can with some certainty say the Zune software is not handling long file names correctly.  

I also took some time to go through each individual album, apparently I was wrong when I said the library resetter fixed the meta data issue.  I've noticed a few albums are now missing track number order and a few stray missing album arts here and there- but that isn't too big  of  a deal.  Is there anyway to get the developer's attention about this issue? 

 zomnomnomosaur wrote:

I had a closer look, and I think I came across something.

I'll start with a picture of the album where I noticed I was missing files:

http://imgur.com/gq2Bu.jpg

The songs that would not reverse sync don't have file sizes listed.  (1) 

The track titles are incredibly long (2)

Going by this, I looked referenced another item that had a ridiculously long title, and surely it was missing as well.  To double check, I connected the zune again and checked device> music, and again I can't see the file size.

http://imgur.com/1v2R0.jpg

I think, I can with some certainty say the Zune software is not handling long file names correctly.  

I also took some time to go through each individual album, apparently I was wrong when I said the library resetter fixed the meta data issue.  I've noticed a few albums are now missing track number order and a few stray missing album arts here and there- but that isn't too big  of  a deal.  Is there anyway to get the developer's attention about this issue? 

If they read this, you just did.  They do read the forums, but there is no way to know for sure.  And, it could be that the song titles are too big to fit the ID3 tag standard for the song title field...or, as you say, the zune software can't handle fields that big.

I use Foobar and it has no trouble.  For tagging i use mp3Tagger and it as well has no trouble.  In the past I've used a whole slew of mp3 playing softwares and well, they also worked fine so I guess, zune software it is.  NSILMike, thank you for your help :) now that I know how to identify which files did not copy over- the process of getting everything copied back shouldn't be as painful. 

 zomnomnomosaur wrote:

I use Foobar and it has no trouble.  For tagging i use mp3Tagger and it as well has no trouble.  In the past I've used a whole slew of mp3 playing softwares and well, they also worked fine so I guess, zune software it is.  NSILMike, thank you for your help :) now that I know how to identify which files did not copy over- the process of getting everything copied back shouldn't be as painful.

I think you may be right.  I searched for the standard, and found some citations that suggest when ID3 rev'd from v1 to v2, a 30 character limit to the title field (and similar limits to some other fields) was relaxed.  Zunes and most current other applications use ID3v2.3