Btsync Should Register New Files With The Media Scanner On Android


Nojan

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I use BTSync to push music to my Android phone. Music player apps do not 'see' these files because media files are not found by scanning the file system (too much battery) but by looking up a database that is updated by the media scanner.

Because BTSync apparently doesn't seem to run the media scanner after syncing files to the phone, these music files never show in any of the commom media players on Android  (except VLC, which doesn't use the database but does scan the file system ... but I don't really want to use VLC to play back my music).

See also this question on Stack Exchange for Android.

Aka: this is a feature request. :)

Edited by Nojan
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I use BTSync to push music to my Android phone. Music player apps do not 'see' these files because media files are not found by scanning the file system (too much battery) but by looking up a database that is updated by the media scanner.

Because BTSync apparently doesn't seem to run the media scanner after syncing files to the phone, these music files never show in any of the commom media players on Android  (except VLC, which doesn't use the database but does scan the file system ... but I don't really want to use VLC to play back my music).

I don't know precisely what triggers the Android system app Media Storage to run, but I don't think individual apps can normally trigger it directly. While running BitTorrent Sync on my S4 to sync about 16GB/20k files, I've observed that Media Storage will run about once per day, for up to 2-3 hours and eat 20-30% of battery capacity. I've concluded that even a few file changes in conjunction with whatever files BTS updates as it keeps in sync are enough for the system to want to run Media Storage again. Since this frequency of battery drain is virtually useless for making my phone run better, I've disabled Media Storage, and I have no problems using my music player, PowerAmp. PowerAmp has a rescan function that I run manually when I add new stuff. In fact, sometimes it needs to be run manually even with Media Storage enabled so that I can get immediate access to any newly added stuff. So I'm suggesting to you to find a new media player that offers a working manual rescan for new media.

 

Additionally, I don't miss whatever services Media Storage provides, but I still think it's too bad there's no way for the user to control it--and I've asked around. Unfortunately, it's required for certain minor things that most people can't live without, such as the stock Gallery app and ringtones. My phone never rings anymore, only vibrates, which I'm fine with, but a lot of people are married to their ringtones. Other audio notifications continue to work on their default settings, but can't be customized, and alas, many people are also married to their customized audio alerts. Since persistent, reliable 2-way sync on a lot of data without pause or sleep is high priority for me, I customize my phone around that, and it's been working great. But without devoting your whole phone experience to BTS, there may be a few changes you can make to get everything you need functional.

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Guest proactiveservices

Refreshing the MediaStorage database isn't the solution: files that are added also need to be sent to the database as they're added. Either this, or add them via the API which adds their metadata to the database at the time of the operation. Having a brief look around the API it seems this is possible. However, I'm not a programmer so my brief skimming of the documentation on the Android site may have missed something.

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