[musichawk]

Trying to drag-and-drop to add 347 PDFs into MSP. It seems to work, chugging along copying the files to the tablet...supposedly. After several minutes Companion declares it has succeeded with 347 files.

When I look at the tablet's library in Companion, sure enough the new songs are there, along with the thousands of existing songs. And on the tablet, the activity box shows a long list of files copied. So, I disconnect.

Then I can look at MSPs Songs list on the tablet. But -- none of the new songs are there!

Reconnect tablet to PC (via wi-fi), Companion reads library from tablet, but the list does not have any of the 347 files supposedly just copied.

Why does Companion seem to do the job, but not really?

Restarting the Companion and MSP don't fix this, which has been happening for days.

In case duplicates exist, I select "create new" (not totally clear what it does) but the vast majority of files I'm trying to add do NOT exist so duplicates behavior should not matter.

What should I try next?

[musichawk]

As a test, I tried adding 10 songs from PC to tablet using Dropbox, worked perfectly.

The implication is that no problem with PC or tablet, the problem is with Companion. Yet the tablet shows the Companion files are being added, they just aren't really there. How could that be?

[Zubersoft]

It sounds like the files are being successfully transferred, but for some reason, the database file either isn't transferred or it's not considered valid by the tablet. I'll run through some tests to see if I can reproduce the problem by adding ~350 files at once.

Mike

[musichawk]

The 10 files that succeeded via Dropbox were in the larger group I tried, but I don't detect that they got duplicated on the tablet, unless the Duplicates setting would obscure that situation.

[musichawk]

Another clue, how that you mention the database. The very latest item in the tablet's action dialog implies trouble writing the final file. If that is the database, the question becomes, why can the PDFs be saved on tablet but not database file? Different locations? (PDFs are on SD card) Different Write rights?

[Zubersoft]

The database will be written to the storage location, whatever you happen to have that set to. I can't imagine why PDFs would be transferred successfully, but not the database. If you can capture the message on the tablet, that might help.

[musichawk]

I just ran Sync again, same 347 files. Looking at the tablet, it worked, all the new files are there. But nothing changed on my end, other than waiting 3 days. Same PC, same tablet, same wi-fi, etc.

Observations:

Tablet Status window only shows a few files, I presume because most of them scrolled off.

There are statements such as "File successfully received and written to storage..." Looks good.

But, there are also a bunch of entries such as "Receiving 0 files from PC. Writing files to MobileSheets Storage Location". Makes no sense. And why does this happen? It happens only between some of the actual file statements, but not between all of them. Again, seeing only the last few actions as shown in Status window, I see two "successfully" file writes, then three "0 files" lines. Then another "successfully", then 2 "0 files" lines. Then, after the final "successfully" are 9 "0 files" lines.

The final lines are "Receiving database update from PC", then "Database successfully updated". This is the where, in several prior attempts, I saw an error. So, you seem to be correct in surmising that the prior problems were due to database not being transferred. Mystery, or something amiss?

New question arising from my test of copying several files via Dropbox, then the same files via Sync. I see DUPES, meaning the same song twice, with the same file name. I don't know how to safely cure this. Since the file name is the same, and I am NOT using folders, it seems to be the same file but two database entries. Do I need to delete both and re-load them, or is there another way? And, how could this be prevented. When doing Sync I told Companion to do the "use same file" (or something like that, don't have it happening so can't see precise wording) which I assume means, don't create a new database entry (if any) for this song; if it already exists, just replace the old file with the new file. That's my assumption, I recall the wording confused me about what would happen. Did I create the duplicates in the database by mis-using the duplicates setting in Sync?

[Zubersoft]

Some of those messages are just indicating that it received a message from the PC, but no files needed to be transferred (most likely because an existing file was used). The "Database successfully updated" message is the most important part. I wish I knew why it didn't work the previous time you tried it.

As for the problem you encountered with duplicate songs, I think there was a misunderstanding there. If you import a file that matches the name of an existing file, you are given an option for how to handle the file conflict. Specifying that you want to overwrite the file means that you want to create a new song but have it overwrite the existing file. The same applies if you select "Use existing file". It will create a new song but use an existing file. If you are performing a batch import, specifying that you want to avoid duplicate songs should prevent this (the duplicate file will just be ignored). There is a similar setting on the import settings dialog for the duplicate file behavior - you must specify that you want to ignore duplicates instead of creating new songs.

Mike