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Garmin Express iTunes Device Playlist not Consistent with Actual M3U File Playlist It Created on Fenix 6x

Bohnster
over 4 years ago

I'm using Garmin Express on a Windows 10 PC with iTunes and a Fenix 6x Sapphire.  I'm using the iTunes option in Garmin Express.  I have no issues with Garmin Express reading my iTunes library and I've been using music and podcast playlists for about 6 months.  DRM is not an issue.  All of a sudden, for specific songs & playlists, Garmin Express is not creating the playlist in full on the watch itself.  I thought it might be the playlist size so I found 3 missing songs and a good one from a large playlist and created a smaller test.  I sent this small playlist of 4 songs to my watch from GE.  GE indicates all 5 files transferred and expanding the watch playlist in GE shows all 4 songs.  All green, working just fine.  However, the watch itself only shows one song in the playlist from the Music menu.  If I open the M3U file on the watch from Windows Explorer, it only shows one song as expected.  Why the inconsistency between GE and the watch?  Furthermore, if I select all 3 album folders from Windows Explorer, then right-click, then select Create Playlist, all 4 songs are embedded in a new M3U playlist and that playlist shows up on my watch just fine.  Something is obviously barfing on the write of the M3U file to the watch but I don't know what it is.  Anybody had that issue?  I guess my next step is to try to edit the original M3U file by copying in the contents of the Windows created one...

  • +1 over 4 years ago

    Playlists seem to ignore any files with metadata that includes characters outside of the 7-bit ANSI set. Common characters like é and ñ in the title, for example will cause the song not to appear in a playlist.

    The songs themselves to exist and can be seen and played individually  

    I opened an issue and had a few back and forth emails with Garmin about this maybe 18 months ago. It hasn’t been addressed. 

    I think there is a problem with Unicode support in built-in music player. There also seems to be an assumption that the artist is the same for all the tracks on an album and the watch physically stores tracks by artist. And it doesn’t correctly handle ordering the tracks on an album with multiple “discs” each having “tracks” where you have to sort the tracks by disc number and then track number.

    I tried several times to load the Hamilton cast album onto my watch and I could never get it to work. Some of the files go missing. The rest of the files go into different folders based on the cast members on each track. And the whole set is out of order no matter what. 

    In the end, I solved this with the Amazon Music app. 

    I don’t think they are really putting much effort into the basic music player. The features are not competitive with a pre-iPod MP3 player.

    It seems like there is an assumption that most people will use Spotify or Amazon or one of the other streaming apps. 

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to brian.reiter

    Thanks for the info.  Your points are on target.  I had checked the XML for the playlist in the iTunes library file but had not checked the XML for the album and songs.  The test playlist has 3 songs from the Banshee series soundtrack with two different artists.  The description has "Cinemax" in it with a trademark symbol which is obviously not ANSI.  I tried a quick edit of the XML and that didn't work, so I'll poke around further.  I shouldn't have to use a paid-for service to play music on an $800 watch. With the cheaper and longer lasting wireless earbuds out now, I finally switched over to using the Fenix for run music and podcasts instead of an iPod shuffle.  After finding the iTunes option in Garmin Express, I thought it was too easy to avoid Amazon or Spotify.  Now I know.  Thanks.

  • 0 over 4 years ago in reply to Bohnster

    To follow-up, simply changing the name in iTunes to edit out the non-compatible characters should work.  Since the edit of the XML in the iTunes library folder didn't work originally, I had assumed that changing the name in iTunes itself wouldn't work either but I tried that and it worked.  It also works to use the metadata editor in Amazon Music then export the album & songs back to iTunes.  Amazon Music is such a dumpster fire of a software app, I didn't want to switch over to that player on the watch.  Hopefully, Garmin will fix the default player to work as well as the other players eventually but I'm not holding my breath.