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Forerunner 245 music database corruption - even with 3.77, clean Windows 10 and new Garmin Express.

Still struggling to understand what goes on when I transfer a large list of songs and the watch gets befuddled.

The watch has 3.77 firmware, and I did a clean install of just Windows 10 and Garmin Express to a virgin machine.

I take a big list of songs in My Music, and transfer.

(1) About 600MB of songs make it across, some songs "are not transferred", then it says transfer complete.

... At this point the watch sees and can play the songs.

(2) Reconnect the watch and re-start, another 600MB makes it before failure, then it says transfer complete.

... At this point the watch *cannot see or play *any* songs*.

... But Garmin Express shows "My Music 1.3 GB and Free 2.3 GB".

... Even though Garmin Express shows *no songs* on the watch.

Something fishy is going on here?  At this point, my strategy is to stick to just small playlists, because large music sets fail in weird ways?

I'm guessing that the stated "500 song" maximum even though the watch has 3.7 GB storage is because the watch's database can't keep up?

  • A couple further notes... If there is too much music on the watch, it will crash and reboot when plugged into Garmin Express - I think the watch probably is detecting that it is taking "too long" and rebooting itself.  Also, I _think_ (yet to be 100% proved out) that there is a playback glitch with full-scale ( normalized to 0 dBFS ) mp3 audio - I was hearing click-glitches, after re-normalizing to -3 dBFS I do not hear these artifacts.  Maybe it is interpolation-clipping during reconstruction?  Not a problem for me as I'm just adding the normalization to -3 into a process I'm already doing, but that may not be something 99% of people want to deal with... Eventually, I'll make a test-file to prove this out.  As far as the database and the watch crashing, I'm realizing that in *practice* this watch may only be able to handle around 300 songs reliably, a shame as it has enough storage for more than 1500.

  • P.S. - there is a lot of investigation left to figure out what the limits really are.  I'm suspecting that it has a harder time where the source folders are "various artists" - it re-generates file names based on MP3 tags, and so it is generating an album folder for every single song or something... I'm guessing a lot of factors play into when the MP3 database gets "overwhelmed".  All I'm sure of is that the watch becomes befuddled easily and that the Garmin Express / internal view of what is loaded is problematically divergent from the MTP / Filesystem view of what is loaded.

  • So, I'm very confused about what Garmin Express actually *does*.  Even when it gets *no errors*, says "transfer complete", and shows green check marks... sometimes the watch is left with the playlists thinking they have only some, or *none*, of the songs.  And it will lose playlists and songs that are *already in there*!  That is, I can have playlist1 on the watch with 100 songs, then add playlist2 with a different 100 songs, and Garmin Express will show everything _fine_, and when I go to the music player on the watch playlist1 will have 0 songs and playlist2 will have 42 songs...  All without _any_ errors reported by Garmin Express, and without it apparently having any view into what is actually loaded on the watch! ???

  • I've got about 250 MP3s (about 1.3GB worth) on my 245 Music and so far no significant issues, I'll probably go above 300 some time soon so we'll see if I hit the same problem as you... Couple of things spring to mind:

    1) Are you 100% sure that you don't have a corrupt mp3 in there somewhere? It might play OK on a PC, but have issues that the watch doesn't like. I've had this before with a very old mp3 player that hated some files...

    2) Did you know that you don't need to use Garmin Express to transfer mp3s over to the watch? When I first got it, I used Windows Explorer and good-old file copy to transfer the files to the Music folder on the device. This worked fine for me. I'm now using Garmin Express, but I still manually copy podcasts over to the watch.

    3) FYI, the playlists are terrible. I've had no end of issues with playlists and has to factory reset my 245 Music several times, so I'm not going there again.

  • Definitely not an issue of corrupt MP3 files, not always the same one but I re-encoded them all myself anyway.
    MTP is in my experience even less reliable than Garmin Express, but maybe G.E. is just dumping them in MTP anyway.
    Note that G.E. renames the files to names based on tag names and makes the playlists point to those names...
    "Just don't use playlists" is a non-starter for me - my whole game here is to figure out *how* to make it work...
    I never have to "reset" it - I can always delete all songs and playlists 2 ways (in G.E. and in MTP mode) and then
    it will "mostly act clean" - it still has zombie playlists that aren't seen by MTP _or_ G.E., but it will "mostly work".
    I'm encoding tighter than you - you said 250 MP3s 1.3GB, I'm encoding V7 lame setting which is about 750 MP3s for 1.3GB.

  • The zombie playlists was my primary reason for device resets, they just drive me nuts!

  • I think the playlists in a way are the least of my troubles.  Not predictably (with my understanding so far), but regularly, the watch will "scrap zombie playlists", and, if I have the *songs* already loaded, it seems to be able to take playlists OK.
    For example, if I load playlist with songs A B C, then playlist with songs C D E, playlist with songs B C D will just "see" the songs and not crap out.
    Note, I've succeeded in getting over 750 songs in about 10 playlists onto the device- but- there is some degree of "load 100, wait, sync, wait, disconnect, connect, sync, pray, load 100 more".  If I just "transfer music", it only gets like 250 before it craps out.  For example, I had 577 songs loaded; I copied them off to the computer, I created a playlist with just *exactly the music that was just on the watch*, and I tried with MTP to reload it (note: I'm suspecting that Express just copies the files over *after* it renames based on tags).  Trying to transfer back (after emptying and clearing the watch of course!) the songs that *just came from the watch*, only 284 made it!  So... It is definitely like a transient "memory during loading" problem, not a "storage of playlists, tags, songs" problem.  If I load 100, do hand waving, load 100, do hand waving, load 100, etc. I can get over 750 on there.  But if I just *load the 750 in a straight shot* (SAME playlists and songs) it craps out before 300.  Either with Garmin express OR MTP.  Note: It seems Garmin Express (OR MTP) doesn't have access to the watch's state - as in, playlists etc. - it is as if the interface was designed by one group designing a watch and another group designing the software, without actually considering the requirements for a sane (my term) system.
    I think my next direction will be to create a list of 500 songs (well, that is all it is SUPPOSED to support, even though I think the limiting factor is internal processing memory and I've gotten 750 to work...) and load it 100 at a time, and just maintain it locally that way.

    P.S. - I forgot to mention - when I say "crap out" I mean CRAP OUT.  When a transfer FAILS, it will _corrupt everything_.  Often the watch loses all previous songs or playlists (even though they are still there for MTP) from its database, and it WILL NOT reliably take new uploads!  When I get an error (either MTP fail or Garmin Express transfer "cannot be transferred", I delete all songs and playlists visible to GE, I delete everything under /Primary/Music, THEN I re-enter music mode after disconnecting, THEN I reconnect and start over!  Any attempt to proceed after ANY error has led to laughable corruption.