All About Symbian - Symbian, Nokia and S60 unwrapped.
Ghost Music entries
Published by Steve Litchfield at 16:15 UTC, August 23rd 2010
Question:
Q. Music player on my old Nokia smartphone seems to have developed a few glitches. The main problem seems to be that some 'albums', synced across from Windows Media Player have duplicated track entries. If I try to play these ghost tracks I just get an exclamation mark and Music player skips ahead to the next one. How can I clean things up?
Answer:
A. Has this memory card also been in other phones? Or have you experimented in the past with loading music files on manually and had a syncing system set up in parallel? Either way, it's evident that Music player's library index is corrupted. What you do next depends on how many albums/tracks are affected.
If you're only talking about a handful, then mark the tracks and use 'Options>Delete' to zap the bogus entries manually. Job done.
However, if the ghost entries are widespread then it's best to consider rebuilding the Music player library from scratch:
- Connect your phone to your desktop in 'Data transfer' (mass storage) mode. The phone's memory card will then appear in Windows Explorer as just another disk drive.
- Look for and delete the folders '\Private\101f8857', \Private\FFC31' and 'Private\101ffca9'.
- 'Eject' the phone 'disk' safely.
- Disconnect the phone, wait ten seconds and then use 'Refresh library' from the top menu in Music player. All being well, sit back and wait as the tracks are rediscovered and the library indices rebuilt.
(This original text of mine was originally published in Smartphone Essentials magazine and re-purposed here with kind permission)
