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Troubleshooting

Alexander Capehart edited this page Sep 16, 2023 · 27 revisions

This page serves as a way to troubleshoot common issues with Auxio. If your issue does not fit into a category, please file an issue.

Audio problems

Playback seems distorted on high-bitrate files

ExoPlayer does more audio processing than other media frameworks, which can result in the player being bogged down by files that have a bit-rate of 5MB+. There is no fix for this other than reducing the bitrate of the file for now. Progress on partially alleviating the issue can be followed here.

HD audio sounds lower-quality

ExoPlayer downsamples all audio streams to 16-bit PCM by default, including higher-quality 32-bit streams. This is possible to disable, but at the cost of ReplayGain support. Work is currently being done on improving HD audio support within ExoPlayer and can be followed here.

Player pauses when music is reloaded

This is intentional behavior to prevent unexpected events during library changes, such as sudden skipping, popping, or playback failing entirely.

Music problems

Music is missing from the library

This can be derived from a variety of reasons.

  • Due to battery concerns, Auxio does not watch the music library for changes by default. To enable this, turn on "Automatic reloading" in settings, or select "Refresh music" in settings whenever you change your music library.
  • If your music is on an SD Card, moving the music from the SD Card onto external storage and then back to the SD Card may cause your device to recognize it.
  • You may have a .nomedia file that excludes your music from the library. Use a file manager to delete this, if it exists. You will need to enable the "Show hidden files" option in the file manager.
  • Rebooting the device may cause the it to scan the music library and recognize your music.
  • Try transferring your music library onto the device using USB File Transfer (MTP). If your device is not configured for this, the option can be enabled in System -> Developer Options -> Default USB Configuration -> File Transfer / Android Auto. Developer Options can be unlocked by going to About phone -> Build number and pressing the option several times.
  • Below Android 10, you may be able to force the device to rescan the music library. Auxio does not support this as it no longer works on new Android versions, but legacy music players like Vinyl Music Player should theoretically support it.
  • If none of these work, it's likely that your OEM manufacturer has completely broken or disabled the media database. Nothing can be done to fix this. This is exceedingly common with Samsung, Huawei, Xiaomi, and Oppo devices in particular.

Slow music loading

Metadata extraction on Android can be extremely slow, primarily due to the in-efficiency of opening files. This makes certain music loads (Especially when the app is first installed) take exceedingly long, especially for libraries of 10k+ songs. Due to caching functionality however, subsequent loads should be somewhat faster.

Auxio "forgets" music when the library updates

Auxio by default identifies music through it's metadata. If it changes, the song can no longer be identified, causing it to disappear from "persisted" data like the playback state. This can be resolved by using a more stable MusicBrainz ID. More Info.

Several "Artist & Collaborator" artists instead of one "Artist" artist

This implies that your artist tags are configured incorrectly, either through poor tag use or unconfigured multi-value separators. This is common with taggers like MusicBrainz Picard or Beets that still naively write delimited values to maximize player compatibility. More info can be found here and here.

Several duplicate albums with different artists

This is likely caused by incorrect artist tagging. When grouping albums from songs, Auxio treats songs with the same album name, but different artist names, as belonging to different albums. If this did not occur, two albums of the same name from different artists would be treated as the same album, which is unpleasant. To fix this, you can leverage the "Album Artist" tag to create consistent artist naming for all songs in an album, while still using different artist values individually. More info can be found here and here.

Several duplicate artist entries instead of one artist entry

This occurs if you only partially tag your library with MusicBrainz Artist IDs. Auxio considers Artists with MusicBrainz IDs and Artists without MusicBrainz IDs to be different, so doing such will result in two artist entries instead of one. This can be resolved by either completely using or completely removing MusicBrainz IDs in your library.

Bit-rate of "32 kbps" on variable-bitrate MP3 files

Android's media extractor (which Auxio currently relies on) does not have good support for extracting bitrate from VBR MP3 files. Future ExoPlayer patches may partially alleviate this, which is being partially tracked here.

Unexpected Chinese/Japenese/Korean Characters appearing in song titles

This implies some kind of encoding issue in your files. Please create an issue and attach a sample file if possible.

Cannot select folders like "Downloads" in "Music directories"

This is a restriction made by the android file picker from Android 11 onwards. There is no way to work around this while maintaining compatibility with "scoped storage" restrictions.

Auxio isn't extracting any tags from my files, even though they are present

Extremely large album covers (3000x3000 pixels) often cause OOM errors that cause all metadata parsers that Auxio relies on to fail. It's highly recommended to not exceed more than 1500x1500 album cover sizes to prevent this.

I have several images in my audio files, but Auxio is not showing the image I marked as "Cover art"

This is supported by Auxio, but only by going to Settings -> Content -> Album covers and setting it to "High quality" instead of "Fast". Normally, Auxio relies on the faster and less memory-intensive cover art cache provided by the android OS. However, this cache is populated with only the first image that android sees for a particular music file, which may not be cover art if you have several images in your tags. This behavior may be changed in the future once Auxio can create it's own cache of cover art, tracked here.

Auxio is not showing the cover art of my music

This is probably caused by your cover art database being broken by your OEM manufacturer. Going to Settings -> Content -> Album covers and setting it to "High quality" instead of "Fast" should also fix this issue.