The VideoLAN Forums

Big problems here..

Just added 40Gb of music to my new phone, but VLC insists on trying to catalogue the entire lot! In doing so it's frozen repeatedly, i've had to clear its cache and app data, uninstall then re-install, i've disabled all "Directories" in the preferences menu, yet still it automatically conglomerates everything into one big messy database that's TOTALLY USELESS.

It's worse than useless - it's confused, utterly wrong on all the assumptions it makes (the only music here is oldskool UK hardore, yet it's categorised under just about EVERY genre from blues to rock)... the Artist list is absurdly long and can't distinguish artists from track names, the Album list is long winded, confused and dissociated, the Song list is an absolute joke - an alphabetical list of 40 Gb of tunes, are you serious? What am i supposed to do, scroll though that to select a track? Ditto the Playlist section - many of the folders contain .m3u playlists so it's diligently listed them all alphabetically even though i don't want them and will never use them, and besides, it can't actually play any of them because it's choked up reporting "The location Null cannot be played" for every one of them, which flashes up on the screen and disappears again so quickly that only the insane repetition of it allowed me to even read it...

This is utterly crazy! I didn't ask it to do any of this, it's completely disabled itself in the process of trying, and even if it worked i'd have no use for such a jumbled list of redundant, disorganised information.

To build a useful playlist i need to be able to add files and folders via a simple file and folder list. That's all. A comprehensive media library might be useful for a few commercial albums but for an extensive collection it COMPLETELY defeats its own purposes - it is absolutely precluding the basic functionality it's intended to facilitate.

I've had to uninstall VLC to prevent its uncontrollable and demented library building spasms. I was SO looking forward to having my favourite media player on my phone, but until this behaviour's made OPTIONAL rather than mandatory, i'm going to have to find another player... if there are any..

Hmm stayed up late trying other players and they all seem to take the same demented approach of ripping every page out of your books and 'organising' them into big jumbled piles indexed by alphabetical order, or word references - a page from the Bible mentions a Peter, so does a page from Peter Pan, so those two pages get listed together. "There's your reading collection bud, neatly 'organised'."


Are there any players that AREN'T on drugs like this? Ie. ones that work like PC media players, without this "media library" behaviour, where you just add files & folders to a playlist, save it and play it?


I tried VLC beta, too - that actually manages to complete its manic cataloging mission but then doesn't even feature a playlist editor to do anything with the piles of scrambled data it's collected - which also precludes saving internet radio URL's as playlists (which really ought to be "bookmarks" anyway).


All in all i'm really disappointed by this whole experience. I expected that using a modern phone as a media player would be a breeze but it's impossible. My old Sony Ericsson phone is far better suited to the job, ditto my Samsung YP-R0 media player. None of this "media library" nonsense there..

Same problem here with my audio collection. A really huge cache containing thousands of redundant art works files consumes nearly all internal memory (sdcard0). No way to move cache to sdcard1 nor to limit cache size. WTF...

I solved it this way:

Every audio file is completely tagged incl. art work.
Put art work files (cover.jpg) in *every* folder of the audio collection containing media files.
Let VLC scan the audio collection.
Delete the media cache files (manually).
Rescan the audio collection.
Now the media cache should be empty, no more art.jpg files in there.
Displaying cover art works well without cached files. VLC takes art work from audio collection.

You can use the directories view to manually browse media files.

As for the categorization/etc, that information is pulled from the metadata stored in the media files themselves. You can use software like EasyTAG to fix the metadata.

Simple: add a .nomedia in your library folder.

Simple: add a .nomedia in your library folder.

Unfortunately, this caused vlc to ignore my whole Music directory resulting in no music listed at all. Creating a cover.jpg for each of my 169 music albums is not an option.

.nomedia disable Media Library. That is what was asked.