One might thing that making a program that plays music stored locally on a computer shouldn’t be that difficult. It must be able to find music files, to play them correctly, to play songs in the correct order, and provide a decent user interface, with some search capabilities. Considering that the most difficult tasks can be outsourced to libraries, there should be no special challenge. Yet all the music players I’ve tried on desktop computers or mobile devices suffered from significant problems of various kinds.
On Android, almost all the music players (or at least those from F-Droid) cannot read tags from music files correctly. That means some tags containing non-ASCII characters are read incorrectly, resulting in displaying album/artist/song names garbled and, what is worse, arbitrarily splitting songs of a single album to two sets, one with a garbled album name and one with the right album name. Additionally, the track numbers may be interpreted incorrectly, resulting in a wrong order of the songs. It looks like almost all Android music players use some common, broken Android library.
A special exception is Vanilla Music, which apparently uses its own, working tag reading library. But even this player is not without problems. It has already happened to me in the past that Vanilla Music couldn’t find new songs uploaded to a phone, whatever I tried, including rescanning the whole media library and reboots. And now I experienced another problem. This time, Vanilla Music search function stopped working, it couldn’t find anything in the displayed lists of artists, albums and songs. After rescanning the whole media library (which takes quite a lot of time), all the lists were split in two parts, sorted separately of each other (i.e. A … Z A … Z instead of A … Z) and one of them being searchable while the other one not. So I ended up with split lists and only one part of each searchable. After more rescanning and reboot attempts, I gave up.
A possible explanation could be that Vanilla Music got damaged by update of my phone from Android 10 to Android 11. So I uninstalled Vanilla Music, installed it again and it started working. Apparently a problem of category 3, a bug somewhere. The lesson learned is that whenever I experience problems with Vanilla Music database, I should reinstall the application instead of attempting to fix its database.
Leave a Reply