Stop Neverending Live Sync

I'm not sure if this is the appropriate thread for this... feel free to redirect me to the correct one if necessary...

Is there any way to stop Windows Live Sync? I began syncing the music libraries between my laptop (Vista) and my desktop (7, rc1) about twenty two hours ago.

As far as I can tell, all of the music has transferred... I have scrolled through both libraries, and everything is there, song for song, artist by artist, on the two machines... with one glaring abnormality.

At the end of the desktop library is a folder called "Unknown Artist" that isn't on my laptop (the laptop is older, and is the source of all of the music; the desktop is a week old, and is on the receiving end). This folder seems to be the problem.

I think this folder may be one I deleted from my laptop about a year ago (don't ask). It used to reappear in my library from time to time, but it hasn't done that in many months.

At this point, I figure whatever folder Live Sync is trying to sync won't be synced. And as long as the folder is tied up with Live Sync, I can't simply delete it (I've tried a few times).

Anyone know how to safely interrupt the sync?

Thanks!

Nevermind. Its fixed.

johngalt said:

Would you be so kind as to tell us what you did so that future readers will know what to do to solve this problem if they encounter it?

Sure!

The first step is to correctly diagnose the cause of the problem... which was the step I tripped up on.

As the music library was syncing, I was watching the messages as they displayed on the bottom right of the WMP. One of these messages was "Retrieving media info for an unknown album". It regularly appeared during the sync, so I assumed it was part of the sync process, and it was trying to retrieve the media info from my laptop. So when that message stayed on my WMP for 36 hours, I thought the sync was stuck... unfinished.

Wrong assumption!

It was a setting on the WMP itself. It was trying to find album art/artist info on the internet, not in my laptop. And it couldn't find any album art/artist info because the "album" itself wasn't an album, it was a playlist... of 30 underground/alt songs from the mid-eighties... accidently saved (and repeatedly deleted) in my laptop WMP library... by a wma-to-mp3 conversion gone wild.

To fix the problem, I did the usual: right-click on the WMP taskbar to open the dialog box, tick the "show menu bar" box, click on "tools", click on "options", select the library tab, and untick the "Retrieve additional information from the internet" box, "apply" the change, and "ok" my way out of there.

Apparently. WMP will try to fill in missing album art/artist info for any new music it acquires... even when it gets those albums thru sync.

No network & internet problem. No live sync problem. Not even a WMP problem. Just a WMP doing what its settings were telling it to do.

Mark it up as user error.

Yeah, the message is a bit vague.

And I actually laughed at your last line. Does that mean M$ has driven me mad?

ahhhhhh... quite hoover dam interesting....

altho thank goodness i go thru WMP when it first installs and tick that option off, all of them actually... so i may have never have known about this problem... good stuff to know here... glad you came back to report your findings.. thumbs up.