Why does my Samsung Galaxy S crash ("Not enough space in music database") when sorting by artist?

Question

Had my Samsung Galaxy S for a week or so, and my new micro-SD card arrived a few days ago, loaded all my music onto it, listened to various albums no problem.

Now when I go into the built-in Music Player app and select the "Artists" tab at the top, Music Player closes with a "Not enough space in music database" error in the notification bar with a red warning triangle sign.

All the other tabs (All, Playlists, Albums & Genres) work with no problem, but as soon as I hit the Artists tab it crashes out. It's a 32GB SD-card with about 25GB of music on it, the internal SD card is almost empty with no music on it at all. On the PC I'm a SqueezePlayer and Last.Fm user, so I'm pretty sure all my tags are setup right (Last.FM lets you know in your feed if you've got incorrect artist/track info, and SqueezePlayer lives or dies by the quality of your tagging).

Searching for this on the web, all I can find is other people with various sized music collections and SD-cards (8, 16 & 32GB) all having this problem and the only suggestions are to download different music apps from the Market. No one seems to have a real solution. That can't be right can it? I previously had an HTC Magic Android phone with a full 8GB micro-SD and much of the same music with no problems playing.

There must be some way to get the built-in music player app working properly? Does anyone know what file/where is this database and whether wiping/clearing it would help?

Answer 1

Found this thread on the Vibrant section of the XDA Devs forum: Not Enough Space in Music Database? (pretty sure the Vibrant is a US carrier-specific version of the Galaxy, with this weird obsession US networks seem to have for making up alternative names for devices).

Maybe it has something to do with how the app handles various artists and/or unknown artists.

I added all my music, then deleted tracks from various artist albums until it worked again. I then put back the various artist album track and it didn't work, as expected.

I thought this was artist based, but when I got it working again--by deleting the track mentioned above--and then added a track for a various artist album by an artist that already existed, the app crashed too.

I then thought it might be song based. So I removed that song and then added a set of songs. However, it unexpectantly worked.

The difference with the set of songs added above is that they weren't part of a various artist album. They were a new artist, but the main album artist wasn't Various with a Contributing artist of the actual artist name. Instead, the Album Artist was the artist name and the contributing artist was left blank (or had the same name).

So, it is that the music app doesn't understand how to handle various artist albums?

Plugged SD card into my PC, did a search for files named *.mp3 with "various" in the artist tag, moved all of them off the card. Plugged card back into Galaxy again, waiting for media indexing to finish, I can now view the Artists column without the app crashing. Still can't Search in the app without crashing, but I have a few more compilation type albums so will try spotting and removing all of them to see if it helps.

Update Nov 2010: The Music player included in the official Samsung Froyo (Android 2.2) update, seems to have fixed this problem, or at least made it so that I can have the majority of my tracks on the phone without this problem showing up.