Troubleshooting missing/duplicated albums and/or missing artwork when browsing the Media Library on your local Android device

[Hi-Fi Cast Developer]

Hi-Fi Cast relies on the Android 'Media Storage' system app to scan your music files and build a database of albums/tracks/artists etc and also extract the artwork from the media files. You can confirm if the problem you are having is caused by Media Storage by opening another music player that uses Media Storage (eg BubbleUPnP) and see if that also has the same problem.

If the problem is missing albums, then you may be able to get Media Storage to re-scan your media by unmounting and re-inserting your SD card and/or restarting your phone/tablet

Otherwise, to force MediaStorage to scan your media and/or re-create missing thumbnails you can either try a Media Scanner app - or you can clear the Media Storage data (see below).

If the problem persists, try using the 'Files' app to move your music into a different folder.

The presence of any file named .nomedia in the folder containing your media or any parent folder will prevent the music files from being processed by the Android Media Scanner.

Please note that there are some audio files types that Media Storage will ignore (depending on the make/model of your phone). At the time of writing these include AIFF, DSD and DFF.

Force rescan using a Media Scanner app

An example of a media scanner app is Media.Re.Scan . There are others available in the Play Store.

How to Clear Media Storage data

Please be aware that the following procedure may delete any playlists you have created with other apps that also use Media Storage.

You can clear the Media Storage data by going into Android Settings, then select the Apps (or Application Manager on some phones) and find the entry for the Media Storage app (you'll probably need to tap 'Show system apps' from the toolbar menu to see the Media Storage app - or on some versions of Android select the 'ALL' apps tab). Once you've found the Media Storage app, tap it to see the app details. From here you need to tap the 'Clear Data' button (one some versions of Android you will have to tap 'Storage' first before you see the 'Clear Data' button).

Once you've deleted the Media Storage data you need to convince it to re-scan your media. Unmounting and re-inserting your SD card (and/or restarting your device) should do the trick. The only way I know of to monitor the progress of the re-scan is to look in the following folder and see how many thumbnails have been created:
/storage/emulated/0/Android/data/com.android.providers.media/albumthumbs/

In the Hi-Fi Cast app, you'll need to hit refresh from the toolbar menu to see any changes. It may take quite a while for your media to get re-scanned. As a very very rough guide, typical scanning speeds can be around 5 minutes per 1000 files.

[Hi-Fi Cast Developer]

Update:

On Android 10 and above if you clear the Media Storage data you'll also need to delete the .thumbnails folder as follows:

• Open your Files app and navigate to Internal Storage > Music
• Delete the .thumbnails folder (if you don't see it then you'll need to go to Settings in your Files app and enable the setting to show hidden files)
• Go back to Hi-Fi Cast and tap 'Refresh' from the 3-dot menu at the top right of the Music Library screen (this will clear the app's image cache)
• You might also need to close the app and open it again