An enormous disappointment

[PowerampisSOdisappointing]

Poweramp has been recommended to me several times with varying degrees of enthuasim. So I had a closer look recently.. and quickly went from being impressed to finding it an enormous disappointment.

It's readily apparent that Poweramp is a well designed, even polished music player. Certainly it has a few bugs, omissions & odd design choices, but it is obviously quite a bit better than most music players. It practically oozes decent design and easy (if not quite intuitive) operation. So much so that I was actually looking for the purchase page when I was surprised to find a glaring design fault. And worse, the actual deal breaker to me being that the clamor to fix the issue in questionn has languished, unaddressed for years on the developer's to do list (!).

That is incredibly poor support and no amount of good UI design excuses that kind of developer problem.

I am referring to how badly Poweramp screws up the use of song ratings. You can't import song (star) ratings from say iTunes. The developer certainly could have made information like that importable. But he didn't bother. Okay, fine. So say we spend dozens, if not hundreds of hours re-rating thousands of tracks. At least we're done then, right? Nope. There is no permanence to the information. It isn't added to tags and the developer doesn't allow us to backup, export or import ratings from Poweramp's proprietary database.

If you buy a new phone, you can as you would expect to transfer your paid Poweramp licence to it. But the developer almost gloats at making you manually re-rate thousands of songs yet again. Ditto if you reset your phone, the app crashes, you rename a music folder or any number of other things. Too bad, you just lost four thousand song ratings again.

It would be trivial for him to at least codge together a song rating backup utility. Users have been clamoring for this for years. But no. He managed to add it to his todo list several years ago and he has pointedly ignored it ever since.

Just another red vs blue argument. A feature pet peeve? Hardly. A lot of people use star ratings rather than playlists (or use both) to manage their music collections. And have spent hundreds, perhaps even thousands of hours massaging song classifications. It hardly matters whether it is 25% or 60% of users that put a high value on song ratings. It is a core feature, essential to large numbers of users that a competent developer wouldn't ignore. And a real mystery why the developer does just that with such a coveted feature when it would be truly trivial for him to provide some import /export functionalty. Ideally as an embedded tag, thereby having permanence and portability. But at least being able to save (backup) song ratings.

And since someone will still label this a pet peeve, we might as well add some of those as well. More features that the developer can add to his todo list. And then ignore. Swipe screen to adjust volume? How obvious is that for a music player? Easier volume adjustment as MX player and scores of others already do. Cover flow? Customizable menu lists? Or a whole bunch of other gee wiz, that was obvious features already voiced in these forums and /or languishing for years on the developer's dusty todo lists?

As to song ratings, there just isn't a valid excuse that such an obvious and in-demand feature wasn't addressed years ago. The developer ought to be embarassed about it. Really embarassed.

[andrewilley]

This question has been brought up many times before and is on a lot of people's wishlists. I personally happen to agree with you that it would be a useful feature (not exactly a deal-breaker, but certainly very nice to have).

As it currently stands though, Poweramp does not read or write song ratings from files. However it does allow you to create your own ratings from within the app, but these are not exported into the actual music files so they can't be seen by other apps.

Andre

[PowerampisSOdisappointing]

Ignoring a highly sought after feature for ~ 5 years (so far) will be a deal breaker for a lot of people.

If he couldn't find an afternoon to address this in all the years its been on his todo list, there is no credible reason to believe that he will ever get around to it.