Si64

Having just posted in the main build thread, I've now found this one so tagging along. Car is a 2022 Seat Ateca. It does have Android Auto capability but I don't use it because I prefer the default maps and don't want it constantly using my phone data. Anyway, I've just discovered that my album art isn't displaying over Bluetooth either. I've tried all the settings on the PA Settings > Album Art page and nothing seem to make it work. I have several other music apps and all display the album art over Bluetooth so this definitely seems to be an anomaly with PA. It's a shame because I've just come back to using it, as it's the best sounding app out there, but it does have a number of niggles which are hard to live with.

Having just moved back to PA, I'm finding a few niggles. Sorry if this has already been discussed, but the Album Art is not showing in my car over Bluetooth. It shows with every other music app I've tried. I've gone through the Album Art settings in PA, and can't see anything amiss. The Always Send Album Art switch is On. Any suggestions? Thanks, Simon.

@maxmpGreat, I'll look forward to it. 👍

Hi Max, Does that relate to the issues we've been discussing regarding tracks not being very randomly distributed when adding to shuffled queues / playlists?

Yes, I've found that starting a new '+Shuffled' Playlist or a new '>>Shuffled' Queue results in a completely randomised Playlist or Queue. The problem starts when you add further albums / artists to those existing Queues / Playlists. That's when all the newly added tracks all seem to congregate towards the top. I might have found a workaround, and funnily enough this is how I used to do it years ago, but for some reason it started to not work properly. Starting from Albums library, select several random albums (or copy an existing Playlist), and create a new Playlist. Start playing in normal mode, then switch to Shuffle All mode (the basic one with no dots). The remaining tracks play in what seems to be a randomly shuffled sequence, and adding further tracks seems to result in the newly added tracks (NOT +Shuffled) appearing scattered throughout the remaining playlist. The 'problem' with this method is that you can't actually view the queue which is currently playing, but I guess that isn't a deal breaker. The only way I could see where the new tracks were added was to scroll through the tracks with the >> button until I came across them. The other issue is that it's very easy to accidentally touch the Shuffle button on the Now Playing screen, which will totally mess up the playing queue, and would be extremely annoying if you'd got a good way into a long Playlists and it all got 'reset' unintentionally. I would prefer adding to a Shuffled Queue to work as it should, but the above might be an interim solution. If only there was a way to disable the Shuffle button on the Now Playing screen. 🤔

Thanks for the confirmation, Andre. I have to respectfully disagree with your Playlist findings though. I have just selected a small existing playlist of about 250 tracks, and created a new shuffled playlist from it: Open existing Playlist > Select All > Add to Shuffled Playlist > New Playlist. The above results in a new, fully randomly shuffled playlist. However, when adding another album to that playlist, using the Add Shuffled option, the newly added tracks are still bunched at the top of the playlist, and may of them are actually next each other, so you get two or three new tracks placed together. As an example, I added AC/DC's Power Up album to an existing playlist of 268 tracks and as can be seen, the new AC/DC tracks are all bunched towards the top, with a number added sequentially: So, in my experience, the issue exist in both Queues and Playlists when Adding Shuffled. I wonder, could the issue perhaps lie within the functioning of the Shuffle Randomisation switch? If it were set to the Less Random option, then it could be argued that the shuffle is working reasonably correctly. But setting it to the Full Random setting, logically should scatter new tracks fully across a while Queue / Playlist, in 'complete randomisation', as it's states. It's this which doesn't appear to be functioning correctly.

Sorry, I lied. It's still not working right. So, if I take these steps: 1. Select items (or all of a Playlist) and Add Shuffled to Queue 2. Start playing Queue 3. Add further items to Queue (Add Shuffled) The newly added items are Shuffled, but all seem to be towards the top of the queue. A single item added, even in Add Shuffled mode seems to be added to the top of the queue, under the current track playing, so when you add a single item to the Queue, it's always played next. I've tried adjusting the Shuffle Randomisation but it doesn't seem to make any difference. Could it be something to do with the number of tracks in a queue? I currently have 4600, and if I add, say, another 10 tracks, they are Shuffled, but I'd say only within about the top 100 tracks in the queue. Just to try to clarify further, this is part of my 4600 track Queue. The track playing is Sugar Mice, which can be seen highlighted in the list. I then Shuffle Added five tracks from the debut Bad Company album, and you can see that the five tracks have been added right below the track currently playing, rather than throughout the rest of the queue.

And it does! Thanks very much. 👍

I did several tests on this when it was first introduced, and found that the shuffled tracks were indeed added after the currently playing track, but if that was at the end of an alphabetically sorted playlist, then all the "add shuffled" tracks would appear at the end of the playlist. So, if you happened to be playing Whitesnake, all the shuffled tracks would be bunched together at the end, but if you happened to be playing Aerosmith, they'd be shuffled more evenly throughout the playlist. For me, this didn't really work as an option, so I've not used the function. On another player I use, when a playlist is shuffled, a new Queue is created, with the tracks in random order, but numbered sequentially. So, when new tracks are "add shuffled", and you are, say, playing track 200 out of 2000, it will add the tracks after track 200 (ignoring those tracks previously played), shuffled within the playlist, but not dependent on the track title / artist currently playing.

Actually, scrap the above. It worked once but now it's back to its old tricks again. 😐

I've just found one way around it: Settings > Audio > Output > OpenSL ES Output > Bluetooth (Settings cog) > No Duck That stops the music temporarily coming through the phone speaker, but it completely cuts out what's playing on PA rather than just ducking the sound.

That setting was on, so I toggled it off and the issue is the same. Just to clarify, it's playing through the Bluetooth device fine, but when a notification comes through, the music PA is playing switches to the phone speaker for the duration of the Notification sound, so, like, one or two seconds.

Not sure if this is a known bug, but I'm having an issue with Short Audio Focus. When PA is playing through a speaker or headphones (Bluetooth), and a message notification comes through, the music pauses and the notification is heard through the speaker or headphones, but the music blasts out of the phone speaker for the duration of the notification. This doesn't happen with other media players, but seems to have been an issue since Android 12. I've tried different settings, and resetting to default, but changing the Audio Short Focus setting doesn't seem to do anything. Cheers, Simon

Ah! I think I know what the difference is. On my old phone, PA only had access to the Music folder, which was on the SD card, so it never actually 'saw' the playlists in the Internal storage. That must be why they weren't displayed twice. Trouble is, if I move the playlists to another folder, than the other apps may not see them.

I don't know how I did it before, but PA only had one set of playlists showing on my old phone. As you can't sort by Album > Track No., I used to periodically import the system playlists into PA, then rename them, but I still don't remember them coming up with the file extension displayed. I'll have to go back to my old phone and run some tests.

OK, but where is this mystical internal storage? Having them stored within PA is good, as it gives me an additional backup which nothing else can interfere with.

Thanks for your full explanation. I know what to do now. If I create new playlists within PA from the existing playlists, then those can be independent to PA and I can continue using the other playlists on the other apps.

Hi Andre, Thanks, yes, these are all external playlists shared between several music apps. So, if I import the playlists into PA, can I then rename them to get rid of the .m3u appendage? As I said, I didn't have this issue with my old phone. PA just imported the playlists without including .m3u in the playlist name, and if I accidentally imported a duplicate playlist, it would add .1 the title. I did import the PA settings from the old phone. Do you think the old playlists are still being picked up? Where would these be stored? Thanks, Simon.

Hi, I'm tearing my hair out trying to manage the playlists in PA. I've recently switched to a new phone, and moved across all my settings, but I can't work out where Android now stores the system playlists, and I keep finding them doubled up in PA. I do use more than one music player, and like to sync my playlists across them all. This was much easier when all music players used the system playlists, but since most of them now have independent playlists, it makes the job rather cumbersome. I've had suggestions before to use a playlist manager, but these never seems to work properly. The phone I had before (Samsung S10+) had the playlists stored in the Music folder in the Internal storage, whilst the music files themselves were on the SD card. As this new phone (Samsung S22+) doesn't have an SD card, all the music files and playlists are stored in the Music folder in the main internal storage. I managed to import my playlists from the old phone to most of my music apps, but for some reason, PA has decided to display two of each playlist, one with .m3u appended to the playlist name. This doesn't happen with other players, which just display the playlist name. I then rename the playlists within PA, and all is well until it scans again and re-imports the playlists from the Music folder, with the .m3u appended once again to the playlist name. If I delete the playlists with .m3u appended within PA, then the playlist files are deleted from the Music folder, and I have to replace them by exporting from another music player app, and so the wheel turns again. I do seem to recall having this issue before, but I can't remember how I resolved it. I think before, PA was picking up duplicate playlists from somewhere, but I don't think this is the case now as the playlists it imports are the ones in the Music folder. So, my questions are - how can I get PA to just display one set of playlists, but without the .m3u appended to the file name, and secondly, am I storing these playlists in the right place, or is there somewhere else hidden away that Android keeps system playlists? If I export the playlists from the Samsung Music app, they go into the Music folder, which does make me think that's the correct place, but is there something I'm missing? Thanks for any advice. Simon.

Agree with the above. It's probably more trouble than it's worth. I'd have just liked to have a duplicate playlist in iTunes, which I could then have kept manually updating once it was created. I used to have one, many moons ago when I had an iPhone 4S, but since I moved to Android I let the iTunes playlist lapse and now it's going to be a job to recreate it. I guess there's better things to be doing anyway. 😄

I seem to recall there was also an issue with certain characters in file names such as track titles. You can't have a forward slash as part of a file name in Windows, so I think any tracks with slashes in the titles (such as Intro / Track One) in the playlist text file, didn't match up with those tracks in the iTunes library in Windows.

Thanks, yeah, I have done that, but still a good number of tracks were missing in the imported iTunes playlist. I'll try it again on a smaller scale. Trying to manage a playlist of over 3000 tracks might have been a little ambitious. 😄

I only use iTunes as a reference library for my PC, but I don't use any Apple devices. It would just be good to be able to sync my playlists, but I guess there's no real need as they can be backed up as text files anyway. Thanks. 🙂

I assume by "external file-based lists - such as M3U files", you mean any pre-existing M3U playlist? So, if for example I create a playlist in Samsung's own music app, then export that playlist to internal storage, it would then become an "external file-based list", which can be imported into PA or other music players? One of the issues is that Android keeps changing the location of system playlists, and some music apps need to be told where they are. I've also been trying to find a way to copy an Android based playlist into iTunes, but have so far been unsuccessful. I can copy a playlist to a text file, then change the file paths to the iTunes library, but it will either not work at all, or will import the playlist but not all the tracks are included.

@andrewilley - thanks for that. Yes, I have several backups of my playlists in other music players on the device. It's a bit more complex than it used to be, as now many music apps have their own playlists, updating one means updating them all indiviually. I'm sure there's an easier way, but it's what I've got used to now.