andrewilley

That's really what it's intended for, just to see what's been most recently added. Not really intended for long-term use going back over years/decades of music collecting. Andre

@maxmp Thanks for the clarification Max. In this specific context though, there's nothing in the exported #EXT tags that Ted415 would need to reinstate, as ratings will already have been restored via settings Import. I think he can safely forget #EXT lines for ease of comparison and editing. I knew about radio streams using #EXTINF title data, although that does get overwritten by any broadcast song details which can make the Category view a bit confusing when random old song titles from the previous listening session are displayed as the main title instead of showing the more useful station name. Maybe titles in stream lists could retain the station name in such cases? (Although that would mean the Player Screen and Library List needing to use different %title% strings, which might mess up animations) I assume by "EXTING" song titles you meant "EXTINF", but I've never seen that title text used anywhere for songs in PA - even when audio files have no tag data of their own? Reading "#PLAYLIST:" names might actually be quite useful though, as parsing them for display as list titles could deal with the complaints from users about seeing filename extenders (".m3u") in the Playlists category view. Andre

All of the #EXT lines are ignored by PA anyway, it only needs the path to the song file. The white lines in the All Songs list are the ones that are also found in the other pane, so it's probably the white ones that you want to remove from the All Songs list. I'm not sure how to block-select and remove based on matched comparison results off-hand, I've never done that. Might be worth Googling, e.g. https://superuser.com/questions/562208/notepad-compare-two-files-and-remove . The Unix diff command would do it automatically (assuming the files are sorted), but that depends on how Unix savvy you are. Andre

@Ventdelinfini As Max has said in the past, the experimental high-res feature is not always compatible with every manufacturer's ROM and/or 3.5mm output, also also disabling DVC may assist in making it work. Have you tried using some of the other output methods - AudioTrack, AAudio, etc? There is obviously no point trying to use high-res on a tiny phone speaker anyway, but 3.5mm output (if it's available) is more likely to work. Andre

Don't worry, I'm keeping an eye on this as potential post-edit spam. Giving it the benefit of the doubt for now. Andre

@andrewz As I said, PA should not crash just because storage has become unmounted or a file is missing. It should try the next file, and then after a few more tries fail gracefully and stop with a message saying "too many failed files". If it is crashing, it's due to something about the storage crashing rather than unmounting. You could try reformatting the SD Card and copy everything back to it, but it could be the card is faulty or the phone is not contacting to it properly. Andre

There are some existing requests for the various AlbumSortOrder, ArtistSortOrder, etc ID3/Vorbis tags to be supported if present, but currently these aren't even read into the database and I suspect any future implementation might have quite a long wait. I don't see any point in creating dummy files for your purposes though. Just copy all of your music subfolders & songs into one temporary holding folder ("Temp Music") on your new device in one go. Then you can simply use a file explorer app to very quickly move a bunch of those folders over into your final master music folder (e.g. "My Music"), task-switch to PA and do a rescan, then switch back to your file explorer and move another batch of folders, switch to Pa and rescan, etc. As you say, if you do the older stuff in year batches of subfolders it shouldn't be too onerous a task. Andre

It's just to try to prevent people from creating extra "sock puppet" accounts to generate fake voting interest in their pet requests. Andre

@andrewz I'd never suggesting hot-swapping SD Cards anyway without unmounting first, quick way to kill them. I turn my phone off before messing with the SIM/SD Card slot. Andre

Poweramp's alphabetical sorting process uses plain ASCII text sorting, so the above is exactly how content should be sorted (individual digits are just another type of alphabetical character as far a sorting goes, they are not consecutively processed to generate larger numbers). To force numerical processing of alpha-sorted text, you need to pad out the smaller numbers with enough leading zeros to cover all of your possibilities - so 0001, 0002, 0010, 0011, 0100, 0101, etc. Exactly the same principle as you'd use for prefixing track numbers as 01, 02, 03, 10, 11, 12, etc for filenames in album folders. There is a existing Feature Request for 'smart' sorting options, which would include numeric interpretation of consecutive strings of digits, which you can vote for here (once your account has enough activity): Andre

@andrewz If storage unmounts, or a filesystem error is encountered during playback, PA should first try to skip the problem song and then after a few consecutive skipped songs it should give up and stop playback. It should not crash though. Andre

@flyingdutchman Thanks. So it's track-by-track rather than a batch process. @Ted415 I guess it would be possible to do a bit of convoluted file management to work this out. In PA, first place all of the songs from the 'All Songs' category list into one huge temporary playlist (so the whole of your music collection is visible in one new list). Then use the 'Export' feature in the Playlists menu to save all of your playlists (tick for both internal and external) to new M3U8 files in a temporary folder location. Then use a decent text editor program on a PC (I personally use Notepad++) to run a comparison between that overarching 'All Songs' playlist and each of the smaller playlist files. That will show you all of the lines that are in the All Songs list but that do not appear in the smaller playlists. Alphabetically sorting the lists in the editor, and removing the #EXT lines, before running the comparison might make the results easier to follow. If you delete the matching lines from the All Songs M3U8 file after each comparison, you will gradually whittle it down to containing only the songs that appear in no other playlists. A bit of a repetitive faff, but it would only need to be done once. Andre

That's good to know. Is it able to create a complete list of all such songs, or is it just song-by-song info? Andre

Poweramp does not provide that information. A song can be in one or more playlists, but you'd need to check each playlist to find it. There is a Request to be able to see what playlist(s) any specific song might already be in, but not the other way around. As you can prevent duplicate songs from being added to playlists, you could try re-adding all of the desired songs again, which would cause only the missing ones to be appended. It's possible that the third-party app Music Playlist Manager might be able to provide the information you want, but I'm not sure. Andre

Normally you would start by doing an Export Settings/Data from your old phone to backup all your settings/database info/etc. Then copy your whole music collection over to a new folder on your new device. Easier if you can just swap the SD Card over of course, but not all phones have that option now. I prefer using my own named master folder, such as "My Music" or "Audio" rather than the system "Music" folder for greater control. Then install PA on the new phone, point Settings=>Library=>Music Folders to your new folder and let PA scan everything. Then re-import the backup file and all your settings/etc will be restored. That won't restore 'Date Added to Library' values though. The only way I can think of to do that reliably is what you did originally, which is to start with just a few subfolders of music, do a rescan, add some more folders, rescan, etc. Laborious with that many folders, but it will work better if you can do it in batches. Andre

I don't think there's going to be an easy answer to this one. The Date Added To Library field is mainly intended to allow users to find their most recently added new songs (with folders picking up a simulated date based on one of the contained songs). It's not really intended for later sorting of a whole music collection, and as far as I know the information is not included in the Export Data feature - which backs up user-generated content such as song Ratings, song Play Counts, etc. I could be wrong on that as I've never tried, but my gut feeling is Date Added means the date added to the current library, not an old one. You may be able to use Date Modified, it the files were created/modified in the order that you purchased them and added them to the storage. There may also be something you could do with that Sort Order tag which you created. Poweramp doesn't use it, but a sophisticated batch tag editor on a computer might be able to run a script to prefix the current folder names with a four- or five- digit number which you could then use for Folder sorting (a bit like prefixing song titles with a track number). Andre

Starting another app should not cause Poweramp to stop playing in the background, unless that app requests to take over audio focus - such as another music player, video player, etc. As @6b6561 has said, you can disable the Audio Focus response which may help. Short audio focus changes (such as a Notification noise, or some short spoken navigation guidance) normally will either pause playback or dip the volume, depending on what option you have got enabled in PA Settings=>Audio=>Audio Focus. There is also the less-likely possibility that your Android device is restricting Poweramp from running as a background process (which might also cause issues with screen-off playback). Which app are you having problems with? Andre

Also worth contacting the source company that sold the files ("Bleep") to explain they are creating out-of-spec files, which some applications can't process. I agree that fixing the files is the best overall solution (especially if there are only a few offenders) but if there are a lot of these in the wild then it might be worth trying to create a work-around for them in Poweramp too, as some other apps have done. Andre

Internal playlists - i.e. ones created using Poweramp's 'Add to Playlist' function rather than read from an M3U file - are only stored within Poweramp's internal database, they do not have any associated physical files on storage. There are methods to allow them to be accessed by external apps (such as @flyingdutchman's Music Playlist Manager) but that would need to be programmed into any syncing software by its author. You can Export any internal Poweramp playlists to physical files (usually for backup purposes, they will be created as .M3U8 files) if you want. Then you could use those M3U8 files instead of the original internally playlists (which should be removed to avoid confusion). The physical files will get updated whenever you make any subsequent changes to the lists by adding, removing or moving songs. However the files will still contain absolute Android path references, which won't work on Windows. With a bit of work you could edit the files and change the paths to use relative paths - but that would be a one-off task, you wouldn't want to be having to do it regularly. Andre

You would need to run the import command with the 'Music Folders Selection' option unticked, as otherwise it will try to restore your old (absolute) Music Folders paths - which clearly won't work on your new device. The only Export/Import option which might have stored/restored the Date Added to Library info (for songs) would be 'Ratings and Track Statistics', but I don't think that information is backed up from the database - only Ratings, Play Count, and Last Played details. Date Added to Library is a pretty transient piece of information, referring only to the first time any given song file was found and added to the current installation's database, so I would expect it to get reset for a newly scanned device. Folder 'dates' (whether that be Year, or Last Modified Date, or Date Added to Library) are just based on the date values of individual contained songs. Andre

Yes, the early instances of the cover images seemed the mostly likely cause to me too, as confirmed by @6b6561 . It may be that Max can devise a workaround anyway, as some other programs such as foobar2000 and VLC appear to have done. Editing the tags with regular editors might prove more difficult though. Andre

No thanks. In fact Google Messages is disabled on my devices, I've got quite enough messaging apps with my preferred WhatsApp, regular text messages, FB Messenger, and all the other ones built into other social media systems. Andre

Some skins support this. And you can remove thumbnails from library lists very easily by changing the View type to one of the more compact List versions. Andre

No, a single message to a text contact, or WhatsApp etc, appears at the top of the screen with empty space below it. New messages get added further down the page until scrolling becomes necessary. Just like Poweramp does with short lists. Andre

Yes, I've just installed the app "CIFS Documents Provider" and get the same result. I can Export settings files to my chosen NAS folder via CIFS, but even though the file appears to have saved correctly onto the NAs, I can't re-import it directly (all files are greyed out as not available for importing). Andre