[files disappear on reboot...then no artists]

The "no access" is only in Playlists. Nothing has changed. I do however get artist names and album images when I add new songs to a playlist. It is not the end of the world since the lists still play music. Perhaps a factory rest is on the cards when I have time.

[files disappear on reboot...then no artists]

Today all my songs in my playlists appear without artist names...and no artwork. Whereas the names and artwork are visible outside of playlists.

This is what started my problems a few months ago. I rebooted to see if that helped...then all artist names disappeared for a long time. With a few reinstalls, updates, and a new SD card, the problem continues. 

[files disappear on reboot...then no artists]

This all started to happened about late November before I upgraded to a 256 card and before upgrading android. I reboot infrequently but I noticed the re-scanning problem then. I installed and reinstalled and it worked for a while.

I have reinstalled 4 times since then and spent far too much time (many hours) trying to solve this issue. Turning auto scan off worked initially.. then didn't. Since I just reinstalled for the 4th time 2 days ago, it is probably not worth re-granting permission, since I had to do it then. I did just change the setting of PA Settings > Misc > File Access Legacy Mode. Maybe that will work. But, as mentioned I don't reboot too often, so it may take a while to find out.  At least it seems to load now after 20 minutes, and I can play my playlists with the file names in the meantime. (I have most backed up).

I have been using Itunes for 15 years to play music on my desktop with almost no problems. I don't know why android music players are so buggy. I have tired dozens of android music players, and only Poweramp seems to load their playlists correctly and also connect correctly with our cars.

 

[files disappear on reboot...then no artists]

The phone just updated the software. It is Android version 11, Samsung UI version 3.1. 

I restarted to test it again. I waited 30 seconds and then opened Poweramp. When I click "artists" it says "doesn't look like anything there".   The album image is missing. However if I click on "songs", it looks like the songs are there. They play with the images intact. But when I check my playlists, the songs load and play, but they are not identified by the artist and the images are missing. This has been the problem for the last 2 weeks.

....Now 15 minutes into the reboot, it is still scanning the library, with nearly half of the 24k songs accounted for from the 256 SD card, but zero playlists in the library settings (even though as mentioned he songs load and play, but they are not identified by the  artist and the images are missing.) 

...Now 20 minutes in, the library is rescanned and the playlists are available with artist listed and images intact.

[files disappear on reboot...then no artists]

 

I simply do a normal "restart".

I uninstalled Poweramp, then reinstalled (the 4th time in the last month) and after waiting an hour or two, the album artists names finally became visible.

I just now rebooted the phone with a new SD card (as of 2 weeks ago) but this time, I kept autoscan. All the 22k song disappeared when the phone turned back on, but they became visible again after about 10-15 minutes of autoscan, so that is an improvement.

[files disappear on reboot...then no artists]

 All my files disappear on a reboot. I saw a similar post earlier.. But none of the suggestions worked including turning autoscan off. I need to do a rescan each time.

But what is really strange is that the artists are no longer identified just songs.

Any ideas?

[apply gain to "normalize"]

Thanks so much for the thorough and intelligent answers. I downloaded foobar2000. I did the scan by track method on my most recent purchases (since I predominantly use playlists). Easy and quick. I'll test them when I can.

[apply gain to "normalize"]

I have seen a few threads on this subject, but I am still confused.

I have "apply gain" selected in the Replay Gain setting. Yet many of my new songs in a playlist will come in at quite dramatic volume differences - which of course can be quite annoying if away from the volume dial.

I tired Mp3gain which is time consuming when working on different files (and I have thousands)... and it doesn't work on m4a (AAC) files. Audacity reprocesses the files with audio match and is time consuming as well. Any ideas?