Arema63 Posted July 9, 2018 Share Posted July 9, 2018 My trusty Poweramp 2.0.10-build-588-play currently gives me a headache. The total number of my music album collection is puzzling. According to Poweramp, I have 149 albums of music. Nevertheless, Google Play Music and Poweramp's competitor (!) show 150 albums. Both the latter are correct! Troubleshooting method proceeds as (1) Rescan, (2) Full Rescan, (3) Turn off 'Auto Scan', (4) Clear Poweramp cache, (5) Clear Poweramp data ... the last thing is deleting the music folder in the micro SD card and hoping a miracle would happen -- next, copying back all my music collection from my computer to the micro SD card. Insert back again the micro SD card into my Poweramp smartphone. And ... still 149 albums as seen by Poweramp! Anyone from my Poweramp buddies had the same odd experience? Visually speaking the odd number of albums in Poweramp doesn't look nice because why does the competitor show the correct total of albums and of course it really looks better! By the way, the competitor is 'made in France'. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrewilley Posted July 9, 2018 Share Posted July 9, 2018 Is the content count correct if you view in Folders mode, perhaps one folder is not getting scanned? Sometimes that is down to file or folder names which include odd characters for example.To track this down any further we'd need to find out which specific album is missing (hopefully it will be early in the 150, but knowing the way luck works it will probably be the very last one!) Andre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arema63 Posted July 9, 2018 Author Share Posted July 9, 2018 Kudos to your feedback, sir. This morning I made an experiment with a different 2015 smartphone but with the same brand, Asus. I copied the same number of music albums from my PC to a similar size Samsung SD card 32 GB. Poweramp & its competitor are also installed on the ol' Asus Zenfone 4 (2015). Finished copying the music albums/files, I inserted the SD card, turned on the smartphone. Wait for another minute and ran Poweramp first. Checked its music folder and -- oh, to my dismay it still missing one item, still 149. Such a contrast with Poweramp's competitor and Google Play Music. Both showed correctly, 150 albums. Even I tried to compare both music apps folders and somehow Poweramp's misarranged the albums! My assumption was if this bug only happened on Asus smartphones! Probably to dig it deeper and search for answers I have to buy a new smartphone. Of course a different brand! I am steering clear of purchasing Huwai after reading many negative comments about Poweramp's skins not working correctly. What an expensive option! On my PC, I use IDTE - ID3 Tag Editor to seek the anomalies of my music folders. Whereas on Android platform, I use Automatag to do the same task except the latter is chiefly for searching the correct album art. Both applications are great except it cannot troubleshoot the cause of that mysterious total number of albums. Once again, thanks for your help. Cheers from an old dude from a tropical country. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrewilley Posted July 9, 2018 Share Posted July 9, 2018 Again, you'd need to find which album is missing for any further troubleshooting. And I also asked what happened in folders mode, are any folders missing? It's not likely to be a phone manufacturer issue, more likely to do with the actual files or the SD Card. Also what do you mean by "misarranged" albums, which is not arranged correctly (PA has a lot of sorting options for you to choose from). Andre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arema63 Posted July 9, 2018 Author Share Posted July 9, 2018 Yes, the misarranged albums were found only on Poweramp album folder. For example on the competitor's and Google Play Music the albums of Catherine Jenkins & Celine Dion were both side-by-side. Whereas Poweramp sorts it differently: Catherine Jenkins next to John Denver! And that was the beginning of the funny arrangement. (Note: I picked the default arrangement). Another odd thing happened with Poweramp's scanning music folders: I tried to prevent it from searching 'notification sounds' on my internal storage. Well, it did include that particular folder! Choosing the option of fewer than 30 seconds was useless. Anyway, thanks for your assistance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arema63 Posted July 9, 2018 Author Share Posted July 9, 2018 BREAK!NG NEWS! At last I found the crux of the problem! After nearly one hour searching my 17,5 GB music collection, I had finally culled the offending album that caused Poweramp's inability to read the spot-on total number of albums. It was just a single album with incorrect ID3 tags. I put my blame on to TuneFab Spotify Converter. I am an avid Spotify subscriber and need high-quality offline music collection so I trusted on that music converter. TunesFab was great doing its job converting all Spotify albums -- except for that particular album with no ID3 tags. The bottom line? I assume Poweramp still had bugs especially on reading numerous (and huge size) music albums. How come if the other music players were correct on displaying the total number of albums without all mixed up? Hopefully that Poweramp's in-depth developers could troubleshoot the bug once and for all. Thanks to Mr. Andre Willey, who helped me by giving hints on solving the matter. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrewilley Posted July 9, 2018 Share Posted July 9, 2018 4 hours ago, Arema63 said: Yes, the misarranged albums were found only on Poweramp album folder. For example on the competitor's and Google Play Music the albums of Catherine Jenkins & Celine Dion were both side-by-side. Whereas Poweramp sorts it differently: Catherine Jenkins next to John Denver! And that was the beginning of the funny arrangement. (Note: I picked the default arrangement). Another odd thing happened with Poweramp's scanning music folders: I tried to prevent it from searching 'notification sounds' on my internal storage. Well, it did include that particular folder! Choosing the option of fewer than 30 seconds was useless. For point 1, what sorting option do you have selected? Display the Albums view and tap Menu > List Options. For example, if you are using Album Artist to sort music (in PA builds 700-709) then that tag must be present, otherwise sort by the regular Artist tag. Point 2: Go to Settings > Folders and Library > Music Folders and enable only the locations where you have music stored (I generally untick everything at the root levels, and then tick the master folder which contains my music). That way you have complete control over what folders Poweramp is allowed to scan for music (may need to do a Full Rescan after changing setting). Andre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arema63 Posted July 11, 2018 Author Share Posted July 11, 2018 Thank you for your suggestions, Mr Willey. Numerous times I did what you'd suggested, the result still the same anomalies. Odd thing happened after my latest posting above (the Breaking News), barely 10 minutes later I saw my music albums were disorganized again by Poweramp! To my dismay, Poweramp hid my FLAC album and after searching it was overlapped in another album with almost the same title (i.e. tag), Classic Rock. An album entitled Rock Classics and another Classic Rock, both had different performers, but for Poweramp both albums were performed by similar artists and added on one album! What made me curious was Poweramp's competitor managed to organize the albums in the right order. For more than 24 hours, trying to become Sheerluck Holmes or Johnny English seeking that elusive Poweramp bug made my luck gone nowhere. My conclusion (and possibly my request) for Poweramp developers please make Poweramp v3 better in compiling albums! Interesting times ahead. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrewilley Posted July 11, 2018 Share Posted July 11, 2018 On the release version of PA (v2, build 588) Album Title tags need to be unique (as it does not read the Album Artists tag). If titles are the same, they will be considered to be the same album. Thus if you have two albums tagged with the same title of "Greatest Hits", but by both ABBA and David Bowie, they will be regarded as being part of the same album. The fix for v2 is to edit the title tags to read "ABBA's Greatest Hits" and "David Bowie's Greatest Hits". v3 (which you can download as a test build from the Downloads tab at the top of the page) also offers a mode which uses the Album Artist tag. However I personally prefer to use folder/file sorting, which gives me much greater control and I can easily edit my folder names and filenames to ensure everything is sorted just the way I want. I've got too many esoteric tracks which are badly tagged, but putting them in folders sorts them perfectly. Andre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arema63 Posted July 11, 2018 Author Share Posted July 11, 2018 Okay. I shall try the v2 first. Thanks. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djdarko Posted July 11, 2018 Share Posted July 11, 2018 2 hours ago, Arema63 said: An album entitled Rock Classics and another Classic Rock One thing I find strange is that you mentioned these albums had similar, but not the exact same title. I tested this just now by relabeling The Strokes "This Is It", to "Enough Brave", and you can see below that the two albums load separately in build 588. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andrewilley Posted July 11, 2018 Share Posted July 11, 2018 The title tags would need to be exactly the same for them to be merged, slight variances are enough for them to be considered separate items. Andre Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
djdarko Posted July 11, 2018 Share Posted July 11, 2018 10 hours ago, andrewilley said: The title tags would need to be exactly the same for them to be merged, slight variances are enough for them to be considered separate items. Andre That was my understanding, but the way he wrote it seemed to indicate otherwise, so I had to test it out of curiosity. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arema63 Posted July 12, 2018 Author Share Posted July 12, 2018 Thanks for your experiment. Allow me to clarify again: I got this problem when my album collection reached more than 140 albums ( a whopping 17,5 GB! ). My previous collection was barely 20 albums and included Rock Classics and Classic Rock. Believe me, it was in perfect order! No overlapping between albums. Adding another 100 albums made Poweramp lost its ability to organize it correctly. Rock Classics and Classic Rock became one album! My workaround was to edit the ID3 info on both albums and came like this: just add another word on the title album Epic Classic Rock. The word 'Epic' helped my sanity at last! Still made me baffled, though, how come Poweramp's competitors never created the confusion? I owned other music players: (a.) two 'made in France'; (b.) Cass-O-Player and Vinylage, free ones made in Russia. All of them don't make a similar mess done by Poweramp.? The best assumption, as the bottom line, is that Poweramp owns algorithm bugs that prevent from distinguishing the very minute ID3 nuances especially within a large collection of music. Cheers for sharing your experiment. Now it is high time for me listening Poweramp with a cup of java.☕ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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