playlists Playlists Visible But Empty

[andrewilley]

28 minutes ago, flyingdutchman said:

 where the code simply looks at the track name and picks up the (new) full pathname

Or perhaps the filename and the first folder level above it. For example, I have a lot of movie soundtracks many of which contain a track named simply "End Credits.mp3", and the containing folder would identify them more completely. Same with artists where the same song title appears on multiple albums but is actually a different version (live, remixes, etc).

Andre

[Irene C.]

Theo said it. An application can fix this issue, so why not Poweramp itself?

But I was referring more to the other more serious problems , like Poweramp crashing when editing playlists and the lists disappearing afterwards. The issue was there in the stable version, is continued in the beta, although now it does only affect the particular list.

I have reported this in both sub-fora ten days ago.

Irene

[yoeleven]

7 hours ago, Irene C. said:

Theo said it. An application can fix this issue, so why not Poweramp itself?

But I was referring more to the other more serious problems , like Poweramp crashing when editing playlists and the lists disappearing afterwards. The issue was there in the stable version, is continued in the beta, although now it does only affect the particular list.

I have reported this in both sub-fora ten days ago.

Irene

Irene, people are looking past or not responding to my observations.  Poweramp CAN very well and VERY ably import the file-based playlists, when we Manually instruct Poweramp to do so.  We can and should expect Poweramp to enable this feature to be applied internally and automatically to those file=based playlists that it does recognize but fails to act on.  Indisputable.  Poweramp can import and play file-based playlists, If we select that option in Settings.  Again, there are unintended consequences, when importing those playlists.  But, the programming coders have that as their responsibility to address.

[yoeleven]

On 11/14/2018 at 9:00 AM, Irene C. said:

Hi Andre,

Yeah, you were right. The paths have changed. Don't know about the batch editor solution though.. My lists contained more than 30 songs, so I guess that the editing goes item by item. 

Nevertheless, can you recommend a good editor?

Thanks again! 

Irene

Irene, here is a method that I have researched.  It removes the drive and directory information from the playlist music records, much like the batch file editor that Andre suggests you use.  The idea is not mine and I elaborated on the idea on the website where the thought was presented.  Here is how I would address the issue.  Note, this is crazy high level stuff.  And, it would need to be made anytime a change to a fle-based playlist was made.  Remember, there are internal system playlists and Poweramp is EXCELLENT at processing them.  If all you use is Poweramp and system playlists, you then live in Utopia.  Life is good.  But, if you send a file-based playlist to Poweramp, you will have already had to do something like the following, to remove the drive and folder information contained in the playlist file.

Here are my examples of before and after, and the excel code I used.

My desktop media center software created the an .m3u playlist.  The contents of the playlist is a simple ansi text editable dataset.  Note, that it includes all the desktop PC drives and sub-folders.  Some of the software players I tested for my mobile devices could not handle that below file structure.  That's the point of the  Excel code.   It removes the drive and folder information.  This is the before state, of a playlist, created by my home PC media center software:

J:\NTFS_1\MP3_D\Dan Fogelberg - River of Souls - 08 - A Love Like This.mp3
J:\NTFS_1\MP3_H\Harry Chapin - Verities & Balderdash - 04 - 30,000 Pounds Of Bananas.mp3
J:\NTFS_1\MP3_H\Harry Chapin - Story of a Life, disc 2 - 04 - 30,000 Pounds of Bananas (live).mp3

Here below, is the output of my slightly modified version of the above Excel code.  If you include a file-based playlist along with your music files, then they must conform to the following structure, otherwise Poweramp just stares at it.  So, again, here is what my Excel code transforms the above to:

\Dan Fogelberg - River of Souls - 08 - A Love Like This.mp3
\Harry Chapin - Verities & Balderdash - 04 - 30,000 Pounds Of Bananas.mp3
\Harry Chapin - Story of a Life, disc 2 - 04 - 30,000 Pounds of Bananas (live).mp3

In the case above, for my needs, even the default \Music\ folder was removed.  Now, with this file structure all 4 mobile software players I have tested work.

For my case, the Excel code looks like:

my code version: =CONCATENATE("\",TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A3,"\",REPT(" ",LEN(A3))),LEN(A3))))

To give proper credit, there was an original code fragment that I copied and re-worked.  You could probably Google and find it if you were really interested.

original code: =CONCATENATE("..\My Music\",TRIM(RIGHT(SUBSTITUTE(A1,"\",REPT(" ",LEN(A1))),LEN(A1))))

First you need to copy the contents of your .m3u file into a column in Excel.  Then copy the Excel code to all the lines in the next adjacent column and, Of course, on the back end, you still need to copy the second Excel column and paste it into a plain text editor, to save your results.  Then, you need to rename the text file from" .txt to: .m3u.

This seems like a lot of work.  It does work and I can pretty quickly mix up and revise a new playlist this way.  Not sure everyone else has the inclination.

If someone thinks this is gibberish, I welcome any input on a specific, exampled, way of making it easier than this.

 

 

[andrewilley]

9 hours ago, yoeleven said:

 Poweramp CAN very well and VERY ably import the file-based playlists, when we Manually instruct Poweramp to do so.

Technically, that feature does not import files per se (PA does that automatically as soon as it finds any playlist files in scannable locations). What it does is to import any Android music database playlists (which of course Android may have already loaded from physical files in the first place, and has managed to convert the path information internally)

Hopefully Max can improve the fuzzy logic for internally reading playlists and creating valid path details, as I know a number of people have this problem when trying to re-use playlists that they have created on different devices (and which thus refer specifically to the other device's storage structure).

Andre

[andrewilley]

I'm going to move this thread to the v3 forums by the way, as it's just as applicable to v3 and it won't get much visibility here in the v2 legacy section.

Andre

[yoeleven]

5 hours ago, andrewilley said:

I'm going to move this thread to the v3 forums by the way, as it's just as applicable to v3 and it won't get much visibility here in the v2 legacy section.

Andre

Andre, Thanks for your attention.  In fact, I was just over in the v3 forums.  I was looking for a means to generate a proper beta-tester report or opinion. 

When I first opened my Poweramp trial app, I was so impressed, I purchased the unlocker tool without delay.  It is a superior music player.  As you know, I still see opportunities for improvement.

[andrewilley]

There are always opportunities for improvement and bugs to fix, that's the nature of complex software. Of course which one get priority treatment is hard with moving targets and differing priorities.

Andre