Nightmare history with playlists. where can I learn?

[James9]

I've regularly lost meticulously created playlists over the years.  One in which I rated individually 4500 tracks with star ratings.  No matter but I'm having more problems and I really wish to master both Poweramp and android system playlists.

In order to avoid duplicates an old system playlists, I exported my Poweramp playlists, deleted the old ones.  Deleted the system playlists to start afresh.

I tried to transfer 39 exported Poweramp playlists to the now empty system playlists.  However only 10 playlists showed up.  When I imported them into Poweramp, some of the tracks were missing or incomplete.

My real aim is to be able to manually create playlists, using a text editor and to get them to work well in Poweramp.  But it is a headache because you can't import individual playlists, you have to import all the system playlists again and they duplicate.

Half this question is, what is the dark secret of the system playlists?  Can you choose folders for the system playlists or does it scan your entire phone and SD card.  Or can only see your phone internal storage.  Thank you

 

 

[flyingdutchman]

Lots of questions.

You understand that there are native android playlsts and Poweramp playlists. When you export Poweramp playlists, it creates .m3u8 text files which are effectively your backups. When you then proceed to delete the Poweramp internal playlists AND you ensure Poweramp is able to scan the folder where the .m3u files are, those playlists will show up again. If you just work with Poweramp, you can forget the android playlists. Only when importing playlists in Poweramp it will import the android playlists, otherwise Poweramp is not interested in android playlists.

You do not need to import .m3u playlists, all Poweramp needs is to be able to scan the folder.

To create Poweramp playlists you can use Poweramp or even my app New Playlist Manager. 

Android will scan your entire device on startup, and so will Poweramp unless you limit the folders for Poweramp to scan, Settings, Library, Music folders, only select folders where you music resides

 

 

[andrewilley]

The Import function only imports existing Android-system playlists (from other music apps). File-based (M3U) playlists are scanned and loaded automatically into Poweramp by the music scanner - as long as they are saved in any location that PA has been told to scan (using Settings > Library > Music Folders).

The individual song files must also be located within folders that PA is allowed to scan, as items listed in Playlists are just pointers to entries in PA's music library, so they can't be shown unless PA has scanned the songs already.

It might be worth doing a Full Rescan to check everything is present in the library All Songs list.

Andre

[James9]

2 hours ago, flyingdutchman said:

Lots of questions.

You understand that there are native android playlsts and Poweramp playlists. When you export Poweramp playlists, it creates .m3u8 text files which are effectively your backups. When you then proceed to delete the Poweramp internal playlists AND you ensure Poweramp is able to scan the folder where the .m3u files are, those playlists will show up again. If you just work with Poweramp, you can forget the android playlists. Only when importing playlists in Poweramp it will import the android playlists, otherwise Poweramp is not interested in android playlists.

You do not need to import .m3u playlists, all Poweramp needs is to be able to scan the folder.

To create Poweramp playlists you can use Poweramp or even my app New Playlist Manager. 

Android will scan your entire device on startup, and so will Poweramp unless you limit the folders for Poweramp to scan, Settings, Library, Music folders, only select folders where you music resides

 

 

 

1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

The Import function only imports existing Android-system playlists (from other music apps). File-based (M3U) playlists are scanned and loaded automatically into Poweramp by the music scanner - as long as they are saved in any location that PA has been told to scan (using Settings > Library > Music Folders).

The individual song files must also be located within folders that PA is allowed to scan, as items listed in Playlists are just pointers to entries in PA's music library, so they can't be shown unless PA has scanned the songs already.

It might be worth doing a Full Rescan to check everything is present in the library All Songs list.

Andre

Thank you both for your replies, I was sending myself a bit crazy and I feel a bit stupid because the main issue was using Poweramp2v I've had so much trouble with playlists being lost over the years.

Anyway upgrading to version 3 my previously exported playlist comes back no problem.  I must have spent 2 days solid to try and get things to work in version 2, I feel pretty stupid, version 3 is great.

By the way I was using new playlist to delete the system playlists.

The real reason I'm excited about this is that I wish to randomise playlists inserting gaps of silence between tracks.  But to do it manually using a true random algorithm.  Thanks again for your help.