Playlists won't keep sort setting

[flyingdutchman]

As @andrewilley has pointed out a playlist, be it an internal or external .m3u playlist, holds no other detail than 

For internal: playlist id,  trackid and play order

For external, the content of the .m3u file where each line represents the track and playorder.

So once you sort, the order changes and afterwards there is nothing to indicate  the order changed.

I noticed i typed this as andre was responding too

 

 

[krs10]

I have the same issue as OP. I have 2 phones: 1 Android and 1 iOS. I use iTunes to manage my music library (yes, sad... I know), and iSyncr to sync music with the Android device. The only stage it makes sense to sort my playlists, which are not exported as sorted within iTunes, is once PA picks them up. I sync daily, thus I have to resort daily, which is really annoying. Is it possible to have PA completely ignore the sorting in playlist files and use a default sorting that can be set within PA? Ideally, PA would have a DB that stores the sort setting for each playlist and applies it, overriding the playlist file, but that may be a lot more work that just having a global playlist sort option that can be configured to override the sorting within playlists.

[andrewilley]

@krs10 Poweramp doesn't have a display/listening order facility for Playlists, unlike other categories such as albums, folders, etc. A Playlist is simply a list of consecutive songs, played in the order they appear in the source file - which is rather the point of them to be honest.

You can re-arrange the order, either manually or using Playlist > (three-dots menu) > Re-sort, but that will permanently rearrange the text lines within the .M3U file to reflect the new playback sequence, so it's not an easily undoable change. Of course if you have an external program (such as isyncr) that then copies an original version back again, thus trampling over your edits, then as you say you are back to square one. You really need to decide which is your 'master' source for .M3U files, and copy from that master version to other devices. 

Andre