Duplicates File Playlist Problem

[graphiceye1821]

I'm having a problem with the same file showing up. I cleared my data/cache of the app but I did export my settings but got an error to import the old settings. Now I'm not sure if it is a settings problem or update version problem. The problem looks like it adds the same song file for many different song files. ALOT of different songs has the same title but DEF different artist. For example most of the problem is in my Soundtrack playlist (soundtracks for movies/TV) I have alot of the title (Main Theme, Main Title, End Theme, End Credits) but they all have different artist names but it shows up as the same artist. I noticed all the songs are correct in arists and songs, but not in playlist.

Also on a side note same thing but little different have a 2 or 3 songs named aftermath (of course different artists) and it adds the wrong song into the playlist which it should be a different one. Any help would be awesome, thanks.

P.S I'm only adding 2 playlist with 400ish songs for now to fix the problem then I'll add all of my songs back on mirco SD. I've had this problem in the past but I forgot how I fixed it. Also just my opinion but it seems the "full scan" is too fast and doesn't read each file 100% but I could be wrong.

[andrewilley]

Playlists are simply a list of filenames, optionally with folder path details too. They contain no concept of matching Titles, Albums, Artists, or any other file-embedded tags as far as Poweramp is concerned. They are always plain text, so you can open any .M3U(8) file in a text editor to see its exact contents. Only the path/filename lines are read.

Poweramp only looks for matches in playlists by checking the exact filename and its containing folder against the songs it has already logged within its music library database. This is to ensure that playlists created on a different file system (e.g. on a PC, or a different Android SD Card) can still be resolved.

There is one possible issue that I can see with this system though, and although the case is a bit convoluted, the following files might not be identified individually:

/Music/Films/Original Releases/Back to the Future/Main Title.mp3
/Music/Films/Extended Editions/Back to the Future/Main Title.mp3

Could this be something like the issue you are seeing? Or are the folder/filename entries in your playlists fully unique?

Andre

[graphiceye1821]

First thats funny you said Back to the Future (#1 fav movie lol). This is what I have hopefully I made it simple enough. Also it's organized by aritist. Both all songs and the playlist. and thats all the songs I'm testing out.

[andrewilley]

Yes, I suspect the problem is exactly what I thought. In order to cope with issues people were having with playlists 'losing' all their contents because an SD Card name had changed, or the list had been copied from another device, Max changed the scanning logic to require both the filename and the folder that it is contained within to match in order for the song to be considered the desired item.

So in your example, you have lots of different subfolders called 'Shaun's Mix'. However the playlist entry Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3  would be the only part of the path/filename that is searched for, and once a match is found within (for example) /Soundtrack (007)/,  Poweramp would consider the match to be sufficient and stop searching any further, thus missing other similar folder/filenames that exist in /Soundtrack (2001 a Space Odyssey)/  etc.

@maxmp would it be possible for the playlist resolving code to be modified in order to pick up such cases - when there may be more than one foldername/filename match - and when there are duplicates, look further up the directly tree to confirm which one is correct? 

Andre

[graphiceye1821]

I kinda get what you are saying, but I've always had subfolders like this since I can remember thus using iTunes & isyncr do import them to my sd card by putting my sd card directly into my laptop and not the phone. Recently I did reset my laptop to factory settings with my personal stuff still on the laptop (if that matters). I would of thought having subfolders would make it my organzied (which I like lol) with my music. isn't there a setting I'm over looking in Poweramp?

I'm not sure what you are asking here-----

(would it be possible for the playlist resolving code to be modified in order to pick up such cases - when there may be more than one foldername/filename match - and when there are duplicates, look further up the directly tree to confirm which one is correct? )

[andrewilley]

3 hours ago, graphiceye1821 said:

I'm not sure what you are asking here-----

Sorry,  wasn't asking you, I was asking the dev if he could modify the code.

The problem is caused by a relatively recent workaround that was put in place because people were losing playlist contents if (for example) an SD Card was removed and replaced, which can cause Android to generate a new path description for the card and so all the hard links in a playlist would fail. When PA followed a purely absolute full path, playlists could also fail when copied from one device to another. It's not your fault, your playlist is formatted perfectly correctly, but PA is not looking back at enough directory levels to differentiate between two files that happen to have the exact same filename and folder name.

Andre

[graphiceye1821]

Oh ok thank you, so pretty much in simple words I would have to wait for the next update version of Poweramp? Like I said I know this happen to me b4 2 maybe 3 times in the past but not in a long time. It's DEF my favorite music player app prob for 10-11 years.

[andrewilley]

Just to check by the way, but where are your various music folders stored? Are the folders /Soundtrack (007)/  ,  /Soundtrack (2001 a Space Odyssey)/ ,  /Soundtrack (Stranger Things)/, etc. all located at the root level of the same storage where the playlist files are saved, as that is what the playlist content is indicating? If PA is able to find an exact full path match, it ought to try use it.  However if those folders are all stored inside another overall Music folder, you could try editing the playlist text to reflect that - e.g. /Music/Soundtrack (007)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3  ,  etc. 

Andre

[graphiceye1821]

Yes it's my root Sd card is 

Android

DCIM

Music ....then all the subfolders of the artists.

Videos...ect

But in Poweramp I have only have the SD card Music folder checked and the Download folder on the root of android phone but there is barley anything in there only have it checked when I download hour mixes from youtube from my phone and just do a simply scan to get them into powermp.

And again I haven't changed anything in my itunes for the past 8ish years, album is always Shaun's Mix 9, I say once a month I add new music to itunes and then insert the SD card to add them on and do a full rescan about once a month.

[andrewilley]

8 hours ago, graphiceye1821 said:

Music ....then all the subfolders of the artists.

So your assorted personal audio folders are not located at the root of the SD Card, which is where the Playlist is expecting them to be, but inside another folder called  Music.

For example, your playlist currently has the following entries, which indicate that these paths can be found at the root of the device's storage (because of the leading "/", which means start at root) not in a Music folder:

/Soundtrack (007)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3 
/Soundtrack (2001 a Space Odyssey)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3 

As your files are not found where the Playlist explicitly states that they are located, PA has to use its own fallback logic to try and find any matches in your music library, but it only looks for a fully matching filename and its first-level containing folder - which in your case returns ambiguous results as you have several subfolders called Shaun's Mix 9 which contain a filename 01 Main Title.mp3. 

Andre

[andrewilley]

A couple of workarounds which ought to work for you:

1) If your playlist files are saved directly inside your Music folder, rather being kept than inside any further subfolders - i.e. your .M3U files are located at the same level as the folders Soundtrack (007)/ and  Soundtrack (2001 a Space Odyssey)/  -  then you could just remove the leading "/" from every text line in the playlist file, which would make the paths relative to the current playlist file's location, rather than relative to the root of the storage. It would be a simple enough global search and replace task for any decent text editor. e.g:
Soundtrack (007)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3 
Soundtrack (2001 a Space Odyssey)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3

2) If your .M3U playlist files are in another folder within your Music folder (perhaps in  Music/Playlists/ ) then you could again use a text editor to create relative paths with appropriate directory crawling references, such as prefixing each line with the sequence "../" which in Android/Linux path terms means "go back up one directory level". e.g:
../Soundtrack (007)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3 
../Soundtrack (2001 a Space Odyssey)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3

3) You could work out the full absolute path to your  Music folder. The easiest way would be to Export a simple playlist from Powermp's Settings >  Library > Playlists menu and see what format it takes (you may need to Grant Access to the storage location). I would expect your lines to end up looking something like this on recent versions of Android (because Android now invents its own random folder names, like AB12-34CD , for SD Cards):
AB12-34CD/Music/Soundtrack (007)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3 
AB12-34CD/Music/Soundtrack (2001 a Space Odyssey)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3

The first two are more compatible and could easily still be used if you copy your music elsewhere in the future as long as the relative paths remain the same. The third format is absolutely locked to your current device and SD Card location, but the Playlist file itself could be saved anywhere on your device and it would still work.

Andre

[graphiceye1821]

Ok I see whats going on, the work arounds I can do. But why all of a sudden the scan is doing this, it was working perfectly for so long in the past?

 

Also did I mention when importing music to SD card it sends the playlist (.) files .m3u & .plb files and after full scan in Poweramp I click import playlist to insert the .plb files and delete (only from app) the .m3u files.

[andrewilley]

The 'Import Playlist' feature is a one-shot function to bring Android system playlists (such as created previously in other music apps) into Poweramp. It does nothing with file-based playlists. Playlist files simply need to be placed in scannable locations and PA will detect and load them automatically during the next scan. 

The old system really wasn't working perfectly at all, people were regularly losing the entire contents of their playlists because they were hard-coded to work with specific paths, which Android sometimes messes with. The new system is much more robust, but it didn't take into account the rather unlikely situation were an exact filename and its containing folder's name were not sufficient unique to identify one audio file only. You do have to admit your cases are pretty unique.  

In fact, at the time that general example was the only case I could see having the potential to break the file search logic, as I too have a lot of soundtracks which contain Opening Titles.mp3 and End Credits.mp3, but my folder names are all different (such as Star Wars, Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, etc) 

Andre

[graphiceye1821]

Yes my cases are unique 😃 if your talking about the artist's names Soundtrack (007) SSoundTrack (2001 A Space Odyssey). But I'm not seeing how these file names aren't different from yours like (such as Star Wars, Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, etc).

Yes they all have the word soundtrack in them but clearly they are all labeled by movie. I labeled them soundtrack to have them organzied in itunes better. Also still not understanding why all of a sudden it would start doing this.

 

Sorry I am very good with computers.

 

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, graphiceye1821 said:

Yes my cases are unique 😃 if your talking about the artist's names Soundtrack (007) SSoundTrack (2001 A Space Odyssey). But I'm not seeing how these file names aren't different from yours like (such as Star Wars, Back to the Future, Blade Runner, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, etc).

Yes they all have the word soundtrack in them but clearly they are all labeled by movie. I labeled them soundtrack to have them organzied in itunes better. Also still not understanding why all of a sudden it would start doing this.

 

Sorry I am very good with computers.

 

The problem is not the upper level folders, it's that in your case the folders which immediately contain your music often seem to have the same name, such as Shaun's Mix 9.

As I said, if an exact path match is not found (which is the ideal situation, as per my three examples above) then PA will fall back on looking at both the filename and the one folder that immediately contains it, but no further up the tree. You have several files called 01 Main Title.mp3 , all of which are located inside folder(s) called Shaun's Mix 9/ ,  so as soon as Poweramp finds any match for /*/*/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title.mp3 it does not continue looking any further.

For PA to identify the songs as being unique and separate, for the same filenames the directory tree would need have the final folder level as unique. Thus either of the following formats would work:
   Music/Shaun's Mix 9/Soundtrack (007)/01 Main Title.mp3
   Music/Shaun's Mix 9/Soundtrack (2001 A Space Odyssey)/01 Main Title.mp3
or, making the filename unique instead:
   Music/Soundtrack (007)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title (007).mp3
   Music/Soundtrack (2001 A Space Odyssey)/Shaun's Mix 9/01 Main Title (2001 A Space Odyssey).mp3

Andre

[graphiceye1821]

Ok I'll see what I can do, thank you so much.