Old exported playlists not finding files on new device

[Sergio11]

First of all I want to thank everybody that reads or tries to help me. I ve got a new phone and I want to just export my playlists that I had on my old phone to the newest one. My songs used to be stored at a external sd card but in my new phone it is located in the inernal storage because it has no sd card slot. When I export the playlists and import it, it just  recognizes the name of the old playlist but not the songs on it, all the songs that were on the old phone are all the same but on different storage locations? What am I missing?

The files of the playlists are in m3u8 format.

I just don t think that is necesaary to classify my music for hours when I am sure that there is a way to do it faster.

 

If anybody that helps me needs more info I will give it to him/her

 

Thanks for your help

 

Sergio 

[andrewilley]

55 minutes ago, Sergio11 said:

 all the songs that were on the old phone are all the same but on different storage locations? What am I missing?

You've summed up the problem right there.

Playlists are just series of lines of plain text which identify the storage locations of some audio files. Of course if you now put those files into different locations, those absolute paths no longer work. For example, exported playlists will contain lines such as this:

D0D8-84ED/Music/Albums/Blondie/Parallel Lines/09 Sunday Girl.mp3
D0D8-84ED/Music/Albums/Electric Light Orchestra/Time/12 Hold on Tight.mp3

If you copy such a playlist file to a new device, obviously the full directory structure starting with the old SD Card name D0D8-84ED (which is what first PA checks) will no longer match at all. So PA will then try to find a match by looking through its library of already-scanned music to see if it can find the songs by using the filename and the folder that contains it. For example, in the above case it would look for the first file it can find called  09 Sunday Girl.mp3  which is inside a folder called  Parallel Lines  (regardless of any other directory levels).

So as long as your music files are still saved in the same general layout within your overall Music folder (and they have all be scanned into the Library) they should be matched.

If that is still not working, check Settings > Library > Music Folders to ensure that the locations of both your music files and the playlist files are ticked and do a Full Rescan. If that does not work, load one of the playlist files into a simple text editor and have a look at the contents to see if you can work out why the audio files on your new device aren't being matched.

Andre

[maxmp]

@andrewilley For imported playlists (== any playlist file in Poweramp reachable folders), Poweramp only uses the last folder and filename for track resolution.

D0D8-84ED/Music/Albums/Blondie/Parallel Lines/09 Sunday Girl.mp3

This will match */Parallel Lines/09 Sunday Girl.mp3, provided you have Parallel Lines/09 Sunday Girl.mp3 track somewhere in Poweramp selected Music Folders.

(If not matched, e.g. if file is not within Music Folders, there will be unplayable entry. This can be later resolved via Playlists header menu / Rescan/Resolve Playlists action).
Thanks!

[andrewilley]

Thank Max. So paths supplied in playlists are always ignored? Even in cases of fully correct and/or relative paths? I must admit I had assumed that the single-layer-folder & filename matching system was only used as a backup method if normal directory matching failed to find a file.

So what happens when using only a containing folder and a filename gives ambiguous results, such as in the case described by this user last month:

Andre