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Display or view text files in a folder


SparseGrey

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I mostly listen to classical music that is organized into different folders for different sets of compositions, e.g., I have one folder for Chopin Ballades performed by Artur Rubinstein, a different folder for Chopin Ballades performed by a different artist, a different folder for the 1955 Gould recording of Bach's Goldberg variations, etc.  I often want to keep and view notes about a given recording.  I can do so on my Android 10 cell phone with a file utility like ES File Explorer, but doing so creates added steps when searching for music, i.e., I need to use Poweramp to look in a folder for the music files and queue the music files and I have to navigate to this same folder in ES File Explorer to look for, view or edit text files that contain my notes about the music.  MY REQUEST:  Let text files with a .txt extension be visible within Poweramp when viewing the contents of a folder, and allow the user to open a text file from within Poweramp using any of the text editors that are installed on the current device.  If this feature is already available in Poweramp, then I apologize.  I have looked in the forum and help menus for how to use Poweramp to perform the function in my feature request, but didn't  see any discussion of it.  I use the full version of Poweramp v3-build-882-arm64-play on an Android 10 Samsung Galaxy s10 cell phone.

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PA's 'Folders' category view isn't actually a file system explorer, it's just an alternative way to sort and display the same songs that Poweramp has already scanned into its Library - just like Albums, Artists, Genres, etc. The library does not contain anything other than the media files though, so you won't see any text files, images, documents, apps, or anything else contained in the underlying file system.

You could browse though all the files in your folders using a separate file explorer app, and then tap on relevant the audio file for PA to play it when you are ready.

Another thought would be to save your notes into the Comments tag within your audio files themselves, instead of using separate sidecar text files, which you can then read in PA by long-pressing on the song title and tapping 'Info/Tags'. I use this for radio/concert/etc recordings.

Andre

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Thank you, Andre, for explaining how the music library works.  Is there any way to load short text files into the comments tag of multiple audio files (other than using copy/paste for each pair of audio file/text file)?  Basically, I'm wondering where the comments tag is stored and in what format.  Is it a separate file that is associated with an audio file?  Or does the audio file itself contain the comments tag as a component?  

       Perhaps I should submit these questions as a new issue in a different forum.  Thank you for your help.

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2 hours ago, SparseGrey said:

Thank you, Andre, for explaining how the music library works.  Is there any way to load short text files into the comments tag of multiple audio files (other than using copy/paste for each pair of audio file/text file)?  Basically, I'm wondering where the comments tag is stored and in what format.  Is it a separate file that is associated with an audio file?  Or does the audio file itself contain the comments tag as a component?  

       Perhaps I should submit these questions as a new issue in a different forum.  Thank you for your help.

That may be possible with some tag editor programs. I use mp3tag, but honestly couldn't tell you if it is possible to pull info from a text file into a comment field. At least not using the tried and true copy/paste and painfully manual method.

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3 hours ago, SparseGrey said:

 Is it a separate file that is associated with an audio file?  Or does the audio file itself contain the comments tag as a component?

MP3 comments are stored in what is known as 'ID3' data format within the music file itself, along with other tag data such as Title, Artist, Album, Genre, Year, Track#, etc.

There are a number of batch tag editor programs out there that can manipulate individual tags based on the content of other data files, but I don't know of any that read from different files for each audio file. This is generally know as a sidecar file - i.e. linked using the same filename but with a different extension.

MP3Tag for example can take a single spreadsheet-style file which contains each MP3 filename in the first column, and information to be copied into specific named tags in subsequent columns, and then run a batch process to update all of the referenced MP3 files. But that's not quite what you wanted.

How many of these have you got, it wouldn't take too long to cut'n'paste each file using a good tag editor, but that would become time consuming if you've got hundreds of files.   

Andre

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Sorry, I just realized that I accidentally posted a repeat of my previous question.  Andre's second reply gave me the information that I needed.  I have downloaded and installed the MP3Tag program (under Windows 10).  I have an untrained hacker's knowledge of R and Microsoft VBA.  I can use one or the other to create a csv file that contains the appropriate metadata for my mp3 files.  From there, I should be able to use MP3Tag to attach the data to my mp3 files.  Thank you, Andre, for pointing me towards a solution.

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Hope it works for you. As you say, crawling a directory for *.txt files and appending the modified-extension filename and its contents to a CSV text file should be pretty easy (watch out for any end-of-line or semicolon occurrences and handle them to keep within the CSV format). If you know a bit of programming, you could even use MP3-modifying library modules in your code to insert the data directly into the Comment tags of the MP3 files yourself - but personally I feel the idea of building a CSV file that you can validate before handing it over to MP3Tag might be a safer and quicker option..

Andre

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I have a similar situation where I would like to keep a small file per artist with some notes on albums and tracks and I did start on it but skipped it as it was to cumbersome to navigate the folder tree to find the correct file. I did start on it, but I gave up as I didn't have an easy way to maintain it. I haven't bothered to make a request for this as PA is a music player and let it stay so. And I need anyway a solution which is usable on my iPhone.

I want to thank you as your post helped me to realize that the file approach is not the best and I already have the right tool in place. I use SimpleNote to keep my notes synchronized between iPhone, Android and it also has a web GUI, nice and simple. The notes are sorted by the text on the first line of the note, so I will just label them as "x - Artist" to have the music notes at the end of the alphabetical list.

Some plusses for SimpleNote:

  • Free
  • Notes can be edited on both phone and computer
  • Notes can be exported to text files
  • Supports some text markups to create lists etc.
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