Applying multiple Artist split + full rescan leads to disappearance of genre images

[GeilerHeinz]

Yesterday I applied some symbols to split Multiple Artists in PA build 901 and did a full rescan afterwards. 

This caused about half of my genres to lose their images even though they are still stored under com.maxmpz.audioplayer/files/selected_genre. Trying to set the image for one single genre manually didn't change the stored genre image but overwrote the image in the folder selected_genre with a blank image like @Absinthequ described in the following thread for the categories Artist and Composer: 

Is there a solution for this bug?

Regards 

[andrewilley]

Were your Genres already split, or did you create new split names for the Genre tags too? If you are now using split Genres, the JPEG image files stored in Android/data/_com.maxmpz.audioplayer/selected_genre must be named to match exactly with the new split Genre names, not the old combined names. Note: some special characters need to be replaced with underscores, but probably there won't be many of those in Genre tags anyway, except perhaps an odd ampersand?

After making any changes, it's worth exiting and fully closing Poweramp (via the recent apps list) to force it to re-cache any artwork on the next load.

Andre

[GeilerHeinz]

Thanks, Andre, for replying. 

Genres are already split since a few month. The jpegs names match exactly with the genre names and special characters are replaced by underscores as well.

On my filesystem a hidden folder _com.maxmpz.audioplayer doesn't exist.

Regards 

[andrewilley]

41 minutes ago, GeilerHeinz said:

On my filesystem a hidden folder _com.maxmpz.audioplayer doesn't exist.

That is where PA stores its data files. Except if the installation is a fresh one on a brand new Android 11 system, in which case the underscore is no longer present and the data structure is in regular  com.maxmpz.audioplayer.

You should see something along these lines in a file explorer:

And in Poweramp's Genre Category:

Did you try force-closing PA and allowing it to recache the images files?

Andre

[GeilerHeinz]

My device OS is Android 10 and the data of PA is stored under Android/data/com.maxmpz.audioplayer.

On my device this folder doesn't exist with a underscore at the beginning. 

I forced the application to close. Next time I started the application the problem still existed. 

Regards 

[andrewilley]

13 hours ago, GeilerHeinz said:

My device OS is Android 10 and the data of PA is stored under Android/data/com.maxmpz.audioplayer.

On my device this folder doesn't exist with a underscore at the beginning. 

On Android 10, there should be an underscored version of the folder name, that is where artwork and other stuff should be cached. This is on internal memory, not SD Card, and ought to be at the top of the list in alpha-sorting:

Andre

[GeilerHeinz]

Now I created manually the folders _com.maxmpz.audioplayer/selected_genre under Android/data on the internal memory and inserted a genre.jpg. PA doesn't pick this genre.jpg by itself and if I try to set the image manually for any genre in PA nothing happens. 

Before I applied some symbols to split multiple artists everything was fine.

Regards

[andrewilley]

Creating the folder manually won't help, PA needs to have created it for itself. Otherwise, for installs on Android 11 devices only (due to new folder access restrictions imposed by Android 11) PA will create and use a com.maxmpz.audioplayer folder name, without the underscore. Upgrades from earlier Androids to Android 11 should still be able to see and use the old underscored version though; for backward-compatibility reasons the restrictions apparently do not apply to already-installed apps.

What I can't quite understand is why PA is not using the underscore version on your Android 10 installation? I tested build 903 on an older Android 7 tablet and it still used the original underscored folder name.

@maxmp any ideas here, have I misunderstood any recent PA build changes? Have there been any changes to the way Genre image files are written to and re-loaded from the selected_genre folder?

Andre

[GeilerHeinz]

I was able to solve the problem by uninstalling PA. After reinstalling PA and restoring all genre image files manually to Android/data/com.maxmpz.Poweramp/files/selected_genre on the internal storage all genre images are shown within PA like it used to be.

@andrewilley While reinstalling PA again the folder com.maxmpz.Poweramp was automatically generated without underscore.

Regards 

[maxmp]

@GeilerHeinz right, recent Androids (10+) require Android/data folders to be named exactly as "package name" (==com.maxmpz.audioplayer for Poweramp), but Android still allows that _com.maxmpz.audioplayer folder to be used if you updated Android while Poweramp is installed. So in case you're reinstalling Poweramp, you're loosing access to previous version image cache, plus there are bugs in some Android OEM variants (Samsung) suddenly preventing from accessing "inherited" folders as well.

[andrewilley]

Thanks Max, I was just about to check this with you this again (as per April 2 post) as I did a test install of build 903 on an older Android 7 device and it used the underscored folder name as originally expected.

So it's now Android 10+ rather than 11+ that creates the default Android naming convention of com.maxmpz.poweramp (with no underscore). And on Android 9 and earlier it will still create _com.maxmpz.poweramp and continue to try to use that even after any updates to Android 11, unless the user has to re-install anyway.

 Andre

[Absinthequ]

😜

Yeah I've split Genre using Symbols and included Unicode with no issues so this had to be a different issue.

I even went fancy and have all Multiple artists split using the red ❌ and orange 🔸 and it works great. That's kind of the new thing to show artists as "Artist 1 X Artist 2" instead of "Artist 1 feat Artist 2". I use dark theme so for me it makes it so much simpler to read and distinguish between artists quickly.