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Will not recognize ratings tags


Kronep

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Pretty self explanatory... ratings tags added in the file by other music players (dopamine in this case) are not recognized.

Also the app's ratings seem to not be saved in the files themselves, which is a bummer every time you format your phone.

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@Kronep a few points, ratings are saved by Poweramp but only in a playlist. The number of times played is not though. However my app new playlist manager has functionality to backup and restore ratings and times played. It also has functionality to read and write ratings to the popm tag of the track itself. You may find reading and writing to the popm tag does not work for music located on an external sdcard under android 11.

Update: just tested the reading popm and update Poweramp Ratings and it works fine. (one small issue under android 11 wjich does not affect the updating, but will be resolved)

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21 hours ago, Kronep said:

ratings tags added in the file by other music players (dopamine in this case) are not recognized.

Correct. Poweramp does not support reading ID3 POPM tags from MP3 files, nor similar Vorbis/etc tags for other file formats.

It also does not modify those same tags when you create your own song ratings within Poweramp. The ratings system used by Poweramp is purely saved in its own internal database and not routinely imported or exported. 


There are two ways to backup/restore Poweramp's internal ratings:

1) Create a playlist containing everything in your library and export it. To do this, long-press on any song in your 'All Songs' list and tap 'All' to select everything in the list. Tap '+Playlist' to add everything selected to a new playlist. Then go to the Playlists category, tap the three-dots menu icon and choose 'Export'. Exported/backed-up playlists always include any ratings data that you may have created within Poweramp.

Later, if you need to restore those ratings - perhaps to another device, or if you reformat your phone - just put the exported .M3U8 playlist file somewhere that PA can scan it and the old ratings will be re-imported into PA's internal database. Note: make sure PA Settings > Library > Playlists > Import Ratings is enabled.

2) You could use @flyingdutchman's New Playlist Manager app to backup and restore ratings - and even on some devices and file formats, write them back into audio files (within the limitations of Android 11's storage handling issues).


I'll move this discussion to the Feature Requests forum anyway, as it's not a bug but intended functionality for the time being.

Andre

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  • 4 months later...
On 4/16/2021 at 4:48 AM, andrewilley said:

 it's not a bug but intended functionality for the time being.

Andre

I would have to call this buggy the way Poweramp saves/reads ratings because I found if the relative path for the file is changed the rating is wiped. You can keep the tags and filename unmodified, but that doesn't appear to matter.

Simply renaming a folder or moving the file from one folder to another wipes the rating. I wonder if that means going to a new sd card will wipe the ratings also because a lot of times different sd cards have different emulated paths.

So after moving a file or renaming a folder i have to rescan and sometimes resolve playlist and the rating is then lost. I tried exporting the playlist before the file move with the rating showing in the playlist. Then importing the saved playlist after the file move. Poweramp will find the song(s) every time, but the rating is lost.

The way Poweramp is set up for ratings it is very fragile. I've re-entered ratings for thousands of files twice now, and I will be embedding them from now on and I guess not be able to see them in Poweramp due to it not being stable. Hopefully this will be at least readable in the future, right now it's set up for a loss.

Edited by Ash Roarshock
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@Ash Roarshock Ratings are currently an internal feature as far as Poweramp is concerned - the app neither reads them from music files, nor does it write them back out again.

When you create an internal rating in PA it is for that specific song. If you delete the song and then create another one with the same filename somewhere else, the rating attached to the 'old' song is lost as soon as you delete it, and you can then create a new rating for the 'new' song if you like. PA cannot know that you have in fact moved a file using an external file manager, all it knows is that a file has vanished (deleted) and later during a rescan some random new one was found elsewhere.

You are correct that ratings are included in exported Playlists, and they can also be re-imported again (to a suitably matching folder/filename combination) as long as Settings > Library > Playlists > Import Ratings is enabled. You can do that to backup ratings for your whole music library too, by exporting a Playlist that was based on the All Songs list.

You can also use a third-party app called New Playlist Manager to import/export ratings, and write them back to files too.

Andre 

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1 hour ago, andrewilley said:

@Ash Roarshock Ratings are current an internal feature as far as Poweramp is concerned - it neither reads them from music files, nor does it writes them back out again.

When you create a rating it is for one specific song. If you delete the song and then create another one with the same filename somewhere else, the rating attached to the 'old' song is lost and you can create a new rating for the 'new' song if you like. PA cannot know that you have in fact moved the file using an external file manager, all it knows is that a file has vanished (deleted) and later during a rescan some new one was found elsewhere.

You are correct that ratings are added to exported Playlists, and they can be re-imported again (to a suitably matching folder/filename combination) as long as Settings > Library > Playlists > Import Ratings is enabled. You can do that for your whole music library if you export a Playlist that was based on the All Songs list.

You can also use a third-party app called New Playlist Manager to import/export ratings, and write them back to files too.

Andre 

Poweramp isn't really losing ratings because of files moving, it's losing them due to how it stores the ratings.

My manually created m3u8 playlist:

#EXT-X-RATING:5
../The Neighbourhood - 03 $TING.flac

Poweramp created playlist:

#EXT-X-RATING:5
6AEA-DC14/Music/Neighbourhood, The/(2013) The Love Collection (EP) - The Neighbourhood/The Neighbourhood - 03 $TING.flac

Having the SD card path is the first 'no no' as you can't upgrade your card without losing everything. How much of the rest of the path needs to be there is debatable, but I think only one folder would solve this issue in most instances. But, it isn't even necessary to have folders in the list at all for Poweramp to find the files.

I can just use a playlist manager or manually make the playlists myself. But obviously at that point, it's easier to just add the rating to the music file. Also there is no benefit of using a playlist manager because as soon as you update a rating in Poweramp, your path will be overwritten on the external playlists and you're still vulnerable to lose the entire rating for that file. This basically corrupts your external playlists.

Obviously using playlists to manage your ratings is a patch to not have to write directly to files on the fly as it could cause corrupt files. I would suggest Poweramp includes an option that READS embedded file ratings, and they can only be WRITTEN to the file using the same dialog as editing tags. I don't need the quick swipe feature for ratings, I think most people would trade it for direct embedding in a heartbeat. I noticed sometimes the ratings get changed accidentally, so i would prefer they were locked. 

Edited by Ash Roarshock
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4 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

Poweramp isn't really losing ratings because of files moving.

That's exactly what is happening. Ratings are tied to one specific file, as found in a specific location in storage, which the database points to using its full path specifier. During a scan, if it notices that a file is missing it will remove that item from the database (which deletes any associated entries such as rating, play count, date added, etc). If it also later discovers a new file, with different path details, that will be added to the database as a new song. As far as PA is concerned, that new song is nothing to do with the other song that has already been deleted.

4 hours ago, Ash Roarshock said:

Having the SD card path is the first 'no no' as you can't upgrade your card without losing everything. How much of the rest of the path needs to be there is debatable, but I think only one folder would solve this issue in most instances.
But, it isn't even necessary to have folders in the list at all for Poweramp to find the files.

Yes it is very necessary to know (and maintain) the exact path details, otherwise how would it know the difference between /Music/Films/TRON Legacy/Opening Titles.mp3 and /Music/Films/Star Wars/Opening Titles.mp3 ? For the purposes of identifying and matching playlist entries, to avoid the problems you mention with changes to root paths, or syncing from another device (e.g. Windows PC) Poweramp checks the filename and first level containing folder, which works 99.9% of the time unless you've got some pretty esoteric naming practices.

So it could uniquely identify the difference between these two files, both called Opening Titles.mp3

/Films/TRON Legacy/Opening Titles.mp3
/Films/Star Wars/Opening Titles.mp3

But if would create an ambiguity/mismatch if it found

/Movie Soundtracks/Star Wars/Opening Titles.mp3
/Film Source Recordings/Star Wars/Opening Titles.mp3

My own preference would be reading from files initially, and writing back to files with a warning prompt, but I don't think that is planned at the moment.

Andre

 

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Still not true. It can find any file and re-apply the rating if the path of the playlist isn't overly complicated. I added every single file in my library to a Poweramp created playlist and exported it before I lost the ratings. I Opened it in notepad and removed the SD card path and also left only one folder up for each file. This took some time to edit, but Magically after re-scanning the playlist all of my ratings came back. I have 14045 songs according to the songs category and wouldn't you know it, 14045 in my playlist i just re-imported. That's with "Don't add duplicates" selected.

You can invent lots of possible scenarios of someone being absolutely terrible at naming files and folders. All of those examples you gave would have year, episode, score or soundtrack title, track numbers, artist or composer information in any normal library. I agree your scenario is possible, although not probable that particular person with such terrible library organization skills could care about a handful of ratings or playlist entries being incorrect.

I think we're in the territory of not seeing the Forrest for the trees. Everyone is set up to have a 100% rating data loss to circumvent the potential one in a million who will lose a handful.

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32 minutes ago, Ash Roarshock said:

It can find any file and re-apply the rating if the path of the playlist isn't overly complicated.

Yes, that's what I already told you in my previous post. For matching entries found in Playlists to existing scanned songs in the music database, "Poweramp checks the filename and first level containing folder, which works 99.9% of the time." In your case, it was 100% which is great. So all of your ratings were thus restored from your backup when you needed to change the paths; I'm glad it worked as planned.

However until such time that ratings are read from, or written to, audio files, they are going to remain relatively low-priority considerations, and will always be in danger of being lost should you move your collection to a new device, or re-install the app from scratch due to a system crash etc - just like play counts and locally downloaded cover artwork. That's the nature of locally-stored information that isn't permanently stored anywhere.

Andre

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