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Playlist loosing track


Cpasley

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This has been a thing since day one. Whenever I either move a track (within a Poweramp scanned folder) change a name or any minor alteration the song within the playlist disappears and I'm left with this ghost track. I then have to manually delete each empty track and one by one re-add what's now missing which is very time consuming. I try doing the rescan/playlist resolve but it does not help.

Screenshot_20211011-055926_Poweramp.jpg

Edited by Cpasley
Bad grammar
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When you add a song to a playlist in Poweramp, it simply stores a pointer (link) to whatever song filename you selected - including the exact folder path to be able to find that file. Nothing more or less than that. So if you later move a file into a different folder, or rename it, Poweramp will no longer be able to see that song where it is expected, and you'll get a 'phantom' placeholder entry in the playlist.

Think of it like a card index file in a public library. Each card says where you can find a particular book, what room, rack, shelf, and even where along the shelf. If someone then moves that book somewhere else in the library building, the index card is now useless and you won't be able to find the book again.

There is a Playlist menu option to 'Rescan / Resolve Playlists', which as far as I understand it will try to find missing items by looking for the exact filename and containing folder elsewhere in your music collection, and rematch the entry if possible.

So let's take an example music file on your SD Card,  /ABCD-1234/Music/Movies/ELO/Xanadu/09 All Over the World.flac

If you renamed the ELO folder to Electric Light Orchestra, the playlist would initially show as broken because the song is no longer located at the absolute location where PA is expecting to find it. In this case, the Resolve menu option should manage to find and restore a link to the moved file 09 All Over the World.flac as it is still contained within a folder called Xanadu.

However if you renamed the file to 09. All Over the World (ELO).flac, or changed the first level containing folder to Xanadu Original Soundtrack, Poweramp would not be able to resolve the location and the playlist would remain broken.

Andre

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