Wrong file when importing a playlist from PC

[William Roussel]

Hello, I am a new Poweramp user and I want to transfer my playlist from my computer to the application. I use Musicbee on my pc and I export my playlist in m3U format, everything works correctly except for the songs that have the same name. For example when a music is called River, Poweramp will display another music from my collection which is also called River. You can see it on the pictures. 

Poweramp should display the music The Knocks - River which is in position 20 of the playlist (picture 1), but instead it displays Eminem - River which is in position 1845 (pictures 2 and 3). And at the position 1845 there is the music Eminem - River (picture 4)

There are musics which appear in double and musics which do not appear in the playlist whereas they appear correctly in the other menus of Poweramp (picture 5)

All path files are corrects

I tried to change the playlist's format and it didn't work 

Poweramp build 911 -arm64-play (911004-cb218340)

Huawei P20 pro

Android 10
What can I do? Thanks

 

[andrewilley]

Yes, that would happen.

In order to get around the problems of copying playlist files between different devices (e.g. a PC file with its likely "C:\Users\yourname\Music\" directory paths copied to an Android device) Poweramp looks for an exact match of the filename and also the first-level containing folder. Once it finds that, it considers the song resolved and moves on. Given that a filename would normally be something like "%tracknumber% %artist% - %title%" or "%title% - %artist%", and the folder would be the full album name, that would usually be a pretty safe bet.

However as all you have in your filename is a one word title "River", and you are using the same word for the folder name, clashes could easily occur. Given that the Eminem song is from his Revival album, why is it in a folder called River anyway?

@maxmp I did mention the possibility of this occurring in admittedly convoluted circumstances a while back. Would it be possible detect if more than one folder/filename combination in the database is a potential match, and when that occurs also check the second level containing folder too?

Andre

[William Roussel]

Thank you for your answer
 
Indeed noting with artist - title would solve the problems, but I thought Poweramp would search according to the exact path indicated in the m3u file. It worked with my old application (musicolet) and with musicbee. Changing the title of all my files would take too much time...
 
I don't use the album name because I only have one song from it and I know the song titles better than the album titles. Anyway this happens with all the songs that are not part of an album (single tracks) and that I name with the title of the song
 
Being able to check in the second level would solve all the problems!
 
Thanks again for your help
 

 

 

[andrewilley]

1 minute ago, William Roussel said:

I thought Poweramp would search according to the exact path indicated in the m3u file.

It used to do basically that back in v2 days, but that made playlist copying between different systems almost impossible (e.g. the "C:\Users\<your_account_name>\Music\..." example above, which would not work on a Mac, Android, or even someone else's PC).

If all your music files are named as just the songname, contained in a redundant folder of the exact same songname, with no artist/album/etc info at either of those levels, then you are going to get a lot of mismatches. e.g. "/Heroes/Hereos.flac" could be by David Bowie or Blondie or about ten other artists - pretty much every cover version song is going to fail in fact.

Andre

[William Roussel]

No, I have the artist's name in the file path. All my files are like that artist/Song Name/Song Name.flac. This is why i don't understand why Poweramp ignore the first level, which is the artist one... For exemple it is Eminem/River/River.flac and The Knocks/River/River.flac, but Poweramp ignore the artist level

Thank you

[andrewilley]

As I said, PA ignores all path details exact the final containing folder, to allow for changes in file system layouts.

To be fair, you are the first person I've heard of who puts just one file into one identically named folder. Out of curiosity, why do you do that?

Andre

[William Roussel]

I do this because it allows me to have the lyrics file (lrc file) in the same place as the music file, so that it is not a mess in the artist's folder ! I don't have it for all my music, but I do have some. And unfortunatly it's a habit. 

Poweramp is the first application that gives me problems to transfer my playlist, it's a shame I really wanted to use it  

[flyingdutchman]

@William Roussel you could always try and use the import "foreign playlist" function of my app music playlist manager. It just looks at the filename and builds a new playlist with the new paths.

[William Roussel]

Thank you for your answer. I just tried with your application by clicking on the "import external m3u playlist" function, but it doesn't work. Or maybe I'm doing it wrong. As you can see on the picture, the file and the image are not good for the music "River" which should have been the one of the group The Knocks and not of Eminem. Is there anything else to do but import the playlist into your application? 

[flyingdutchman]

@William Roussel if you use the free version, the albumart is provided by the android system. On the paid version and with Poweramp installed, it uses the Poweramp retrieval code.

[flyingdutchman]

@William Roussel if you expected different values, check the tags as i think these hold the values you see ie eminem, sheeran

[andrewilley]

As your filenames are not unique (nor their containing folders) I think a filename matching app won't really help much. Why not make the filenames a bit more meaningful by adding the artist's name too? This could be done across your whole music collection as a batch process pretty easily. Of course you'd still need to recreate the playlist files with those new filenames. I can't think of an easy way out of this one to be honest.

Andre

[William Roussel]

Thank you both for your answers. Indeed I think that the only solution would be to change the name of my files. I never wanted to do it because windows always displays the artist's name next to the file name thanks to the tags, so I found it useless to put it in the file name too.

I will think about it

[andrewilley]

Especially in Windows, I couldn't imagine trying to sort through a collection of singles without both the title and artist in the filename. I tend to use Title-Artist ordering, as that works better for me in a long list, but Artist-Title is probably more common. OK you can set columns for named tags if you want, but that only applies in certain viewing modes and not when simply looking at the the basic files list.

Andre

[William Roussel]

I don't have to sort a whole collection because I put tracks in folders and folders in folders, it's very clear ! In my library two musics of a different artist can't be in the same folder. And I always use Musicbee to listen to my music on my pc so I don't have to go in my library very often. 

[andrewilley]

Sorry, you were the one who said Windows always displayed the artist name next to the file name. Presumably you meant a program in Windows rather than Windows itself?

Andre

[William Roussel]

No I meant with windows' columns as you can see on the screen

[andrewilley]

Columns for specific tags can enabled or disabled, as I said. Apart from normal files, Windows has several preset modes to can use for Videos/Music/Photos/etc, which is what you are seeing. I never use the local default folders, as all my content is on a NAS.

It doesn't really matter though, it is the actual folders and filenames that playlists use.

Andre