files disappear on reboot...then no artists

[Brit]

 All my files disappear on a reboot. I saw a similar post earlier.. But none of the suggestions worked including turning autoscan off. I need to do a rescan each time.

But what is really strange is that the artists are no longer identified just songs.

Any ideas?

Edited February 14, 2022 by Brit
more info

[andrewilley]

Normally, I would have said this would be due to your storage not being properly mounted when PA starts, so the scanner gets confused as it can't see anything immediately, but you've turned AutoScan off so that's less likely to be the case.

When you reboot, have you allowed PA time to exit gracefully rather than just doing a hard power-down?

Andre

[Brit]

 

I simply do a normal "restart".

I uninstalled Poweramp, then reinstalled (the 4th time in the last month) and after waiting an hour or two, the album artists names finally became visible.

I just now rebooted the phone with a new SD card (as of 2 weeks ago) but this time, I kept autoscan. All the 22k song disappeared when the phone turned back on, but they became visible again after about 10-15 minutes of autoscan, so that is an improvement.

Edited February 14, 2022 by Brit

[MotleyG]

@Brit What is your device and Android OS version? Typically on reboot the SD card is not immediately available, and most devices will show an icon in the upper left side of the status bar while it is initializing. If Poweramp starts before your external storage is ready, it won't be able to access the files. But 10-15 minutes sounds very long even for this process, usually it is done within 10-20 seconds if the card has a lot of music (I have 24k+ on a SanDisk Extreme 512GB card).

BUT the tracks should not disappear from the library, they will just not be available.

[Brit]

The phone just updated the software. It is Android version 11, Samsung UI version 3.1. 

I restarted to test it again. I waited 30 seconds and then opened Poweramp. When I click "artists" it says "doesn't look like anything there".   The album image is missing. However if I click on "songs", it looks like the songs are there. They play with the images intact. But when I check my playlists, the songs load and play, but they are not identified by the artist and the images are missing. This has been the problem for the last 2 weeks.

....Now 15 minutes into the reboot, it is still scanning the library, with nearly half of the 24k songs accounted for from the 256 SD card, but zero playlists in the library settings (even though as mentioned he songs load and play, but they are not identified by the  artist and the images are missing.) 

...Now 20 minutes in, the library is rescanned and the playlists are available with artist listed and images intact.

Edited February 15, 2022 by Brit

[andrewilley]

During the phase when you say there are no Artists and no cover images, I assume you are seeing filenames instead of song titles in your lists? All this points to PA not having a valid saved music database, so all it sees are the initial audio filename entries (hence no artwork either, as any that has been downloaded is linked to the songs via the Title/Artist details, not by filename). So each time you are starting PA after a phone reboot, a FULL Rescan is being performed. With 24k+ songs, I would expect that to take at least 5 minutes, depending on storage access speeds, of which the initial discovery phase to crawl the folders/filenames only takes a few seconds and the remainder is reading every single file individually to detect its tag data, and then finally resolving any Playlists against these 'newly discovered' songs.

Have you tried turning the Auto-scan options off in PA Settings > Library > Scanner? Then do a manual FULL Rescan and ensure that everything is present and correct, and see what happens after the next reboot? 

Did this only start happening after your phone updated its Android version? Try changing the setting of PA Settings > Misc > File Access Legacy Mode. It would also be worth clearing storage access permissions for the app, and unticking everything in PA Settings > Library > Music Folders, then re-granting permission and ticking just the locations that contain your music and allow them to be read again. I would suggest making a physical file backup of any internally-created Playlists first - they should survive, but better safe than sorry.

The final nuclear solution would be to copy all your SD Card data elsewhere, re-format it, and copy it back again. And it that does not work, clean uninstall of the app and re-install (possible also clear app data as sometimes Google restores old settings from its cloud, which should be different between Android 10 and 11 installs).

Andre

[Brit]

This all started to happened about late November before I upgraded to a 256 card and before upgrading android. I reboot infrequently but I noticed the re-scanning problem then. I installed and reinstalled and it worked for a while.

I have reinstalled 4 times since then and spent far too much time (many hours) trying to solve this issue. Turning auto scan off worked initially.. then didn't. Since I just reinstalled for the 4th time 2 days ago, it is probably not worth re-granting permission, since I had to do it then. I did just change the setting of PA Settings > Misc > File Access Legacy Mode. Maybe that will work. But, as mentioned I don't reboot too often, so it may take a while to find out.  At least it seems to load now after 20 minutes, and I can play my playlists with the file names in the meantime. (I have most backed up).

I have been using Itunes for 15 years to play music on my desktop with almost no problems. I don't know why android music players are so buggy. I have tired dozens of android music players, and only Poweramp seems to load their playlists correctly and also connect correctly with our cars.

 

Edited February 15, 2022 by Brit

[Brit]

Today all my songs in my playlists appear without artist names...and no artwork. Whereas the names and artwork are visible outside of playlists.

This is what started my problems a few months ago. I rebooted to see if that helped...then all artist names disappeared for a long time. With a few reinstalls, updates, and a new SD card, the problem continues. 

[maxmp]

@Brit Poweramp keeps “unresolved” entries even if there is no access to the files. The “no access” condition could be due to the file permission revoked, folders renamed, storage changed, music folder settings changed, files moved or deleted, etc. - anything that makes files inaccessible.

[Brit]

The "no access" is only in Playlists. Nothing has changed. I do however get artist names and album images when I add new songs to a playlist. It is not the end of the world since the lists still play music. Perhaps a factory rest is on the cards when I have time.

Edited February 22, 2022 by Brit