Jump to content

Is there a way to see which songs failed to be copied into a playlist?


NadCat

Recommended Posts

I have a .m3u playlist with 1632 songs. When I import it and copy it to a Poweramp playlist (to get rid of the .m3u in the playlist name) there are only 1629 songs in the Poweramp playlist. Is there any way to see which songs have not been added? I've already scrolled through all of the songs multiple times and every file in the m3u playlist is found by Poweramp. THe only other way to check would be comparing both playlists song for song which I obviously would prefer not to

Link to comment
Share on other sites

My first guess would be that the original 1,632 song .M3U playlist contained three duplicated tracks, which when copied to an internal playlist would not get included - assuming you have the default 'ignore duplicates' mode enabled.

The other possibility would be that three of the songs in the .M3U list don't actually exist in the PA music library database at all. In that case, they would still be shown in the initially loaded .M3U list, but as raw filenames only with no tag/cover data and would be unplayable. They too would not get included when copied to an internal playlist.

To find the offending items manually wouldn't be quick with nearly 2,000 songs though. I think I would re-export the newly created (internal) playlist back to an M3U8 file, and then load both it and the original file into a decent text editor on a computer, one that can do A-B comparisons. The formatting may need a bit of tweaking with global search&replace to match the directory layouts before running the comparison though.

Andre

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's weird, I did "Remove duplicates" on the .m3u playlists more than once and some were removed but they still had more entries than the ones I created by copying them. I just did a text comparison and removed the duplicate entries and now the amount of songs is correct. However, there is something even weirder: I have the song "Battering Ram" from Saxons album "Battering Ram" in the playlist. If I check the original .m3u it clearly says "\Music\Saxon\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3". That's the correct path for the correct song on my phone, too. I also have the song "Battering Ram" from Iron Saviors album "Battering Ram" and in the .m3u it says "\Music\Iron Savior\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3" (again that's the correct path for the right song on my phone, too). I have two playlists. One contains both "Battering Ram" songs, one only the song by Saxon. However, when I import the .m3u files in Poweramp both playlists only have "Battering Ram" by Iron Savior. The one which contains both songs has the Iron Savoir song twice which explains one of the duplicates.

So this is the .m3u:

[...]
...\Music\Iron Savior\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3
[...]
...\Music\Saxon\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3

and this is what Poweramp imports:

[...]
...\Music\Iron Savior\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3
[...]
...\Music\Iron Savior\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3

I already checked and played the song located under Saxon\Battering Ram on my phone and it's the one by Saxon. When I play it in the imported playlist both are the one by Iron Savior. In both cases the wrong song is sorted in the correct place so the playlist looks like this (sorted by artist/year in foobar):

...\Music\Saxon\Sacrifice\Crusader.mp3
...\Music\Saxon\Sacrifice\Forever Free [Rerecorded].mp3
...\Music\Iron Savior\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3
...\Music\Saxon\Battering Ram\Stand Your Ground.mp3
...\Music\Saxon\Battering Ram\Top Of The World.mp3

Screenshot_20220430-110122_Poweramp[1].png

 

.m3u.png

Link to comment
Share on other sites

55 minutes ago, NadCat said:

So this is the .m3u:

[...]
...\Music\Iron Savior\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3
[...]
...\Music\Saxon\Battering Ram\Battering Ram.mp3
 

You have encountered a very rare side-effect of PA's method of resolving external playlists. To avoid issues with importing playlists that were created on other file systems where the full paths won't match with the Android storage (e.g. an M3U with references to paths like C:\Users\<username>\Music\ etc) Poweramp considers a match to be reliable if both the full filename and the first-level containing folder are correct. The rest of the path is ignored.

So what you have is an (extremely) rare situation where two different bands have released their own albums with the exact same album name and including an identically named track too - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battering_Ram_(Iron_Savior_album) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battering_Ram_(Saxon_album). The best quick fix would be to append the artist names onto one of the ambiguous filenames (so creating Battering Ram - Saxon.mp3 or Battering Ram - Iron Savior.mp3 ) or do the same with one of the folder names. That way each one then would pass the unique filename + foldername matching test. Remember to edit both the storage folder/filename and also equivalent text of the entry in the M3U file too.

For more info, see the 'File Based Playlists' section in:

 

@maxmp While this is very rare, it has come up once or twice before. Would it be possible to implement my suggestion of watching for any ambiguous database matches during Playlist Resolving rather than just accepting the first hit, and if there are any clashes also check the next level up of containing folder too?  

Andre

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Okay, good to know. I did expect something like this. I don't really want to change my naming convention, so I guess I'll just have to delete the song every time I import new ones. On a related note: it would be really helpful if you could filter for songs that appear in a playlist but couldn't be physically found (I did have some of them, too, because something changed a bunch of ' to ` and "..." to a single character). Searching for those manually gets really tedious in larger playlists

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Unknown files will still appear in playlists, but shown as placeholders of the raw filename only (no cover image, no tag info). This is in case you later add the missing file so it can then be read properly.

You could Re-sort the playlist by Artist name for example (any unknowns would get grouped together). But keep a copy of the originally ordered M3U file, as the updated sort version would get written back to the file when you make edits.

Andre

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...