Poweramp Won't Finish Scanning For Media Files!

[Aniket]

Hello, When my device was first updated to Android 12, I had faced something similar but a couple of days ago, my Samsung Galaxy S20+ (Exynos Variant) was updated to one UI 4.1 and since then I am unable to use Poweramp at all. I did a hard reset of my phone and cleared the cache as well but nothing seems to be helping.

Also, I would like to know why doesn't Poweramp ask for permission for "All Media Access" when opening for the first time like so many other players do because they seem to be working fine and I have seen only Poweramp trip like this with every system update!

I would like to know what I gotta to to listen to some music. All alone in a village, come on, someone save me! I just might die without my music!

On a more serious note, and I have pointed this out before when I had got Android 12 for the first time, when I click on App Info for Poweramp, in permissions settings, it only shows- "Nearby devices" in Allowed tab, while "Files and Media" is still in the "Not Allowed" tab. This is happening even after you run Poweramp for the first time and give it access to specific folders both on the internal storage and the external storage. Why, oh why?

Edited July 30, 2022 by Aniket

[andrewilley]

Try using File Access Legacy Mode in PA Settings=>Misc. Or if it's on, turn it off.

Then clear the Music Folders selection completely (so it shows no songs at all) and then Enable access to just the folder(s) that contains your music (do not try to access root levels). If you have playlists or ratings, Export your Settings/Data first as these may be lost.

PA is always built to the latest Googler API levels, so whatever restrictions Google apply to access tend to hit it before other apps. Max thinks that requesting global storage access is unlikely to be permitted for a Play Store app that's meant to be just a music player. 

Andre

[Aniket]

@andrewilley

That is all good to know but a music player ought to play music first and foremost and then comply with the rules!

I know about the legacy mode and it is also very iffy at best.

Let me just show you why I am really confused.

Just did a hard reset of the whole system for the 10th time today (not kidding), and here is the first app I installed. This is Poweramp asking for music folders at the start.

Once you do select the folders with music in the card, the app asks for permission to those folders only. I get it. This is all apparent and fair on your part. Now, once the scan is done, the app states the final tally of the no. of songs. Here is the image for that:

The total no of songs: 12,057. That tells me, it counted every song on the card. Okay, all good.

Now, look at this:
 

This says, Poweramp just has access to "Nearby devices", and NOT "files and media" permission which every other music player I try from play store asks for when I open those apps. What am I missing here.

I would not be bothered about this detail if Poweramp behaved like a stable music player which it does not. Want some evidence? Here is a playlist file from Poweramp which it spit out the last time I asked for a Poweramp export playlist.

Bolly Music.m3u8

If you open the Bolly Music.m3u8 file, Poweramp generated, you would know why this is making me so crazy.
The playlist contains around 6000 songs but the file Poweramp generated did not list the path of half of the files, just the names and the rest of the files were outputted with the file path as they were all supposed to be.
Now, if you say that the files must not be on the SD card, I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are.
This is causing me a lot of pain as I have really given a lot of time to make those playlists.

Poweramp starts scanning for file changes every-time I open the app even though there is no apparent change on the external card, and usually it takes 15-20 secs for the scan to finish. So, it should not be a big deal and it is not until all of a sudden, the scanning just would not stop even if you run it for an hour. I have changed the SD card just to make sure the card is not the issue. The scanning would keep going with numbers showing like 5468/12057 and then 9853/12057 and after some time, all the numbers vanish and I am left with a circle on the right side of the Rescan button.

I hope you can make some sense of what I am trying to explain. Legacy mode does not fix this at all. It happens intermittently and at the worst possible times like backing up my playlists!

Regard.

Edited July 30, 2022 by Aniket
Extra file at the end.

[andrewilley]

13 minutes ago, Aniket said:

This says, Poweramp just has access to "Nearby devices", and NOT "files and media" permission which every other music player I try from play store asks for when I open those apps. What am I missing here.

Not sure why Nearby Devices is listed, might be something specific to your system? I don't think it's Chromecast or Bluetooth as I use both of these and that doesn't show in my permissions list. Mine has no general permissions at all in fact:

With Android 10/11+ (and not using Legacy Access) file access is granted via the Storage Access Framework to specific locations, not for general Files and Media. In your example, you would use the Android permission selection system to separately grant access to the "Poweramp Waves" folder on your SD Card and also to the "Poweramp" folder in internal memory (as per the FAQ I mentioned earlier).

Slow scanning could be caused by a clash with Android's media scanner trying to do the same job at the same time, so try putting an empty .nomedia file in the top level of both of your music folders.

@maxmp would be able to advise further on this though.

 

13 minutes ago, Aniket said:

The playlist contains around 6000 songs but the file Poweramp generated did not list the path of half of the files, just the names and the rest of the files were outputted with the file path as they were all supposed to be.
Now, if you say that the files must not be on the SD card, I can tell you with absolute certainty that they are.

Exported playlists will only show path information if the entry has been resolved as matching to something in PA's music library database, otherwise just a filename will be shown in the list. If the database is still populating (e.g. during a FULL Rescan) then some items may not have been matched. For a valid match to exist, both the filename AND the first level of containing folder must be exactly the same between the entry in the music database and the entry in playlist. The "Rescan / Resolve Playlists" option will attempt to correct that if any folders or files have been moved, but it can only do so when the original database scanning process has been completed. Is the original playlist in this case an internal one (i.e. created within PA with the +Playlist feature) or is it a file-based one (e.g. an .M3U file)?

Andre

[Aniket]

18 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Not sure why Nearby Devices is listed, might be something specific to your system? I don't think it's Chromecast or Bluetooth as I use both of these and that doesn't show in my permissions list. Mine has no general permissions at all in fact:

Well, the first thing Poweramp asks for when it is running for the first time on S20+ is to ask for that permission. Just FYI.
 

19 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Slow scanning could be caused by a clash with Android's media scanner trying to do the same job at the same time, so try putting an empty .nomedia file in the top level of both of your music folders.

@maxmp would be able to advise further on this though.

Are you saying that I can put a .nomedia file in the "Poweramp Waves" folder? If I do that, won't Poweramp also not read the music files?
 

22 minutes ago, andrewilley said:

Exported playlists will only show path information if the entry has been resolved as matching to something in PA's music library database, otherwise just a filename will be shown in the list. If the database is still populating (e.g. during a FULL Rescan) then some items may not have been matched. For a valid match to exist, both the filename AND the first level of containing folder must be exactly the same between the entry in the music database and the entry in playlist. The "Rescan / Resolve Playlists" option will attempt to correct that if any folders or files have been moved, but it can only do so when the original database scanning process has been completed. Is the original playlist in this case an internal one (i.e. created within PA with the +Playlist feature) or is it a file-based one (e.g. an .M3U file)?

This makes sense but then why does "Resolve Playlist" not work at all even when all the scanning is done? It has not worked for me since Android P if I remember correctly. No matter how many resolve playlists I do, If I have altered or deleted some file from the main library, I always have to do a manual cleaning of the playlists myself and by the way, it worked amazingly well in V2 of Poweramp but don't ask me to go back to that version. I can do the manual cleaning. That is not much of a hassle since we now have range-selector feature that I requested.

[Bencherished]

@andrewilley My OS is android 12, I use Bluetooth headphones, and Nearby devices is allowed, including files and media permissions.

@Aniket Try selecting internal storage only, then observe what happens. 

If it works fine, move as much files to the phone, if no problems, do the reverse, if there is any problem, you have to format the sd card. 

Bencherished 

[andrewilley]

3 hours ago, Aniket said:

Are you saying that I can put a .nomedia file in the "Poweramp Waves" folder? If I do that, won't Poweramp also not read the music files?

Poweramp ignores the presence or otherwise of .nomedia files. It fully scans any folders that are ticked in its Music Folders list. But it will stop Android from scanning the same folders again.

 

3 hours ago, Aniket said:

This makes sense but then why does "Resolve Playlist" not work at all even when all the scanning is done? 

Resolve Playlist is intended to find files that are now in different root paths to the locations referenced in the M3U file or internal copy - for example when copying a Windows M3U file to an Android device, or if you move your files to a new SD Card and the card's root location changes. The process ignores all of the originally quoted root levels, and only checks for matching songs in the database which have the exact same filename and first containing folder.

If a playlist some the audio filename only in the Playlist category view, the requested entry in that playlist has not been matched with anything in the database. Check the source M3U file and compare to the content of your storage.

So if an M3U playlist file, copied from a PC for example, contains a line referring to:

C:\Users\FredBloggs\Music\Artists\ABBA\Arrival\Dancing Queen.mp3

Then any of the following local files, once they've been properly scanned into PA's music database, would be considered a match because in each case the last folder/filename is /Arrival/Dancing Queen.mp3

9462-E832/Media/Artists/ABBA/Arrival/Dancing Queen.mp3
9462-E832/Audio/ABBA/Arrival/Dancing Queen.mp3
9462-E832/Media/Albums/Arrival/Dancing Queen.mp3

However the following locations would NOT work as the final folder name or the filename are not exact matches:

9462-E832/Media/Artists/ABBA/Arrival/Dancing Queen - ABBA.mp3
9462-E832/Media/Artists/ABBA/ABBA Gold/Dancing Queen.mp3

One exception: if a filename in the M3U file has no path information at all, it can still be matched with an audio file found in the same path as the playlist file (i.e. relative path).

Andre

[Aniket]

15 hours ago, Bencherished said:

@andrewilley My OS is android 12, I use Bluetooth headphones, and Nearby devices is allowed, including files and media permissions.

@Aniket Try selecting internal storage only, then observe what happens. 

If it works fine, move as much files to the phone, if no problems, do the reverse, if there is any problem, you have to format the sd card. 

Bencherished 

@Bencherished

Did it, not changing anything! The scan time was quicker though which is understandable.

[Aniket]

13 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Poweramp ignores the presence or otherwise of .nomedia files. It fully scans any folders that are ticked in its Music Folders list. But it will stop Android from scanning the same folders again.

@andrewilley

That is nifty little thing I learned. I suppose this would help me a lot since I don't want android to be scanning my music library anyway. This will also stop all the galleries from showing album arts which will be really neat. Thank you very much for the tip.

 

 

13 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Resolve Playlist is intended to find files that are now in different root paths to the locations referenced in the M3U file or internal copy - for example when copying a Windows M3U file to an Android device, or if you move your files to a new SD Card and the card's root location changes. The process ignores all of the originally quoted root levels, and only checks for matching songs in the database which have the exact same filename and first containing folder.

You did an awesome job in explaining how PA works while it is scanning for files, however, I never said that PA is not able to recognize files. I said, if I change something in my main library, say a file had a name: "I am in lvoe" and it is added to playlist "Love songs",  and I changed the file name to "I am in love" in my main library. PA does a great job to match all the files, in this case, PA will tell that there is no match for the filename "I am in lvoe" which was in the playlist "Love Songs" but in PA V2, those entries in a playlist which were not matched to an actual file used to vanish on their own and that was neat because those were "NOW" wrong entries anyway since the files have been either changed or deleted altogether. The entries in the playlist used to just vanish as if it never existed but these days, those entries remain there for you to clean up and those entries don't get cleaned up even if I do "playlist resolve". Is there something I am doing wrong ?

Like I said, it is not much of a big deal. With the new range selector feature in the PA, I can very easily sort a playlist first to get all the invalid entries in a playlist at the top and then delete it in a jiffy. So, not a big deal but since it already used to be a feature, why change it at all?

[andrewilley]

It was a deliberate change a few years ago, made to prevent items in playlists from being deleted if the source file went missing for some perfectly genuine reason. For example you changed a folder name, or renamed a file (exactly as in your example in fact), or a storage location became unmounted. It was done following user complaints about permanently broken M3U files if some of the source music files became temporarily unavailable. Admittedly the more recent resolving system is more robust, in that only the first folder name and filename must match, but it would still be easy enough to unintentionally wreck carefully created playlists.

So now if a file is initially not present, or if it has subsequently been removed, it's up to you to decide what to do about any phantom entries left in playlists (which will still show the raw filename as a placeholder). I guess it ought to be possible for Max to add an offer-to-remove warning prompt during the Resolve process, but I can see all sorts of potential complaints occurring even with a warning.

Andre

[Aniket]

14 hours ago, andrewilley said:

It was a deliberate change a few years ago, made to prevent items in playlists from being deleted if the source file went missing for some perfectly genuine reason. For example you changed a folder name, or renamed a file (exactly as in your example in fact), or a storage location became unmounted. It was done following user complaints about permanently broken M3U files if some of the source music files became temporarily unavailable. Admittedly the more recent resolving system is more robust, in that only the first folder name and filename must match, but it would still be easy enough to unintentionally wreck carefully created playlists.

@andrewilleyOh, I did not think of that. That makes total sense.
 

14 hours ago, andrewilley said:

So now if a file is initially not present, or if it has subsequently been removed, it's up to you to decide what to do about any phantom entries left in playlists (which will still show the raw filename as a placeholder). I guess it ought to be possible for Max to add an offer-to-remove warning prompt during the Resolve process, but I can see all sorts of potential complaints occurring even with a warning.

Yes, that would be nice if Max sir implements it if possible.


By the way, please tell me how to close this topic that I have started.

Regards

Edited August 1, 2022 by Aniket
Added another query.

[andrewilley]

No need to close the topic, in case anything changes so it can be updated. You can mark a post as the Solution if you like though.

Andre