Adding new music takes a long time

[MothraMoon]

Someone siad it is a ten minute ordeal. I WISH!! It is more like a ten hour ordeal. I feel like giving up. I thought it was working okay, but hten it stopped for some reason. I had to empty and start all over with a fresh instlll of the app and it took SEVEN HOURS!!!

I turned off auto rescan. I did everything. This is the fourth complete rescan (which I did not initiate). It's so god awful I cannot bear it. WHY WHHAT AM I DOING WRONG. DOES THIS MEAN I CAN NEVER ADD ANY NEW MUSIC TO THE PLAYER WITHOUT HAVING TO START OVER EVERY TIME????

CAN I POSSIBLY BE THE ONLY ONE WHO LIKES TO ADD NEW MUSIC EVERY WEEK WITHOUT ENDURING 12 HOURS OF EXCRUCIATING AGONY??? I assume anyone who is willing to endure this rather than "just get spotify," is like me and finds it totally inadquate. I like to add songs every week. I even got rid of the album art folder because I ONLY CARE ABUOT LISTENING TO THE MUSIC IN RANDOM SHUFFLE MODE. WHY IS THIS SO HARD?????????

[MothraMoon]

PS, i HAVE SCOURED THE INTERNET FOR DAYS AND WEEKS LOOKING FOR A SOLUTION. THERE SEEMS TO BE NONE. I HAVE ASKED ON REDDIT. AND NOW I AM ASKING HERE. I KEEP THINKING THERE MUST BE A SOLUTION AFTER SO MANY PEOPLE HAVE COMPLAINED FOR SO MANY YEARS.

[MotleyG]

30 minutes ago, MothraMoon said:

Someone siad it is a ten minute ordeal. I WISH!! It is more like a ten hour ordeal. I feel like giving up. I thought it was working okay, but hten it stopped for some reason. I had to empty and start all over with a fresh instlll of the app and it took SEVEN HOURS!!!

I turned off auto rescan. I did everything. This is the fourth complete rescan (which I did not initiate). It's so god awful I cannot bear it. WHY WHHAT AM I DOING WRONG. DOES THIS MEAN I CAN NEVER ADD ANY NEW MUSIC TO THE PLAYER WITHOUT HAVING TO START OVER EVERY TIME????

CAN I POSSIBLY BE THE ONLY ONE WHO LIKES TO ADD NEW MUSIC EVERY WEEK WITHOUT ENDURING 12 HOURS OF EXCRUCIATING AGONY??? I assume anyone who is willing to endure this rather than "just get spotify," is like me and finds it totally inadquate. I like to add songs every week. I even got rid of the album art folder because I ONLY CARE ABUOT LISTENING TO THE MUSIC IN RANDOM SHUFFLE MODE. WHY IS THIS SO HARD?????????

First off, welcome to the Poweramp forum. Hopefully somebody here can offer some support to help you. Let's focus on the issue you are having and work from there. You are posting on a thread that has been inactive for over a year, so the original issue has likely already been dealt with and resolved.

A couple of questions if I may ask to help get you on the right track. The OP has a Samsung S20 and had an issue with an external SD card. Is this the same device and situation for you? And was Poweramp first installed from a fresh installation on your current device, or restored from a previous device that had been working as expected for you in the past?

Edited October 31, 2022 by MotleyG

[andrewilley]

I've moved this conversation to a new thread as it clearly wasn't the same discussion that someone else was having back in a dormant thread from 2020/2021.

@MothraMoon please could you outline your own issue, including device details and Android/Poweramp versions, type and quantity of audio files, etc. Are you using File Access Legacy Mode (in Settings=>Misc), and where is your music stored?

But in general, you should be able to manually add new audio files any time you like, and a quick rescan - usually the automated scan when you next start the app - should pick them up in a few seconds.

Andre

[MothraMoon]

Thanks. I am not sure where to put all this info since you said you moved it. I will refer to my reddit thread which is longer than War and Peace. However, I installed the trial version, then I got it working after much hand wringing agony. I bought the unlocker. It stopped working (like it just would not respond or play music when I hit play). I did everything short of a factory reset of my phone, and had to start over. (And this was not the first app I used. I have scanned and rescanned my sd card many many many times which is why I am ready to drive off a cliff. There truly seems to be no solution and I am a big believer in the old adage, NO MUSIC NO LIFE.

In short, I deleted the app and the unlocker app. Then I reinstalled it. I had to do a full rescan which consists of the spinning icon with no real info showing. This went on for several hours and I had to leave it overnight. I began the ordeal at 8:00 not realizing I would have to babysit it until 4:00 am. 

This morning it continued scanning, only this time I saw the progress where it would say something like 100/17,000 files. That took three hours and that was only half the music. It finally finished and showed all 30,000 songs.

However, I just know that I am going to have to go through it all again if I ever have to restart the phone.

I don't know how else to add the music. I can plug the phone into a laptop and drag them to the music folder on the sd card (if it is not 30K songs it should not be sooooooooo horrible), or I remove the sd card and add songs that way.

Downloading them from the cloud would be a massive PITA so I am at a complete loss.

I mean, it is so messed up now that it seems to have ruined my phone. Yesterday it was hanging for over an hour "calculating" and trying to read the card. It's a big file, but I thought if it can handle a 512 GB card (this one is only 256 and only half full) I am like WTF??????

I really want this app to work I am sick of this. I have been obsessing on this for two months ever since my iPod died. Why was I able to drag a few files over and have it work using 2009 technology, but today it is MISSION IMPOSSIBLE.  (And btw, I totally eliminated the itunes folder structure and put all 30000 songs into one giant folder. Could that be what is messing things up? The reason I did that is because I thought managing so many folders on the phone would be a nightmare. This way, I could just add things after a certain date. But I don't know.

Why does it seem to work for literally everyone else on the planet except me. Could it be that my phone is a Samsung A515F (which is not a u.s. model but comes from Argentina. That was another rip off that I was unaware of at the time. Since Tracfone switched to verizon, the phone has been basically a doorstop until my ipod died. I am trying to throw out every conceivable reason why this thing will not work)

[MothraMoon]

I also want to add that I even went tot he app settings in android and unselected the "remove permissions if unused after a few months" or whatever it says. Somebody mentioned that restarting the phone will undo this setting which super frustrating.

I have not been able to test the theory. In any case, I never go months without using the phone. I only downloaded it two weeks ago and I have been futzing with it almost continuously since then.

But why would removing  the card have any impact on the file paths stored in the app if they do not change. I mean, I have my itunes pointed to an external hard drive, and if I remove it, itunes does not lose all the settings and have to rescan it. That is why I don't understand how to add new music. If it would just remember that it scanned everything before a certain date, and then only look for new stuff that would be the perfect solution.

[andrewilley]

Yes, putting 30,000 songs into one folder is probably a very bad idea. PA has to ask for directory info and open every single file during a scan to get the tag data and/or cover art. A Samsung A51 should be able to read fast enough, but 30,000 in one folder is asking for trouble.

I would suggest backing up the card onto a computer, cleanly reformat the card, and then copy your music back into more logical folders. Even if you just use /My Music/A/ , /My Music/B/ etc. Or by year, or whatever works for you to get it down the hundreds or files per folder rather than thousands. Ideally use tidy Artist/Album/songs ordering to be honest, but that might take a while if you don't have them stored that way on your original computer. Then clear PA's setup completely by clearing app data and start from scratch, set the Music Folders location to the SD Card's My Music folder and let it scan. Ideally I would not suggest using Legacy File Access Mode. It is technically a bit faster, but Google could disable it during future Android updates and you should not need to do a Full Rescan again any time soon.

Removing and re-inserting an SD Card can cause Android to treat it as a new storage location, which would force a rescan as PA would not be able to find its ABCD-1234/My Music/A/ folder when Android has renamed the card so it is now EFGH-5678/My Music/A/ instead.

Andre

[MothraMoon]

How many separate folders does it need. What would be the maximum per folder? I even eliminated the artwork because that was slower to load than the songs themselves. It took two weeks to copy all the music onto the card because I was afraid to do it all at once (because it takes such a long time it will burn out the fan).

If I have to do it all over again, I think I will just give up.

I could do it by date but anything else would defeat the purpose (because the way itunes structures the folders would be a nighmare to maintain manually)

[MothraMoon]

Okay, I see you answered the question above. "hundreds per folder not thousands"

[MotleyG]

2 minutes ago, MothraMoon said:

How many separate folders does it need. What would be the maximum per folder? I even eliminated the artwork because that was slower to load than the songs themselves. It took two weeks to copy all the music onto the card because I was afraid to do it all at once (because it takes such a long time it will burn out the fan).

If I have to do it all over again, I think I will just give up.

I could do it by date but anything else would defeat the purpose (because the way itunes structures the folders would be a nighmare to maintain manually)

The structured folders may help, but ultimately Poweramp still has to read each file and index it in its' own database. If you have healthy metadata included (song title, album, artist, genre, etc.) It will help to make sure this is done quickly and accurately by Poweramp. It they do not have the data, it will take longer as PA then has to guess at some of that data from the folder and filename, and if they are all in one big folder, that could be a bottleneck.

That Samsung model is just a derivative of their A51 series. It came with Android 10, and has 128GB of storage and 4GB of RAM, more than enough to keep Poweramp happy for operational performance. I'm not sure if you updated to A11 or higher, but again Poweramp is more than capable there. As far as the SD card goes, if you have a 256GB card, and have 30k tracks on 50% of that, I have to assume these are all mp3 or some other lossy format. So again this is also very manageable for PA under normal conditions. But depending on the card's read and write speeds, this could affect what you are seeing.

For comparison, I have a 512GB SanDisk Extreme card, and it is 99% full. I have about 25k songs mostly in Apple lossless (yes I still have iTunes at home, too many IOS devices in the family to abandon it yet). If I initiate a Full Rescan, it takes about 30 seconds to run through the contents and find all songs, then about 10-12 minutes to catalog the entire library. If I just do a simple Rescan, it picks up newly added tracks and updates Poweramp in just a few seconds. I typically use my digital audio player, running Android 8.1. But I also have a LG G8 phone at Android 10 and get similar results.

 

 

[beat8000]

I also had a PA fullscan issue in August 2021 for which I have sent an Android debug log to @maxmp: There were a lot of warnings and also some errors which each caused a stop of the scan in different trials.

In my music library stored on two 1 TB sandisk SD cards I had one folder with 708 flac tracks and about 57 GBs. But to my surprise this folder created no problems.   

Edited October 31, 2022 by beat8000

[andrewilley]

If copying 250GB of music took two weeks then either you have a slow SD Card (unusual these days), or problems with its formatting, or you are using a slow port on the computer (I'd suggest a USB 3 'blue' port with a fast card reader as a minimum). Even that going at full speed won't match the hard drive though, so you should just be able to leave it copying. iTunes is pretty crap at logically organising its content on storage, so just split the files out into folders alphabetically or just in 500-1000 files at a time.

Andre

 

[MothraMoon]

I don't know. The file data is embedded in the mp3 files. That's why I did not think it would be a problem to ditch the folders (I keep a copy in itunes folders view anyway so I have two copies of the music on a 1 TB drive). However, I thought it would be a pain to manually track it on the phone/player because I would have to keep lists of everything I added.

For instance. If I have a ton of Beatles stuff already, and then I add another item to the Beatles folder, I have to manually go to that folder and copy that album to the phone version and insert it into the right folder. Just seems like a pain compared to seeing everything by date. [Like you can't just sort by date to see the most recent things added]. And never mind the compilation albums which itunes really made a mess of. Thing is, I really don't care as long as I can play the files.

But if this is the problem I guess I cannot do it this way which makes me question whether I want to bother at all. It was such a hassle putting everything on the sd card to begin with that I think I would rather stab my eyeballs out than do it again. But I guess I will suck it up. If it still doesn't speed up the card reading process it will have been a huge waste of my time.

Thing is, I know my collection is not really all that huge, but compared to most peoples' it is.

[MothraMoon]

Okay to answer the question about the sd card. I put it in the card reader slot on the laptop. It took a long time because I broke the task up into small batches because I did not want to strain the laptop. Maybe that is just paranoid. But I think it copied at the rate of about 24 mbps which is pretty abysmal. It's a UHS I which is not the fastest, but I thought it was capable of at least 100 mbps.

[andrewilley]

It's not a waste of your time, the computer can just get on with it. I often leave bulk copying tasks (such as terabytes of data across a network) to run overnight.

24MB/s (Megabytes) isn't too bad, but 24 Mbps (Megabits) is poor. But a decent USB 3 (blue) port and a fast card reader should beat that, maybe 50-60MB/s? But sometimes that'll slow down after a bit due to buffering. You ought to get at least a GB or two per minute anyway, so only a few hours copying.

And for reference, I have about 65GB of music across 315 folders / 7500 files, and a Full Rescan from scratch takes a few seconds for the initial directory crawl and then less than 2 minutes for the full tagging pass. Adding new files takes almost no time at all as a full directory crawl is done first (a few seconds) and then only the new files need to be read for tag data.

Andre

[Wolfpig]

First those low speeds might be due to the Hardware as that must be able to reach the Max read/write speeds too. 

 

Second if the sd card only gets that slow speeds and the Hardware can be ruled out as a cause..... could it be that the sd card is damaged? 

 

I would test it with a limited amount of stuff on the sd card (Maybe around 20gb) to see how Poweramp behaves and to recheck if it is caused by the app or the card put the same files afterwards onto the internal save of the phone. 

 

If that works better then you at least know what went wrong. 

 

BTW. Recently switched phones and put around 151 folders with a bit over 2200 files on it (approx 80gb) and scanning took almost no time. 

[MothraMoon]

OK. It's a brand new card but could have been destroyed scanning so many times. It's a Lexar brand which may be crap... I don't know. But at least I have a better idea what to do.

[andrewilley]

Lexar are generally fine, often used for photographic purposes. C10 or U3 or faster spec would be best.

Multiple reading won't damage it, but a reformat to give a clean new start certainly won't do any harm.

Andre

[6b6561]

Re-format the card in the phone would be my first recommendation, but I can understand that you are a bit hesitant to do so.

How about by doing a simple speed checks on that card. Take a single large file and:

• Copy it to the card using the card reader and see how long it takes.
• Insert the card in the phone and see how long it takes to copy the files

The 1TB drive is that a USB drive? If so, then you are probably both reading and writing the files over the same USB bus?

What PC model do you have? This could help us to dig out the speed of your internal card reader in the PC. I have had a lot of issues with internal card readers... have you checked that your card reader drivers are updated?

You wrote that you are worried about your computer overheating due to high load during the copies, it sounds a bit strange that a file copy would put that much strain on the PC. Could be if you have an issue with the card and there are a lot of re-writes etc.

It sounds like you copy the files manually in explorer? Then I understand that you want to have all files in a single directory, sort by date and copy. Here I would recommend that you would go for some synchronization software, such as http://allwaysync.com/ which allows you to synchronize drives. It can also be used to sync a folder on your phone to the PC over a USB cable, that is something that I haven't tested and might be quite slow.

 

[MothraMoon]

It's a Dell XPS 13 purchased in about 2019. (I also have another one purchased in 2018). It still works pretty well but it's not as lightning fast as it used to be. But compared to many of the other lemons I have owned, I am still overall happy with it and not looking to replace it yet.

Overall it is pretty good, but I try to avoid doing behemoth tasks on it. I also have major problems with photoshop now that that program has become so bloated, but I am stuck with it for now.

In any case, I don't like to set something running and just leave the house. Something always goes wrong when I do that.

I am pretty sure that all my files have enough metadata embedded which is whyit never occurred to me that the app would be reading folder names.

I would love to redo the entire thing but I know I will just end up redoing the same things over and over after itunes comes along and redoes it (like a single artist "greatest hits" album giong underr "compilatoins.") Thus, I have accepted the fact that are forced to deal with less.

Like in 2009 we could have songs, and album art, and it would not take 17 hours to load when you add a few new songs. But if I have to jettison all these "nice" things in order to hear the entire collection on random shuffle, it is literally all I care about.

It's beginning to look more and more like an impossible dream, but I am going to reformat the card -- erase it totally -- and copy everything from my San Disk Extreme SSD to the card -- in the hated iTunes folder order. It's going to mean endless futzing to make sure the sd card version and the phone version matchup.

I already spend time matching up copies in OneDrive (which is where everything is stored in case the house burns down). And I run itunes off of a completely different laptop and SSD on my other Dell.

There used to be a basic Windows Media Player that acted a lot like itunes that let you rip cds, burn cds, and make playlists.

My motto for the last ten years has been: IT WAS TOO GOOD AND USEFUL. IT HAD TO GO.

 

[MothraMoon]

OK, follow up. I spent all morning on this. I tested out half the music library in the "traditional" folder structure, and yes, it seems to be working much better in terms of the app actually reading the songs without spinning for several hours. (It took probably ten minutes for 18,000 songs). I erased the drive in the phone, but copied the files from my USB to my SD card via the laptop. This was only moderately painful (as it was averaging about 20 megabites per second).

I am going to load the rest of it in this manner and hope for the best. At least now I know that individual songs in a giant folder is bad.... still not sure why, but I will never attempt it again. Of course, slotting the files in manually on an SD card to keep it in the same order that itunes does also seems like it may cause damage to the card, but at this point I don't care.

Not sure if I am the only one who ever thought to flatten the folder structure to avoid that nonsense, but it doesn't work. I just hope the app will continue to work and not crap out on me every week forcing me to rescan every time. Of course, if it takes ten minutes as opposed to ten hours, I may be able to live with that. [I would consider some program that "syncs" but I did not really want to do it for all 30000 songs in one go. iTunes has not "synced" in years, and I used to just drag the songs into the player via the software. That's where I got the idea to sort songs by date].

[6b6561]

I have my music organized in a Artist/Album hierarchy.

• Total number of dirs:  1266
• Total number of files:  11951
• Total size of files:  92.49 GB

And I have had this synchronized to a couple of different devices for years without any issues. Even my old Samsung xcover3 is able to handle it.

I'm also on the hook for iTunes as I do have a iPhone as my secondary phone but there is no way in hell that iTunes would get anything but read access to the library...

I have recently gone through the exercise of re-syncing this to both a new iPhone as well as to a Android. I did let the syncs run over night, iPhone sync failed somewhere half way but recovered by re-starting the sync. Similar thing with the Android setup.

There is no way that I would attempt to handle this manually, find some good synchronization software and let that handle it.

[MotleyG]

52 minutes ago, 6b6561 said:

I'm also on the hook for iTunes as I do have a iPhone as my secondary phone but there is no way in hell that iTunes would get anything but read access to the library...

Same here. Use iTunes as little as possible other than to manage what I tell it. Use mp3tag (my personal preference) or something similar to manage your metadata and folder/file structure.

1 hour ago, MothraMoon said:

[I would consider some program that "syncs" but I did not really want to do it for all 30000 songs in one go. iTunes has not "synced" in years, and I used to just drag the songs into the player via the software. That's where I got the idea to sort songs by date].

There are many good/free sync apps available. Plus for this exact purpose there is a good paid one called TuneFusion from Illustrate software that does this very well.

1 hour ago, MothraMoon said:

Of course, slotting the files in manually on an SD card to keep it in the same order that itunes does also seems like it may cause damage to the card, but at this point I don't care.

This shouldn't be an issue with most decent brand cards. They are made for 100's of 1000's of cycles.

[andrewilley]

I do not have iTunes installed on ANY of my devices or computers. I tried briefly many years ago, but as I define my exact storage locations, subfolders and file naming protocols, it was quickly clear that me and Apple were never going to get on.

I copy most stuff manually, but I do use foldersync app for some tasks such as moving auto-downloaded podcasts into my required folder structure on my phone. I also use AlwaysSync on the PC for keeping my documents and other work folders synced between my laptop and NAS storages for when I'm away from home.

Re: memory cards. There is no danger in copying files to them, that's what they are for. If anything, they are happier if you copy data in bulk and leave it there rather than regularly deleting and replacing odd files. 

The reason for not keeping too much in the root of any one big folder, and creating smaller subfolders instead, is simply the amount of time it takes to read a whole directory table in order to find something. Each time you open a file, it's much quicker to find it in 100 items than it is in 30,000. Remember the raw underlying tables are unsorted, they exist in the order the files were added (or replaced).

Andre

[6b6561]

Quite interesting reading on SD cards in general. I would say that there is no worry that a memory card would be worn out using it for more or less static file storage.

https://www.colesclassroom.com/how-long-do-micro-sd-cards-last/