songs repeatedly get duplicated randomly, full rescan doesn't help

[micromothman]

I've been a Poweramp user for about 5 years, on 2 or 3 different phones. Currently on a Samsung A52 5G. I love the app WHEN IT WORKS but I keep having this recurring problem and am pretty frustrated. I get a recurring problem - for no apparent reason, about 1/4 of my massive music library is suddenly duplicated, now many albums have all the songs in twice. I didn't do anything to the storage to trigger this, it just suddenly happened overnight. I've had this problem about 3 times already over the past few years. Previously a full rescan fixed it, but this time it makes no difference. Running out of patience with hearing everything twice, I tried deleting the app data. OK, that was probably a bad idea. The duplicate songs are gone, but now I lost my playlists, which had been carefully curated over many years. Sigh. Are my playlists permanently gone? Why does this duplicate song problem keep happening?

[maxmp]

If songs are duplicated, it means the track files added two times in Music folders - one time in legacy file access mode (these folders are marked as such in Music Folders selection dialog), and another time - as storage folder. From the app point of view these are different files.

Unselect one of the duplications in Music Folders (preferable the legacy folders as legacy file access is not going to last). Thanks!

[andrewilley]

As Max says, this could be caused by multiple entries in the Music Folders selection page pointing to the same physical folders, but I can't see how this would randomly occur and sometimes be fixed by a Full Rescan and sometimes not. When you see this problem happen again, long-press on each of two duplicated items and select Info/Tags for each. The top lines should show you the full Android storage path for each audio file - are they identical, or do they point to different locations?

Unfortunately if you cleared app data, you will have cleared (permanently) anything stored in Poweramp's music database, which includes song ratings, play counts and internally-created playlists, amongst other things. It's the equivalent of doing a clean re-install. Did you happen to have previously made a backup of your settings (which can include Playlists) using Settings=>Export Settings/Data? Or maybe you saved your internal playlists out to physical files (in .M3U8 format) using the Export option in the Playlists menu? Otherwise, sadly there's not much that can be done now. That's the annoying thing about backups - you don't need them until you really do, and by then it's often too late.

Andre

[micromothman]

Thanks for the replies. 

I had already looked for a duplicate file structure, and could find no such thing; there was no "extra" music folder, only one music folder plus its 100s of subfolders. No sign of duplicate artists, albums etc folders. It wasn't until I drilled down to individual albums that the duplicates appeared.  If there was some minor difference in the file strings of 2 identical songs, I hadn't actually checked as I was not prepared to individually go into 1000 different albums to delete them at that level. Well, it was actually only a seemingly random 1/3 of albums. 

Fortunately I do have a backup of my playlist m3u8 files from a few months ago. I'd hardly changed them recently as I find it really difficult to add files to playlists on a tiny touch phone. No easy way to select multiple songs across years, artists, etc. That leads to another question - is it possible for me to run Poweramp on a desktop PC, to create and edit playlists there? So much easier for me to work with my 10,000 song collection on a full screen computer with a mouse. 

Greg

[Fitzian]

@micromothmanno desktop option, sadly. Foobar2000 is plenty powerful, though.

You're now talking about playlist files, though, when your issue was your library as scanned.

1 hour ago, micromothman said:

If there was some minor difference in the file strings of 2 identical songs, I hadn't actually checked as I was not prepared to individually go [...]

Maybe you should check the file strings of 2 identical songs. 

As Andre said...

19 hours ago, andrewilley said:

When you see this problem happen again, long-press on each of two duplicated items and select Info/Tags for each. The top lines should show you the full Android storage path for each audio file - are they identical, or do they point to different locations?

 

[andrewilley]

6 hours ago, micromothman said:

I had already looked for a duplicate file structure, and could find no such thing; there was no "extra" music folder, only one music folder plus its 100s of subfolders. No sign of duplicate artists, albums etc folders. It wasn't until I drilled down to individual albums that the duplicates appeared.  If there was some minor difference in the file strings of 2 identical songs, I hadn't actually checked as I was not prepared to individually go into 1000 different albums to delete them at that level. Well, it was actually only a seemingly random 1/3 of albums. 

Fortunately I do have a backup of my playlist m3u8 files from a few months ago. I'd hardly changed them recently as I find it really difficult to add files to playlists on a tiny touch phone. No easy way to select multiple songs across years, artists, etc. That leads to another question - is it possible for me to run Poweramp on a desktop PC, to create and edit playlists there? So much easier for me to work with my 10,000 song collection on a full screen computer with a mouse. 

 

If you could just look at one duplicate pair of songs, and see if the paths and filenames are identical between both.

M3U8 files are plain text, so you can actually edit them manually in a text editor if you want. I agree that creating diverse playlists on a phone isn't easy - rather like batch editing of tags. I prefer to do both tasks on a computer.

The problem you'll have is that the M3U8 files created by Poweramp will contain absolute Android paths, so you you might need to batch search&replace the first portion of each line to get a PC to recognise the directory structures. Poweramp is able to cope with either version of file (PC or Android) as it ignores all absolute path detail and only refers to the final subfolder name and the exact filename for matching purposes. So I mostly create playlists on my PC and just copy the M3U file over to my phone and let Poweramp resolve the song locations.

Andre