Removal of broken/missing songs from playlists

[TBAce11]

Good evening everyone,

Everytime a song gets drastically changed (tags/info) or the song itself is deleted from the phone's hard drive, PA displays a hollow and unplayable copy of it that simply serves no purpose to me anymore. The logical solution would be to remove it from the playlist, but tracking it amongst a huge collection can prove painfully long if one forgets which ones were recently tampered with. I'm aware of the existence of the analyze/repair option available in all playlists created in Poweramp, but I have yet seen a missing song getting restored after deploying it.

This being said, would it be possible to add a playlist feature that will simply scan it and remove all broken/missing songs for us at once?

[ihaspei]

same here. looks like the resolve/rescan playlist button doesn't work.

the solution that i'm using to find these false entries is searching in each playlist the extension name of the song (.mp3, .flac, etc). then just delete them.

[andrewilley]

Poweramp's music library is at its heart a simple index/catalogue of all of the audio files detected in the user's chosen 'Music Folders' location(s) and in any subfolders. An index is created which points back to the precise location in your device's storage where each music file can be found. The second phase of the Full Rescan process opens each one of those files to look for any embedded 'metadata' tags (such as Title, Artist, Album, Genre, Track#, etc) which are then saved into the music database for quick access via the Library Category views.

You can edit the tag information in any of those files - to change an Album or Artist name for example - and Poweramp will detect the fact that the file has been modified and re-read the metadata contents into its music database. That won't change the storage path or the filename though, so it is still regarded as the same audio file as before, just with modified tag details.

If however you change the filename or the folder structure in any way, Poweramp will no longer be able to locate that original file by its path/filename, and will treat it as having been deleted and thus remove it from the database. During the same scan it may of course find a 'new' audio file which it will then read into the database. So while the song will still show with the same Title, Artist, Album, etc in your Category lists, internally it is a completely new file as far as the index pointers in the database are concerned.

A file being 'new' makes no difference to general playback from the Library Categories - other than Play Counts and other generated data for that song will be set back to zero again - but if you have any playlists which refer specifically to the directory path and filename of the original item (which is how playlists work) then they will no longer be able to find the song as the original item has been removed from the database. Poweramp does not physically remove such orphaned entries from playlists though, as otherwise an action as a simple as changing a top level folder name from 'Albums' to 'Music Albums' would wipe out the contents of your entire playlist collection. Instead, you will see a placeholder showing the filename (with MP3/FLAC/etc extender) which the playlist was looking for but could not find.

The Rescan/Resolve Playlists function will attempt to re-discover such missing items by looking for the same containing folder and filename pairing throughout the whole database. What is won't currently do is remove anything that it still can't find (such as a file that really has been deleted), you need to do that manually.

Andre