Replace function in Playlists

[Naireem]

It would be cool to have a replacement function in playlists, especially through this rare bug that happens, if you import *.m3u ore *.m3u8 playlists: (the one where songs are mismatched; like "Artist 1/Album/Blabla.mp3 to Artist 2/Album/Blabla.mp3").

And it would be nice to have such a function!

 

And many thanks for Poweramp! The best Music Player i ever used!

[andrewilley]

There is 'Rescan/Resolve Playlists' in the menu of the Playlists Category. That will deal with situations like the one you describe, as long as you haven't changed the filename or the name of its immediate parent folder.

Andre

[Naireem]

Yes, i know. But this doesn't solve my issues. As the Album name is the same name across multiple Artists! Thanks for your prompt reply!

[andrewilley]

How often do you have different Artists with the exact same album subfolder name and the exact same song filename? It's possible to create of course, but very rare in the real world. The easiest solution going forward would be to ensure that your filenames are formatted to include the artist's name too - e.g. "Music/ABBA/Arrival/02 Dancing Queen - ABBA.mp3" versus "Music/SomeCoverBand/Arrival/02 Dancing Queen - SomeCoverBand.mp3".

But if you really do need to do a complex search/replace batch edit on the paths within a playlist, export it to M3U8 first and edit it in a text editor. But if the results are still ambiguous, the re-import will not necessarily find the matches that you want (remember that high level path details are ignored, as discussed earlier; if they weren't, you could never import a playlist that was created on a different device).

Within PA itself, you can only delete the old entry and add the new one from your Category lists.

Andre

[Naireem]

I already have my preferred naming scheme: It's "Music/Artist/Albumname [Year]/Disknumber-Tracknumber Trackname.mp3". I unfortunately don't have the time to edit ~80,000 Tracks to a new format. And moving the Track to its original position in a ~3500 tracks long playlist is a difficult maneuver. (I like to have the tracks in its original position for reasons)

[MotleyG]

Nothing wrong with this folder format. But how does this lead to duplicate issues? If anything, this should ensure a very unique structure is met. Do you have a real example you can share?

[Naireem]

It's "Music/Artist/(Same Album name) [(Same year)]/(Same Disknumber/Tracknumber and Trackname).mp3". Very rare indeed, but when it happens, it's awful.

[MotleyG]

6 minutes ago, Naireem said:

"Music/Artist/(Same Album name) [(Same year)]/(Same Disknumber/Tracknumber and Trackname).mp3"

This is your format, but what are some real examples of a true duplicate? It is impossible to program around a potential issue, and if it is so rare, it is better instead to deal with that specific incident.  

[andrewilley]

I'm with @MotleyG  on this one. How often do you find a duplicated song with the same Album Name, from the same Year, with the same Disc & Track numbers, and also the exact same Filename and Extender?

Externally editing exported M3U files wouldn't help much either, as once you re-scan them back into PA you'll encounter any ambiguity clashes that were present before (as everything you edit beyond the filename and its first level parent folder will be ignored anyway).

You wouldn't need to rename 80,000 files to fix this by the way, just the tiny tiny number of files that have somehow managed to create clashes.

 

@maxmp while I agree this issue is incredibly rare, and also easily fixable by being more conscious about the naming of files, I do wonder whether it might be worth adding a bit of code to check one extra folder level up for any specific instances where searching for the filename and its parent folder doesn't return a unique SQL match from the music database.

For example, there could be an admittedly rather forced case like this which would create an ambiguous match when trying to check for /Disc 1/01 Main Titles.mp3 in a Playlist:
  Films/Star Wars, Extended Release/Disc 1/01 Main Titles.mp3
and
  Films/Back to the Future Complete/Disc 1/01 Main Titles.mp3

Andre