Can Poweramp find skipped files in playlists?

[Julian Lavreau]

I recently purchased Poweramp.  I have 90 playlists and in about 30% of them, Poweramp fails to play (skips/can not locate) the songs.  What to do?

[Fitzian]

 

Poweramp does not retain any musical information about Playlist entries, such as the song Title, Artist, Album, duration, etc. Once a Playlist has been created/read, Poweramp only knows how to find each song by its absolute file location in local storage - i.e. the precise directory path and filename. If you later change an audio file's name, or move it to a new folder, Poweramp will no longer be able to access the song file. In such cases, any musical information from the Library (Title/Artist/Album/etc) will be replaced by a simple placeholder of just the original raw filename. There is a 'Rescan / Resolve Playlists' option in the Playlists menu which will attempt to track down and reconnect to any such moved files (even files to which Android temporarily prevented access, which can also happen) however changed filenames can't be rediscovered.

(source linked above)

[Julian Lavreau]

Thanks @Fitzian.  I was too brief in stating the question.  No file names were changed.  Folder locations were not changed.  I have thousands of songs, hundreds of which were created using sound editing programs.  I tried the rescan function and it recovered a small number of songs, but I'll assume that short of manually sifting through files one by one, there is no facility to locate files.  I've tried 8 different Android music apps and Poweramp is the best, but I will testify: I don't need another feature, bell or whistle except an app that intelligently helps to organize (including finding) music files.  I'd pay hundred dollars for a program that find a file notify me where it is and allow me to move it appropriately; or that intelligently can report broken (missing file) playlists entries; or eliminate duplicates.  For those of use who may have moved music from different platforms (e.g., iTunes, Windows) to Android I see posts all over the net with people just trying to find their music.  Bells and whistles don't work if the songs aren't there to be played.  End of rant.  Start of file hunting....  Thanks again.

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, Julian Lavreau said:

No file names were changed.  Folder locations were not changed.

If that's the case, the songs ought to work in playlists.

As I said in the Guide on the subject, Playlists are actually very basic things. The M3U file needs to contain nothing more than a long list of files and the paths where they can be found. As long as you have not changed anything since the playlist was created, the filename and its parent folder location should be able to be matched with the contents of your device's storage. To make things more compatible between the file systems on different devices (e.g. Windows) all that Poweramp cares about is the actual audio filename and the one level of folder that contains it.

So let's say you have a playlist that refers to a song by the following path:

C:\Users\yourname\Music\Albums\ABBA Gold\Dancing Queen.mp3

Poweramp will happily find a match for these storage variants on your Android device:

/storage/0/Music/Disco/ABBA Gold/Dancing Queen.mp3
/ABCD-1234/Audio/Studio Recordings/ABBA Gold/Dancing Queen.mp3

However it will NOT be able to find the song if you've renamed either the file, or its parent folder, such as:

/storage/0/Music/Disco/ABBA Gold/Dancing Queen.flac
/storage/0/Music/Albums/ABBA Gold/01 Dancing Queen.mp3
/storage/0/Music/Albums/ABBA/Arrival/Dancing Queen - ABBA.mp3
/ABCD-1234/Audio/Studio Recordings/ABBA/Arrival/Dancing Queen.mp3

It doesn't matter that the renamed files are subjectively somewhat similar to the original. From an exact computerised matching point of view, the file might just as well be called /Songs/Rick Astley/Never Going to Give You Up.mp3, as it won't match.

Andre