New Phone - Playlist Issues

[realquiet]

Hello,

So I am upgrading from Samsung S9+ to Samsung S23 Ultra and ran into a problem with my Playlist.  Once I had everything manually transferred and set up on the S23 I can see and play all of my songs but in playlist I only see the song names that wont play on the rip logo.  Device says "cannot play storage unmounted".

On the S9 my MP3s were on an SD card and on the S23 there is no SD card only internal storage.

I exported my playlist on the S9 and put theme in a folder called "playlists" on the S23.  I moved my MP3s from S9 SD card folder "Music" to S23 internal folder called "Music X".

In my research last night I think I saw Andre say that that the MP3 folder must be named the same on the new phone?  Then again I believe I saw Andre say he recommends not using Samsung's internal dedicated "Music" folder but rather create your own folder.  Hence my "Music X" folder.

Thank you in advance for the help, this is driving me crazy.

realquiet

 

[andrewilley]

If you can see the playlists, but the songs within them consist of just filenames rather than the song title/artist/album/etc, then it usually means the audio files that were referenced in the M3U(8) playlist file could not be found when the last scan took place.

As long as the Library is now properly populated with your songs from their new storage location (check the 'All Songs' Category) probably all you will need to do is open the Playlists category and choose 'Rescan / Resolve Playlists' from the three-dots menu. If that does not work, try doing Settings=>Library=>Full Rescan.

Andre

[realquiet]

Hello Andre,

Thank you but it still did not work.  It just shows the rip screen and the song title.mp3.  And says cannot play storage unmounted.  Also I should mention There is no album art or artist/album only song title. 

I just uninstalled app and reinstalled and tried your method.  I did not import. In playlist it sees the list but only shows rip logo and once inside it shows rip logo for each song title.

Thanks 

[andrewilley]

And this is only for playlists? Has the rest of your music library been scanned correctly? (so All Songs is populated with all of your music, complete with Titles, Artists, Album names, etc).

Andre

[realquiet]

Yes this is only for the Playlist.  The all music is perfect.

Another thing I did when transferring from old phone is I grabbed the exported playlist/backup file from the download folder where Poweramp put it and also went deep into android/data/maxmp and grabbed what I think is a .pla file.

So in my new phone in the "Playlists" storage folder I have a playlist .pla file, a playlist vlc file, and the playlist backup file I created.  When setting up new phone I tell Poweramp to look in "Music X" and "Playlists".  So I figured Poweramp will look in "playlists" and grab one of the 3 that it chooses as I don't know which one it wants.  This might be where the issue is?

[andrewilley]

I would suggest simply copying the plain M3U (or M3U8) files from your old device's Playlists folder to the new one.

As long as the song filenames and their first level of containing folder are the same as on your old device, that should work and a Full Rescan will remove all the extra confusion and leave you with just the M3U playlists.

Andre

[realquiet]

I believe the the vlc files are the M3U8 files.  My computer just tags them as vlc.  As to the first level of containing folder I did put the mp3s in a new folder called "Music X" vs the old phones sd card folder "Music" to avoid using the Samsung dedicated Music folder.  I'm sorry I'm not that tech savvy.  Is the Music X the first level containing folder?

[andrewilley]

Could you perhaps post a copy of one of your playlist files? It will be plain text, so can be cut'n'pasted into your message from a text editor. If a playlist file worked within a Playlists folder on your old device, copying it to a similar Playlists folder on your new phone should work fine too.

 

Googling it, VLC media player can use playlists with the extender .VLC, but it doesn't seem to offer them in its "Save Playlist to File"  dialogue box which offers four standard choices:

M3U8 would be the safest format to choose, as that uses 'Unicode' text encoding which supports a huge number of international character sets rather than just basic alphanumeric letters and numbers. 

I've just tried creating a playlist in VLC, and it seems to be treating spaces as percent-encoded - i.e. any spaces in filenames are changed to "%20" (the ASCII code for a space being hex 0x20). Poweramp won't read that layout, as it expects filenames to quoted normally.

VLC saved M3U8 file:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:237,Paul Simon - The Boy in the Bubble
Paul%20Simon/Graceland/01%20-%20The%20Boy%20in%20the%20Bubble%20-%20Paul%20Simon.mp3
#EXTINF:289,Paul Simon - Graceland
Paul%20Simon/Graceland/02%20-%20Graceland%20-%20Paul%20Simon.mp3
#EXTINF:191,Paul Simon - I Know What I Know
Paul%20Simon/Graceland/03%20-%20I%20Know%20What%20I%20Know%20-%20Paul%20Simon.mp3
#EXTINF:163,Paul Simon - Gumboots
Paul%20Simon/Graceland/04%20-%20Gumboots%20-%20Paul%20Simon.mp3

Corrected M3U8 file:

#EXTM3U
#EXTINF:237,Paul Simon - The Boy in the Bubble
Paul Simon/Graceland/01 - The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon.mp3
#EXTINF:289,Paul Simon - Graceland
Paul Simon/Graceland/02 - Graceland - Paul Simon.mp3
#EXTINF:191,Paul Simon - I Know What I Know
Paul Simon/Graceland/03 - I Know What I Know - Paul Simon.mp3
#EXTINF:163,Paul Simon - Gumboots
Paul Simon/Graceland/04 - Gumboots - Paul Simon.mp3

VLC is also outputting relative paths, but Poweramp should not be concerned about that as it resolves file locations based solely on the exact filename and the first level of containing folder. So in the above example, as long as a file called "01 - The Boy in the Bubble - Paul Simon.mp3" can be found inside any subfolder in your music collection called "Graceland", that should be sufficient to provide a match. In fact, all PA needs are the actual filename lines, the #EXT... metadata lines are ignored.

Whether your top master folder is called Music or Music X does not matter at the resolving stage, as it will be ignored anyway. However if you edit the folder name later, you'd need to re-run 'Rescan/Resolve Playlists' to discover the new file locations.

The following Guide might help too:

Andre

[realquiet]

I tried to put only the M3U8 file in my playlist folder and allowed power amp access to it but it still did not work.  I have been trying to re export the playlist from the old phone but where ever I set the target folder I cant find it in there.  The only place I can find it is in android/data/com.maxmpz.audioplayer/files/playlist.  I did use this method before on my old phone S9+ and it worked.  I think I'm doing something wrong exporting the play list.  Here are a few screen shots of what they look like saved on my computer and the last one is how it looks on the new phone.  I don't know how to put the play list into text.

[andrewilley]

I would ignore the computer stuff, just copy the files which worked over from your old phone. Don't copy anything from the android/data/ hierarchy.

You can also use the Settings=>Export Settings/Data feature on your old phone, and then import just the playlists part into the new phone.

Andre

[andrewilley]

And to edit/view a playlist file in a text editor, just right-click in it and open with a text editing program (Notepad, WordPad, MS Word, etc)

Andre

[realquiet]

Thank you Andre for continuing to help.  I just tried phone to phone copy of the M3U8 file and did the full playlist back up, but only imported the playlist.  Doing a full re-scan each time. No success.  By the way this playlist is my singles and not full albums.  I just grabbed songs from my computer and put them in a folder on the phone.  When using Poweramp to play them I have full album art and artist titles everything.  I notice in this screenshot that artist and album is missing.  

[andrewilley]

Well none of those will work if you have now changed the master Music folder name, as you placed all of those audio files directly inside the SD Card's root-level folder Music , rather than the normal process of them then being inside a tidy structure of further subfolders inside Music (e.g. separate subfolders for Genres, Artists, Albums, etc). Thus the folder Music would in this case be the first level of containing folder, and that's what Poweramp will be trying to match. So for example it would be looking for a file called Summertime.mp3 located directly inside any folder that it can find in your designated storage area called Music.

I assume that only some of your collection is stored this way, most of it is in specific named subfolders? The simplest solution for the above single files (other than just using the system Music folder on your new phone) would be to move any audio files which previously existed directly within the Music folder (which you have now named Music X) into their own additional subfolder called Music so the matching rules would now work Thus the path to those singles files would become something like /Music X/Music/Summertime.mp3. 

Andre

[realquiet]

Thank you Andre!  

That was the trick.  I just put the mp3s back into a folder called "Music"  inside of "Music X".  I should have posted the playlist in text editor in the beginning it would have saved you a lot of time.  Thank you for showing me how this works,  

Yes I should have started the playlist originally in folder called Singles.  I can see how this can be another future problem if SD cards come back to phones and I put my entire collection on the phone.  I'm wondering if i should fix this now (redoing the playlist) or deal with it later.

Thanks again

realquiet

[andrewilley]

Yes, I agree it would probably have been simpler and tidier in hindsight to have put all your singles files into one named subfolder in the first place. That's what I do in fact. Now might be as good a time as any to neaten that up, while it's fresh in your mind.

First, rename that new 'Music' folder to a more intuitive name like 'Singles'. The next background rescan in Poweramp will spot the new location and put the songs back into your Library using their newly revised path. Of course doing so will break your existing Playlist again (sorry!) as the files will no longer be found directly in a folder called 'Music'. There are a couple of fairly simple fixes for that though, both of which are one-off tasks, one within Poweramp and the other externally:

If the playlist contains only all the files from the new Singles folder, you could just add the correct song references to the end of your (currently-broken) playlist in Poweramp and then remove the old incorrect/orphaned entries. Go into the Library view and choose the Folders or Folders Hierarchy Category. Long-press on the new 'Singles' folder in the resulting list so that it is ticked, then tap '+Playlist', and finally tap on the name of the required playlist. That will add all of the songs from that folder onto the end of the playlist.

Now all you need to do is remove the old broken entries. Open the playlist from the 'Playlists' Category. Long-press on the first incorrect item in the list so it is ticked, then scroll down to the last incorrect item and long-press on that. All the items in between will now be selected, then just tap Delete. All done.

There is second method, which might be more suitable if you have omitted some songs from the list, or created them in a particular playback order that you want to retain. Open the actual M3U playlist file in an external text editor (just like you did earlier in this thread) and use the editor's Replace-All feature to correct the faulty path references. Based on your screenshot above, I would change "/storage/00BE-0446/Music/" to the new (non-SD Card) path "/Music X/Singles/" which will be fine for Poweramp. I would suggest doing this with a copy of the file rather than the original, so you've still got the first version just in case it all goes horribly wrong!  Note: if there are any songs from other folders, those should still work due to PA's scanning rules that we've discussed, but you may wish to tweak any such lines manually to remove the '/Singles' reference just for a bit of slightly OCD tidiness.

Andre

[realquiet]

Yes I am going to redo the list using your second option as I do want to retain the song order.  Those options are both great advice!  I'm so glad you recommended them.  I have been using Poweramp since 2010 on the original Droid (with the slide out keyboard). Every time I upgraded phones I would get out my printed screen shots of my ever growing playlist and manually make a new list. It would take about 4 hours. The first time I learned I was able to just transfer my playlist was on my last S9+.  I really didn't want to do it again and you helped solve the problem and taught me a few things here so I wont ever have too.  I actually took screen shots of your solution and the playlist redo advise and emailed it to myself.  Thanks again and I really do appreciate it!

realquiet

    

[andrewilley]

Great, glad I could help. Sometimes these things can take a bit of getting your head around to start with, but once you understand how the underlying detection logic works (filename and one folder name) it's not too hard to manually edit playlists so they can work on multiple devices even. Which of course was the point of the logic in the first place, so playlist files containing (for example) full Windows paths can still be used.

Andre