Auto-export of playlists

[OllyMUK]

Hi

I use MediaMonkey to sync my music between the desktop and my phone. However as I prefer Poweramp, I use that for playing my music. I sync my m3u playlists from my desktop to my phone, which is a nice feature. What I'd like is to then sync the playlists back to my desktop so that changes on my phone can appear on my desktop. I get that Poweramp stores them in its database, but could I ask for an auto-export feature that exported a playlist to a set folder when there was a change? That way, MediaMonkey can grab it and sync it back when I'm next at home. 

Possible?

Olly

[andrewilley]

If you make changes to an M3U (file-based) playlist in Poweramp, the physical M3U file will get updated as soon as you add, remove or move any songs. So the updated file can then be synced back to your PC using any two-way syncing application that checks for file modifications.

However, the updated M3U file will now contain the full absolute Android filesystem path for each song - not Windows style "C:\Users\username\Music\Artist\AlbumName\songfile.mp3" paths. While Poweramp can cope with either format (it is designed to ignore the root levels of folder naming, for this exact compatibility reason) your Windows player might not be so forgiving as it won't be able to find Android's "/AB12-CD34/Music/Artist/AlbumName/songfile.mp3" format.

The only way for an M3U file to be cross-compatible with both file systems is to use relative paths. So for example if you created an M3U playlist file directly inside your Windows "Music" folder, and make all the individual song lines contain paths based from there - such as simply "Artist\AlbumName\songfile.mp3" - then that same file will work in Poweramp if you place it inside your "Music" folder on your Android device too. As the playlist was in relative mode rather than absolute format, Poweramp will retain that format whenever it writes new content back to storage, so it will remain Windows-compatible too. 

For more information on this subject, see the final section in this guide:

Andre

[OllyMUK]

Thanks Andre

That's really useful. It seems to work too, which is great. 

Of course, it only works for M3U files created outside of Poweramp, so I think that there's a use case to allow for something similar for playlists created in Poweramp, which is where most playlists might be created, on the fly as it were. 

 

Olly

[andrewilley]

Internal playlists - i.e. ones created using Poweramp's 'Add to Playlist' function rather than read from an M3U file - are only stored within Poweramp's internal database, they do not have any associated physical files on storage. There are methods to allow them to be accessed by external apps (such as @flyingdutchman's Music Playlist Manager) but that would need to be programmed into any syncing software by its author. 

You can Export any internal Poweramp playlists to physical files (usually for backup purposes, they will be created as .M3U8 files) if you want. Then you could use those M3U8 files instead of the original internally playlists (which should be removed to avoid confusion). The physical files will get updated whenever you make any subsequent changes to the lists by adding, removing or moving songs. However the files will still contain absolute Android path references, which won't work on Windows. With a bit of work you could edit the files and change the paths to use relative paths - but that would be a one-off task, you wouldn't want to be having to do it regularly.

Andre

[flyingdutchman]

@andrewilley fwiw Music Playlist Manager has options to create relative paths. It will use the Poweramp media database when this app is installed otherwise it looks at the android media

[6b6561]

MediaMonkey supports two way sync of playlists between PC and Android so I assume that the path "magic" would be handled by MM.

I guess the main issue is how to initiate a new m3u playlist, couple of ideas comes to mind but the following is the easiest that come to mind.

• Create some dummy playlists like z1, z2....m3u8 in MM. (Named z... so that they sort at the end of the list)
• Rename a z... in Poweramp to something sensible when you take them into use

I think this would work with MM and two-way sync.