Moving Poweramp to a new phone preserving folder added dates

[jamesww]

I've recently moved over to using Poweramp after having used VLC for ages and it's great.

I've recently got a new phone and I'm having trouble working out how best to move it across.

The most important thing for me to preserve is the 'date added to library' for each folder, I use that so that I can organise my library based on having music I've added most recently at the top.

So I've copied the music folder structure exactly from the old phone to the new phone, but the location of the music folder is different as it will no longer be on an SD card.

I then used export settings (all settings selected) on the old phone and import settings on the new phone, but after that it didn't see the music. Then I did a rescan pointing at the new music folder and I'm not sure if this reset everything but certainly the date added to library seemed to be gone as the folders were just sorted alphabetically.

I tried import settings again after the re-scan and that results in an empty library again.

If anyone could point me in the right direction to achieve what I'm trying to do that would be much appreciated!

[andrewilley]

You would need to run the import command with the 'Music Folders Selection' option unticked, as otherwise it will try to restore your old (absolute) Music Folders paths - which clearly won't work on your new device.

The only Export/Import option which might have stored/restored the Date Added to Library info (for songs) would be 'Ratings and Track Statistics', but I don't think that information is backed up from the database - only Ratings, Play Count, and Last Played details. Date Added to Library is a pretty transient piece of information, referring only to the first time any given song file was found and added to the current installation's database, so I would expect it to get reset for a newly scanned device. Folder 'dates' (whether that be Year, or Last Modified Date, or Date Added to Library) are just based on the date values of individual contained songs.

Andre

[6b6561]

Please note that Poweramp is not using the folder date for the "date added", the "date added" is the date when a track was scanned the first time. A full rescan will be done in alphabetic order.

It should also be noted that the directories typically gets a new date as the directory is normally created as a new object and not copied.

How many directories are we talking about? If it's a "small" number of directories, then you can move them out of your library and move them back one by one into your library...

[jamesww]

Thanks for the replies! To add a bit more context, it's 3000+ folders with one album in each folder, with all those folders in one folder. Basically my main concern is being able to view albums in the order that I have acquired them. Over the years I've added albums maybe 5 / 10 at a time, originally into Itunes, which can sort using Date added to the library but I also added a descending number to the 'sort album' id3 field so that the ipod would display the albums list in that same date added order.

So when I first started using Poweramp I added the folders in batches, rescanning between each addition to duplicate this order - to make it a bit less of a job I did it per year for the first ten years, then two or three months worth at atime, then month as it got more recent.

Ideally then I was thinking that Poweramp would just pick up the files in the new location and maintain star ratings, played counts as well as the date added to library, it sounds like that may not be possible? What would normally be the procedure to move from one phone to another keeping the same file structure? (I was expecting like a 'retarget' step so the app knew where to look)

If not, is there another way of achieving what I'm looking for, ie a view within the app where it will show me a list of albums in this added order (it would also correspond to the order in my 'Sort album' field, if there's some way of manipulating that) - perhaps I should have asked this in the first place, as the step by step folder addition process was a bit painful in the first place!

Edited March 12 by jamesww

[andrewilley]

I don't think there's going to be an easy answer to this one. The Date Added To Library field is mainly intended to allow users to find their most recently added new songs (with folders picking up a simulated date based on one of the contained songs). It's not really intended for later sorting of a whole music collection, and as far as I know the information is not included in the Export Data feature - which backs up user-generated content such as song Ratings, song Play Counts, etc. I could be wrong on that as I've never tried, but my gut feeling is Date Added means the date added to the current library, not an old one.

You may be able to use Date Modified, it the files were created/modified in the order that you purchased them and added them to the storage.

There may also be something you could do with that Sort Order tag which you created. Poweramp doesn't use it, but a sophisticated batch tag editor on a computer might be able to run a script to prefix the current folder names with a four- or five- digit number which you could then use for Folder sorting (a bit like prefixing song titles with a track number).

Andre

[jamesww]

Thanks for the suggestion re the folder naming Andre, that's interesting I can see how that would work, but ideally I'd rather leave the folders named as they are so they're legible when I look through / sort them. I'm not sure about the date modified, I think there was a reason I didn't use that when I first set up Poweramp, but I can't recall now what the difference was and I will certainly try that again - it may be that it works well enough for my purposes, I'm more interested in roughly the order I added things rather than exactly.

if I was going to start again and have another go at reconstructing everything else (ie ratings, playcounts, etc) could I ask what's the best way to do that step by step, assuming that I have Poweramp installed on both phones and matching sets of folders / files albeit in different locations on each phone? I suppose the question is how do I make sure the old set of data is mapped on to the same files in the new location?

[andrewilley]

Normally you would start by doing an Export Settings/Data from your old phone to backup all your settings/database info/etc. Then copy your whole music collection over to a new folder on your new device. Easier if you can just swap the SD Card over of course, but not all phones have that option now. I prefer using my own named master folder, such as "My Music" or "Audio" rather than the system "Music" folder for greater control.

Then install PA on the new phone, point Settings=>Library=>Music Folders to your new folder and let PA scan everything. Then re-import the backup file and all your settings/etc will be restored.

That won't restore 'Date Added to Library' values though. The only way I can think of to do that reliably is what you did originally, which is to start with just a few subfolders of music, do a rescan, add some more folders, rescan, etc.  Laborious with that many folders, but it will work better if you can do it in batches. 

Andre 

[6b6561]

This is where we can get creative... importing 3000 folders one by one would take a long time as it takes time to copy them across, wait time for scan...

What could be done is to create 3000 dummy tiny mp3 files, so one for each album, copy those across one by one or the first ones in groups of years, months... once that is done, then there would be 3000 albums in the DB, all with just the single dummy track. At this point the real content could be imported and the dummy files deleted.

I could quite easily script the creation of the dummy files for @jamesww if I get an excel or similar list of the albums, artists and date added, then I can create the 3000 dummies. The 3000 files can also be placed in a "year month" directory tree.

We could do a proof of concept with 10 files or so if you want to and if the result is fine, then we can do it for all files.

It wouldn't take me many minutes to modify some scripts that I have for creating test files.

[jamesww]

3 hours ago, 6b6561 said:

What could be done is to create 3000 dummy tiny mp3 files, so one for each album, copy those across one by one or the first ones in groups of years, months... once that is done, then there would be 3000 albums in the DB, all with just the single dummy track. At this point the real content could be imported and the dummy files deleted.

 

Thanks for the offer, that does sound ingenious, ideally I'd like to get this working in a way that I can easily reproduce if I have to move phone in the future, but I may get back to you about this!

 

11 hours ago, andrewilley said:

Normally you would start by doing an Export Settings/Data from your old phone to backup all your settings/database info/etc. Then copy your whole music collection over to a new folder on your new device. Easier if you can just swap the SD Card over of course, but not all phones have that option now. I prefer using my own named master folder, such as "My Music" or "Audio" rather than the system "Music" folder for greater control.

Then install PA on the new phone, point Settings=>Library=>Music Folders to your new folder and let PA scan everything. Then re-import the backup file and all your settings/etc will be restored.

 

Thanks Andre, I did this and that's picked up things like played count / last played date but where I had 'list position' / 'per track progress' set it didn't seem to pick those up, is that because it is a folder specific setting rather than album specific?

Regarding the added to library date you're right that it hasn't copied that across. I remembered that date modified didn't work before because it was updated when I fixed some album artwork which had been displaying in Itunes but didn't in Poweramp, but now also the dates seem to have got further messed as I've copied the files back and forth.

Would it be a reasonable feature request that the 'date added to library' could be something that is exported / imported with the other settings, as it is is one of relatively few sort fields for Folder / Album / Artist / Album Artist etc? Or alternatively that the the 'sort album' id3 tag could be something you could sort by in the Albums category?

[andrewilley]

There are some existing requests for the various AlbumSortOrder, ArtistSortOrder, etc ID3/Vorbis tags to be supported if present, but currently these aren't even read into the database and I suspect any future implementation might have quite a long wait.

I don't see any point in creating dummy files for your purposes though. Just copy all of your music subfolders & songs into one temporary holding folder ("Temp Music") on your new device in one go. Then you can simply use a file explorer app to very quickly move a bunch of those folders over into your final master music folder (e.g. "My Music"), task-switch to PA and do a rescan, then switch back to your file explorer and move another batch of folders, switch to Pa and rescan, etc. As you say, if you do the older stuff in year batches of subfolders it shouldn't be too onerous a task.

Andre

[jamesww]

Thanks Andre, would a request to preserve the 'date added to library' as part of the exported / imported settings be any more viable - as that must already be read in and is available to the user to sort the different views already?

I think for now what I may do is just remove the last couple of years and add that back bit by bit as to be fair I don't generally scroll back much past that.

Looking at my Itunes library it seems like I've had the same thing happen with that when moving pcs but in that case my 'sort album' has bridged the gap.

[6b6561]

I'm also using the date added sort, but I do only use it to go a couple of months back in time and that's to see if there is something new in the library that I have forgotten about. Personally I don't see the use for going much further back in time than that.

iTunes has it's own database file, so next time it's time for a change of PC's, then make sure that you copy across the database as well. It's also a good idea to have a backup of the database in case that your PC dies. The normal iTunes database is in some proprietary format, but you can also make it available as an .xml file.

Had a looooong chat with ChatGPT, leaves a bit to wish for... anyway, I got a python script for extracting album info out of the iTunes.xml file.

Album Artist,Album,Date Added
ZZ Top,Eliminator,2024-01-14T18:54:01Z
ZZ Top,El Loco,2024-01-14T18:54:01Z
ZZ Top,Gimme All Your Lovin',2020-06-01T10:10:31Z
ZZ Top,La Futura,2020-06-01T10:10:31Z
ZZ Top,One Foot in the Blues,2022-04-21T19:09:02Z
ZZ Top,Recycler,2020-06-01T10:10:31Z
ZZ Top,Rhythmeen,2021-08-26T09:55:20Z
ZZ Top,XXX,2020-06-01T10:10:31Z

So it would be a simple exercise to run the python script to extract the information out of the iTunes database and use that as input for creating the "dummy" files to populate the Poweramp DB.

[andrewilley]

36 minutes ago, 6b6561 said:

I do only use it to go a couple of months back in time and that's to see if there is something new in the library that I have forgotten about. Personally I don't see the use for going much further back in time than that.

That's really what it's intended for, just to see what's been most recently added. Not really intended for long-term use going back over years/decades of music collecting.

Andre

[jamesww]

I was looking at this a bit more and what I realized was that while the 'dates modified' of my folders had gone wrong the 'dates created' actually look about right so along the lines of what you were suggesting 6b6561, I think if I change all the modified dates to match the created dates and then re-import I can sort by date modified within the folders view instead of date added to library. I thought that might mean coming up with some kind of script but it looks like there are several applications online that will do this, fingers crossed this they will be able to cope with doing it to 30,000 files! I'm probably going to wait until I have more time to do this as I still need to double check everything has album art properly and it makes sense to do that first.

One other thing with the import / export process that I haven't been able to get working is the 'list memory' options. I have that box ticked for import settings and export settings, but looking at a couple of folders where I have this applied it's not being copied across. I'm not sure if it's something to do with my setup -  as described above the folder structure above is exactly the same, but in a different place. When I export 'List memory options' is showing the correct number of folders. After I've imported to the new phone and go to export on the new phone it shows 0. The per track progress isn't copied either but I'm not sure if that's supposed to be?