List of songs on no playlist

[Ted415]

Hello I was not sure what category I should post in but was hoping someone could help.

I have had an unlucky rash of lost and stolen phones and while my music is all backed up I only have an older playlist backup.

Its very difficult to figure out which songs are not on the playlists because the date added gets messed up with new phone.

All I want is to be able to see a list of song that are not on any playlist and it would make it much easier to add them back.

 

Edited March 13 by Ted415

[andrewilley]

Poweramp does not provide that information. A song can be in one or more playlists, but you'd need to check each playlist to find it. There is a Request to be able to see what playlist(s) any specific song might already be in, but not the other way around.

As you can prevent duplicate songs from being added to playlists, you could try re-adding all of the desired songs again, which would cause only the missing ones to be appended.

It's possible that the third-party app Music Playlist Manager might be able to provide the information you want, but I'm not sure.

Andre

[Ted415]

Thank you Andre. I appreciate the help and will investigate Music Playlist Manager. I can't do a universal add back with duplicate block because i dont want my full library occupying each playlist. If there are any database experts here who could somehow use my library database and playlists and create a playlist of songs that are not in any other playlist I would happily PayPal a $50 remuneration.

Obviously I will be obsessively backing up playlists going forward.

[flyingdutchman]

@Ted415 yes Music playlist Manager has an option to check if a track is on another playlist

[andrewilley]

2 hours ago, flyingdutchman said:

yes Music playlist Manager has an option to check if a track is on another playlist

That's good to know. Is it able to create a complete list of all such songs, or is it just song-by-song info?

Andre

[flyingdutchman]

@andrewilley It is available from a track context menu( 3 dots) it will check available playlists and offer them in a dialog box. From there you can select the playlist(s)

 

 

[andrewilley]

@flyingdutchman Thanks. So it's track-by-track rather than a batch process.

@Ted415 I guess it would be possible to do a bit of convoluted file management to work this out.

1. In PA, first place all of the songs from the 'All Songs' category list into one huge temporary playlist (so the whole of your music collection is visible in one new list).
2. Then use the 'Export' feature in the Playlists menu to save all of your playlists (tick for both internal and external) to new M3U8 files in a temporary folder location.
3. Then use a decent text editor program on a PC (I personally use Notepad++) to run a comparison between that overarching 'All Songs' playlist and each of the smaller playlist files. That will show you all of the lines that are in the All Songs list but that do not appear in the smaller playlists. Alphabetically sorting the lists in the editor, and removing the #EXT lines, before running the comparison might make the results easier to follow. If you delete the matching lines from the All Songs M3U8 file after each comparison, you will gradually whittle it down to containing only the songs that appear in no other playlists.

A bit of a repetitive faff, but it would only need to be done once.

Andre

[Ted415]

@andrewilley

@flyingdutchman

You guys are awesome. Thanks much for this guidance.

[Ted415]

@andrewilley Notepad++ is so cool!

I reached the compare stage. Now I just need to be able to "select all" of the red lines and add back the #EXT lines for proper formatting for importing back to PA. 

 

[andrewilley]

All of the #EXT lines are ignored by PA anyway, it only needs the path to the song file.

The white lines in the All Songs list are the ones that are also found in the other pane, so it's probably the white ones that you want to remove from the All Songs list. I'm not sure how to block-select and remove based on matched comparison results off-hand, I've never done that. Might be worth Googling, e.g. https://superuser.com/questions/562208/notepad-compare-two-files-and-remove . The Unix diff command would do it automatically (assuming the files are sorted), but that depends on how Unix savvy you are.

Andre

[maxmp]

@andrewilley Poweramp actually parses #EXT and other metainfo tags for radio stream playlists, also RATING: and EXTING: EXTINF: title for any m3u playlist. It's not a problem to extend the m3u parser with extra readable stuff, it's just never been requested that much.

[andrewilley]

@maxmp Thanks for the clarification Max. In this specific context though, there's nothing in the exported #EXT tags that Ted415 would need to reinstate, as ratings will already have been restored via settings Import. I think he can safely forget #EXT lines for ease of comparison and editing.

I knew about radio streams using #EXTINF title data, although that does get overwritten by any broadcast song details which can make the Category view a bit confusing when random old song titles from the previous listening session are displayed as the main title instead of showing the more useful station name. Maybe titles in stream lists could retain the station name in such cases? (Although that would mean the Player Screen and Library List needing to use different %title% strings, which might mess up animations)

I assume by "EXTING" song titles you meant "EXTINF", but I've never seen that title text used anywhere for songs in PA - even when audio files have no tag data of their own? Reading "#PLAYLIST:" names might actually be quite useful though, as parsing them for display as list titles could deal with the complaints from users about seeing filename extenders (".m3u") in the Playlists category view.  

Andre

[Ted415]

@andrewilley OK I think I got it done but how do I change the file type on PC to .m3u8? It saved as a TXT file. I tried saving it as HTML in Notepad++ and using an online converter to .m3U8 but no dice.

[Ted415]

@andrewilley Never mind I got it! Thanks again. In Notepad++ I pasted the data over an existing .m3U8 file data and saved.

Edited March 16 by Ted415
Solution clarification