Playlists not imported when in USB drive root and folder deselected

[Luke94]

Hello!
I'm trying Poweramp and I've been impressed so far with its functionalities, apart from a little issue that I noticed, and I'm not sure if it's supposed to work this way.

I'm using the universal version of Poweramp and connecting an USB Drive to my phone (S23 Ultra, Android 14).
My drive is organized in folders containing songs and podcasts episodes, and a few m3u playlists in the root of the drive, so:

Drive root

• Folder 1
• Folder 2 (Podcasts folder)
• Folder 3
• playlist1.m3u
• playlist2.m3u
• playlist3.m3u

If I select the full drive in Poweramp

63 folders, 5 playlists and 1740 tracks are detected

 

Since I don't want to listen to podcasts in Poweramp, I uncheck the Podcasts folder from the library selection (notice that the check next to the drive name is removed as well)

 

and now we have 8 fewer folders (the podcasts ones), around 800 track less than before (podcasts episodes), but 0 playlists!

 

 

It seems like removing a subfolder from the library scan also ignores anything contained in the drive root, and that only the remaining selected subfolders are taken into account.
I would like to scan the whole drive except one folder instead.

Is there any way to do that?

I hope I explained the problem clearly, and thanks for your support!

[andrewilley]

First, avoid trying to grant access permissions to overall root locations. That is specifically forbidden when using Android's Storage Access Framework for the device's internal user storage and SD Cards, but even if it is permitted for USB mounted storage (which it seems to be treating as a folder within its overall file system) it's probably not a good idea. Instead, grant access to one or more specific folders, and store everything else as subfolders within that.

In general terms though, if you enable access to a top level folder (or in this case, a master USB location) then everything else within that will be enabled too - i.e. all files and subfolders. However if you later disable even a single subfolder, the overall folder has to be disabled as it is no longer fully selected, and each activated subfolder is enabled instead. Thus any files stored at the top level of the master folder will no longer the picked up as the master folder is not selected for access.

I got caught out by that logic myself a while ago when configuring the backup regime on my NAS drive: I could easily backup an entire volume (which caught all files and subfolders on the volume too) but if I disabled even a single folder within the volume, the volume itself was not considered as a backup source, only the selected folders - and crucially not any files stored at the root level of that volume. If you want the root files scanned, the whole volume has to be selected.

So in this case, just put your M3U files into a 'Folder 4', and enable that for scanning too.

Andre

[Luke94]

Thanks @andrewilley , I did as you suggested, created a single folder "Music" on the root, with all the other folders and a new Playlists folder inside. This way I could select a subfolder of a drive (and not a root folder).
Then I was able to select all folders (so music folder + playlists) and exclude the podcasts folder.

Everything works fine now, thanks!