Created playlists - Find moved music files automatically (Relative M3Us)

[Purist]

Hello folks,

I have a question or idea for the player or the playlist function. I bought the full version many years ago and have never looked back. However, I have an annoying problem.
When I create my own playlists in the player everything is as it should be. However, if I move an MP3 file on my phone to another folder within the entire directory to be monitored, then Poweramp suddenly no longer finds the file. This is stupid. There is the so-called relative playlists like in Windows. Is there a way to possibly incorporate this as a feature into the player? Or is there already a solution and I'm just too stupid to find it? Thanks in advance!

PS: I'm from Germany, so if anyone wants to answer in German, feel free!

Best regards

Edited April 10 by Purist

[andrewilley]

Poweramp can read (and then later re-write) relative path playlists if they are found in external files, but any playlists that you create internally within Poweramp (using the '+Playlist' feature to add songs) will use the same absolute Android paths that the Library database has previously scanned. That is also what will be saved if you Export any internally-created playlist to a file.

Once read, a playlist is nothing more than a series of index pointers to the exact locations (with full paths) of specific audio files. It doesn't know anything about the music contents, just the location of the audio file. If you later move or rename one of the files, or rename its containing folder or path, you will break the link as the song in question will no longer be located where Poweramp is expecting to find it.

As a bit of background, resolving the contents of external playlist files across different platforms is actually quite a tricky task when the file systems do not match. For example a song on your PC called C:\Users\yourname\Music\Artists\ABBA\Arrival\Dancing Queen.mp3 is clearly never going to be found on an Android phone where its location might be AB12-CD34/My Songs/Artists/ABBA/Arrival/Dancing Queen.mp3.

So the resolution process only checks for an exact match with the filename and the first level of folder which contains it. So in the example above, even if your folder structure is different or you move folders and files around your device, a match would be made and stored for storage/0/Music/ABBA albums/Arrival/Dancing Queen.mp3. The important bit is that a file called Dancing Queen.mp3 needs to be inside a folder (anywhere in the scanned Library locations) called Arrival. Once the song has been identified, the path is stored in the database as an absolute reference (i.e. for the current device) to alllow for immediate access.

This logic is not 100% guaranteed to generate a perfect match, but the cases where it could become ambiguous with another song and fail are very rare and somewhat convoluted.

There is a menu option in the Playlists Category called 'Rescan / Resolve Playlists', which will re-parse all the entries in playlists and see if in cases where the file path has been lost it can find the required folder/file pairing again elsewhere. So as long as the filename and its containing folder name have not changed, the song can be found again.

Andre