Choosing Poweramp as a new media player

[Ajm]

Hello

I am looking for a new music/media player to replace Rocket Player for my Android devices.
I have an older Samsung A50S mobile and a Galaxy Tab A7 with SD cards.

I have a few questions to see if Poweramp will meet my needs. 
I do not need streaming at all. I do not care about an equalizer, skins, etc.

1) I want to be able to transfer music from my iTunes Library (on my laptop) to my devices. The library has both ALAC and MP3 files.
2) I want to add other files, such as guitar backing tracks from my laptop and not stored in iTunes.

For example, an "Albums" playlist and then some songs from the Albums playlist in another playlist for musical practice?

I know how to create separate playlists in iTunes, but then how do I easily get the playlist - and the music files - into Poweramp?

I have a lot of cds/albums that I want on my devices. Probably 100 GB or so.

Does Poweramp have some sort of 'sync' feature/app? Or is it only drag and drop from laptop to external device? And, then direct Powermap to add/find the media folders?
(Rocket Player had a sync feature/app between laptop and device)

Can I do this with Poweramp? Use my iTunes Library (plus the other files) and create different playlists(folders) and how do I get all this onto my devices easily and organized?

Hopefully, the above makes sense. I've already emailed directly to support last week but I have not yet received a reply.

I do not mind paying for an app if it does what I need, there is support and it is updated and maintained.

Thank you

Andrew

[andrewilley]

I guess the TL;DR answer to this is not easily, and not with any sort of automatic syncing process.

Poweramp expects you to provide it with a local folder location (on device or SD Card) that already contains your music files in a folder/subfolder layout of your choice - artist>album>songfiles would be easiest, but you can work out your own if you wish.

Metadata (artist, title, album, genre, cover artwork, etc) should be embedded within the audio files as tagged data so Poweramp can organise everything neatly into its music library.

Any playlists should be provided in a standard format (e.g. M3U or PLS) and must contain references to the specific songfiles using the exact same filenames and first-level containing folder structure (e.g the same album subfolder name). The root device-specific storage structure is ignored for better cross-system portability. Playlists are only resolved by looking at the subfolder/filename locations of the music files, they cannot identify particular songs by tag content.

Poweramp has no automatic storage management tools though (other than user-requested file deletion), so you would need to download all of your music files from iTunes first, along with any playlists converted into (for example) M3U format, and then copy all of that content to a suitable location in your device's storage. Poweramp can pick it up from there.

There are music syncing apps out there which can, with a bit of work, maintain a matching file library across several devices. But we have seen a few issues occurring with such setups, especially in relation to files not being recognised as refreshed when changes are made.

My own personal preference is to do the job manually myself using drag-and-drop so I have complete control - but then I don't use iTunes at all, and Apple do have a habit of re-complicating anything they come near.

Andre

[Ajm]

Thank you for the helpful reply.
So, if I understand correctly, the only practical process is to drag/drop using Windows Explorer from my Music Folder on the laptop to my devices.
And, since I want to duplicate my music/media on 2 devices (phone and tablet), it would be best to drag/drop first to an external drive and then copy everything to my devices.

Something like this...?
Poweramp - Master Folder
Albums Subfolder
Guitar Songs Subfolder (some songs may be duplicated in the Albums subfolder - is that ok?)
Backing Tracks Subfolder
Other Subfolder(s) as needed

Unfortunately, it sounds like a cumbersome process (at least the first time). I have hundreds of artists and a thousand+ albums in hundreds of subfolders (600 GB). I don't want all my music on my devices, plus my sd cards don't have enough storage. I wouldn't do much changing after I get a significant amount of music on my devices.

I came across the app - Droid Transfer - which seemingly has an option to export music from iTunes. But, it is not a media player only a file transfer app. It would still be cumbersome to transfer music, but it would be much easier visually to scroll through my iTunes library and select albums/songs instead of tediously opening folders/subfolders with Windows Explorer. 

As for metadata, I think it is embedded in the files. iTunes is just a library, so if I am seeing artist info/artwork in iTunes then I am assuming that that is because the metadata is in the actual music files on my laptop.

If I can do the above folder/file structure with Poweramp on my devices then I do not think I need playlists.
If I want to make playlists can I use Poweramp after my files are on my devices?

My apologies for all the questions. I hope I am explaining everything ok.

Thank you again

Andrew

 

Edited May 8 by Ajm

[6b6561]

Hi,

Poweramp doesn't have any file transfer of synchronization features built in. What you can do is that you share your iTunes folder from your PC and use something like FolderSync to copy the music to your mobile device and to keep it in sync. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=dk.tacit.android.foldersync.lite

I use FolderSync to keep my 13000 track / 106GB library in sync on my mobiles and works like a charm. I even had it running on my old Samsung xCover 3 without any issues.

iTunes isn't that bad these days and music files ripped and managed by iTunes should be quite standard so I wouldn't expect Poweramp to have any issues with those files.

The 30 day trial version of Poweramp on the play store has all the features of the full version, so why don't you go ahead and copy a subset of your music by drag and drop to your phone and give it a test? Wouldn't cost you anything but some time.

Kim

[andrewilley]

@Ajm Yes, your assessment is correct that you would need to use some sort of external mechanism to get your music and Playlist files from your PC to your phone. Poweramp has no integrated file management systems, it basically expects your music to be present in local storage ready to be scanned into its database. It can do a few specific tasks such as user-requested deleting of files you no longer need, tweaking embedded tags on a song-by-song basis, searching for online cover artwork or lyrics based on the embedded song tags - but nothing that could really be called music file management.

The fact that you only want a subset of your PC (or iTunes) music collection on your phone makes any kind of automation very difficult to set up. I'm the same, I have close to a terabyte of random audio files on my PC, but only about 80Gb of them on my phone. I initially set that up using manual folder drag-and-drop, and I can't really see another way to do it reliably.

There are music management tools that automate syncing, such as MusicBee or MediaMonkey for example, but again I can't really see how they could decided what sections of your content to copy. Also there have been issues experienced by some users with regard to updated content not being flagged as refreshed for Poweramp's database.

I use FolderSync (as mentioned above) for certain tasks, but pretty tightly defined - for example automatically copying content from internal podcast app locations into my chosen music folder hierarchy. It can copy across shared systems too, so if your music is in an FTP location or SMB share (mine is on a NAS) then it could sync content from external folders on there to folders on your phone. I use it to automatically back up my phone's new DCIM/Camera content to my server's photo storage overnight for example. But again, defining suitable rules would be tricky.

What FolderSync would be very good at would be maintaining a sync between your tablet and your phone though, so you'd only need to manage the content on one device and any changes could be automatically echoed over onto the other device(s).

Playlists can be created and managed within Poweramp, or loaded from existing M3U/etc files. M3U files work well across platforms as long as the filenames and the first folder they are contained within are consistent (so for example a given filename is contained within the same album folder on all of your filesystems; higher levels of folder naming and storage references like C:\Users\etc are ignored)

Andre

[6b6561]

Playlists can be exported as .m3u8 files from iTunes, but there might be an issue with windows using \ as deliminator in paths while Android uses /, special characters in file names might also cause issues. I can test this when I'm back at home.

Otherwise the paths would be the same in your iTunes library and on the phone.

[andrewilley]

@6b6561 Poweramp doesn't care about "/" vs "\" delimiters, both will work fine.

Andre