Handling of missing-not found songs

[Chris Brokes]

I use Power Amp as my primary music player when riding my motorcycle. As I'm sure you can imagine, few things are more annoying than, when going 90 mph on a highway, your music suddenly stops because the player couldn't find a file and doesn't know what to do!

My request is that when the player discovers a missing song it doesn't hang, but rather goes on in the playlist until it finds a song it can play. (keep in mind that there are many reasons why a song may be missing!)

Now, how this should be handled is something I'll leave to developers. In the short run, maybe just code a simple:

if [ ! -f "filename" ]; then

statement (keep in mind both android and ios are loosely unix based so similar OS functionality should also exist) to force the song to the next one in the playlist or maybe return a song length of zero...which Power Amp already is coded to handle since it is one of the options available...

In the long run, possibilities includes stuff like adding a user mask option so the name of external storage can be updated between devices (an issue with Android where the SD card name now changes by device...or even worse, a new device may not have SD expansion at all forcing all your playlist, which used to work on your old device, to fail since the device name is now 0 instead of XXXX-XXXX)

How about when doing a library scan, have the option to refresh playlist? or even better yet, make all playlist relative instead of absolute paths...

Anyway, at the end of the day I don't care how the issue is addressed, I'd just like my tunes to keep coming when there is an issue instead of stopping when I'm mid ride!

Thanks for listening to my issue and I hope to see it resolved someday!

[andrewilley]

Hmm, quite a lot to unpack there.

Song files which were detected during the last scan (and are thus included as entries in the Library) are expected to still be present. Background rescans occur fairly regularly to update any new songs and remove anything that's gone missing in the meantime (such as folder being deleted or SD Card contents changed) so the Library should always be up to date. If during playback an expected file is missing, it will be skipped and the next file played. If that happens repeatedly over multiple files, eventually playback will stop as clearly there is some sort of storage error occurring. So if you make any changes to the songs on your device's storage, although it should happen eventually in the background, it might be worth doing a manual Rescan anyway just to be sure.

Playlists are a little different in that it's possible for an M3U playlist to have missing entries where a requested song was not found in the device's storage. Those items are meant to be skipped over during playback, and I'm sure that's what used to happen. However I've just done a quick test and such a missing song (i.e. shown as just a filename with no other data in the playlist) indeed blocks playback as you mentioned.

In fact, just trying it now it locked the whole app up and even force-closing and restarting PA and doing a Full Rescan still left the player screen locked trying to play that one missing track and unable to change to anything else. I had to reboot the phone in the end, after which the playlist was handled as expected and the missing track was silently skipped during playback. @maxmp could you maybe look into this, as this is not expected behaviour. I'll send you a logfile in the locked state before I rebooted the phone.

Andre