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All playlists say 0 songs after flipping card to a new phone


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I have about 1000 playlists. At the moment, they all say 0 songs.

 

I flipped my old card, which had the playlists folder under /Audio on the card, to my new phone.

 

I ran a scan. Went to Playlists in Pamp, everything is 0 songs.

 

The folders are there, I've gotten the program to recognize everything properly, I can play from folder view.

 

I tried copying backed up playlists again, now that I've scanned and played. The minute go to Playlists in Poweramp, it says 0 songs on every one.

 

I still have backups that are NOT 0 songs if that would help.

 

But is there anyway I can restore these under these circumstances or do I now have to recreate 1000 playlists?

yes, about 75% .m3u, the rest in m3u8

 

The path TO the card might be different (from HTC to Samsung), but otherwise I have identical directories set up.

 

This is how my header looks from one of my backup playlists that worked on my old phone:

 

/mnt/sdcard/Audio/Melody Gardot/The Absence/01 - Mira.mp3

 

As a test, I created a Pamp playlist on the new phone, and then exported it to file hoping to view the header. Except I can't find it. the test playlist appears in my list of playlists and the newly created (on the phone) list has all the songs. I exported. But despite Pamp's advice as to where the file is located, I can't find it. I ran a search of the phone...still can't find it. It used to be exported to the /Playlists folder at the root card.   (My playlists are generally kept in /Audio/Playlists--so this is a different directory). I finally (with the file manager native to the phone rather than Win Explorer) found the /emulated directory on the phone. I then tried to move the test playlist. It shows up in the native file manager, but not Win Explorer. So, I don't quite know how to manipulate, edit it or anything else, which after all, was the point of exporting it.

 

I don't really know what to do to give you that information. Handling playlists on Android has always seemed like a full time job.

 

Not that I would edit all 1000 missing playlists --especially those that merely mirror folders---but is there any way to edit one so that is picked up again? Some eclectic ones I have would be easier to edit than recreate.

Ah, would I be right in assuming that you have moved from an ICS or an earlier Jelly Bean device to a JB 4.2.2 based ROM? If so, Google have changed the default file system paths. :(

 

If that's the case, all would not be lost though as there are lots of ways to do global search & replace operations across multiple text files to change the old format to the new structure. You'd need to do it on a PC, and then copy the files back to your phone, but that would not be too big a hassle as you'd only need to do it once. I just did a quick search and TextCrawler would appear to be perfect for the job, and it's free. Not exactly an automatic fix, but it should get your playlists working again.

 

Max posted recently about the logic that he uses for relative path searching, which might help work out the issue: http://forum.powerampapp.com/index.php?/topic/4625-m3u-playlists-visible-but-emply/?p=18492

 

Andre

Ah, would I be right in assuming that you have moved from an ICS or an earlier Jelly Bean device to a JB 4.2.2 based ROM? If so, Google have changed the default file system paths. :(

 

If that's the case, all would not be lost though as there are lots of ways to do global search & replace operations across multiple text files to change the old format to the new structure. You'd need to do it on a PC, and then copy the files back to your phone, but that would not be too big a hassle as you'd only need to do it once. I just did a quick search and TextCrawler would appear to be perfect for the job, and it's free. Not exactly an automatic fix, but it should get your playlists working again.

 

Max posted recently about the logic that he uses for relative path searching, which might help work out the issue: http://forum.powerampapp.com/index.php?/topic/4625-m3u-playlists-visible-but-emply/?p=18492

 

Andre

Correct, ICS to JB.

 

I see the thread you are talking about, but I'm not sure what the path should be if I edit. Can you be more specific as to what I should replace?

 

Thanks for the TextCrawler suggestion--sounds handy to have around even without THIS issue.

Just check to see what the full path to your music folders now looks like on the new phone (create a new short playlist in Poweramp and export it if you want to be 100% certain). Then look at the old M3U/M3U8 files to see what was hard-coded in there. Then it should be simple enough to work out what text your need to search and replace to make your old files use the new format (do it to one or two M3U files to test first, before you then batch process the others).

 

If you're feeling really brave, you could edit the playlists to use relative paths instead - and then it won't matter what the device's native folder structure is.

 

Andre

Ok, I edited everything to  a generic /audio or /audio2. Rescanned.

 

Total songs picked up: 0

 

Can you or someone tell me exactly what path to edit keeping in mind that I am on an SD Card subdirectory either /audio or /audio2

 

1000 playlists...toast, otherwise.

All of your songs are showing as visible in the Library arean't they? (Just missing from the playlists)

 

If not, make sure you've got the current location of your music folders enabled within Settings > Folders and Library > Music Folders.

 

Andre

Folders were properly selected as the music folders before scanning.

 

Basically, I gave up. The way these are handled is really frustrating and I figured it was a done deal for having to redo the important ones and giving up the idea of playlists. Managing playlists in Android is simply a full time job.

 

So, I deleted all the file based playlists on the card. From the /emulated directory, I deleted all the playlists there.

 

I deleted every playlist folder I could find.

 

Then checking P-amps settings I was curious what would happen if I clicked "import playlists".  I didn't tell it where---to my knowledge, there were none left.

 

Suddenly 700+ playlists are back, all with songs populated.

 

Where did they come from? Since I deleted every physical file?

Why do they work now?

 

I probably shouldn't question good fortune, but figuring out what is going on here seems to require an Android developer.

Sounds like more side-effects of the move to JB 4.2.2. That new multi-user directory structure that Google created is a bit confusing (especially with some of the legacy stuff getting virtualised). But I still think text-editing your old playlist files to match correctly with the new directory structure, and then re-importing them, should have worked.<br /><br />Andre

Yes, text editing would work great if I had specifics on what to edit in and how, but as noted, I don't. I can't figure out what the path is to text edit IN. So, I've gave up on that. It would've been nice to have some definitive info. It doesn't seem like it should be complicated to do, but as with everything involving playlists, I guess it is.

 

WIth regard to the 706 playlists recovered, that omits about 150 or so. Trying to figure out one by one what's missing, what's not is impossible given the problems with file management on Android. I open up the two windows in Win Explorer--they don't even populate correctly. I try pulling up the native file manager, but that doesn't open in 2 windows, plus there's the small screen issue.

 

So, I just deleted the playlists. 

 

Since I had a directory structure for music that was a legacy of having a smaller SD card, I figured I would take advantage of this to combine those directories, since the path no longer mattered. Even that was an incredible chore. Just trying to find the SD card in Andro Explorer is a nice puzzle. Astro Explorer works better but refused to copy any files into the same directory name---like /Audio2/Joe Blow/The Wines  to /Audio/Joe Blow/   on the ground that there was already a "Joe Blow" folder--even though it didn't include the album "The WInes." Andro would ask me if I wanted to overwrite, but Astro wouldn't. The native file browser was equally bad. Win Explorer wouldn't populate the windows correctly.

 

You know, I feel like it took about 3 hours to get the new phone set up. ANd 3 days to get Poweramp's playlist issues resolved. And then only by wiping them out.

 

I think it's better to just not use playlists. Obviously, they create more problems than they are worth--we won't even mention Pamp's own historical issues--like the tendency for Pamp to zero playlists out when you add songs to a list that had some missing songs; or to wipe out lists when upgrading the program.

 

Playlists are supposed to make life easy. It shouldn't be this difficult.

In case of recent ROM update, you can get your filebased playlists not being resolved, but this could happen only if you actually don't have all those songs in Poweramp folders/library (e.g. due to the new path to storage/sdcard, Poweramp library is empty). Adding (checking) the appropriate storage/folders in Poweramp Settings => Folders and Library => Music Folders, should resolve it. Poweramp resolves filelist based playlist entries by last folder name + file name, thus, such playlists are not sensitive to root folder changes (you may need to open such playlist once).

Thanks!

Sounds good Max, how many nested folders within your music structure can it cope with? For example I might have things like mnt\extSdCard\Music Folders\Films\James Bond\50th Collection\CD1\filename.mp3. As that's a external card it's not so much of an issue as it won't alter with 4.2.2, but if I was using internal memory would that get caught?

 

Andre

Well, Max, but that's what should have happened, but it did not. I did not change the directory of the playlists on the card. I didn't change the directories of the music. IN fact, I just took the card I had in the old phone and flipped it into the new phone. I set up P-am to read the correct folders and ran a scan.

 

Every playlist I opened said the same:

 

0 songs.

 

BTW< I now am looking at the built-in music app and Google Play, and all the former playlists are there and populated---even after I have actually deleted the physical files. It has somehow pulled them in from some mysterious cache I can't find. Indeed, the music app now has 3 versions of them, each cached from my attempt to recreate them.

 

Where, I have no idea.

 

Managing playlists was a lot easier on Treo 680. This is not much of an compliment to Android. :)

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