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Since marshmallow, old playlists empty


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Marshmallow 6.13.661.9

Htc one m8

Newest PA release since April 3

Ever since marshmallow upgrade,  all playlists created previously in PA licensed,  show up with  zero songs.   Songs still in same locations on  SD,  reselected folders,  rescanned,  imported,  still zero songs.   New playlists create fine,  album playlists not created in PA from old folders still read and play fine.   Please help so I don't have to rebuild all my old playlists.  

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https://forum.powerampapp.com/topic/8723-since-marshmallow-old-playlists-empty/
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  • 1 month later...

It appears that Android changed the name of the SD card in your phone with the Marshmallow upgrade. It used to be sdcard1 and now it's some 8 character jumble of letters. A file manager should show you what it is.

If you look at a playlist file you'll notice it basically is just a list of locations for all the songs. If you use Microsoft Word or Google Docs to open the playlist file, tap "find and replace" and type in sdcard 1 to select all of those and then tap "replace all" with whatever the new name is.

  • 1 month later...
On ‎5‎/‎4‎/‎2016 at 11:04 PM, Zombienoms said:

If you look at a playlist file you'll notice it basically is just a list of locations for all the songs. If you use Microsoft Word or Google Docs to open the playlist file, tap "find and replace" and type in sdcard 1 to select all of those and then tap "replace all" with whatever the new name is.

But, are Poweramp playlists even accessible so they can be opened with a text editor?  Seems like they're in a Poweramp DB or something like that, not files on the device that can be opened and edited.

My issue sounds the same as the OP.  I upgraded to Marshmallow, something with the SD card path must have changed as a result (songs weren't playing due to a bad path -- an "/extSdCard/" message or something like that), I think I had to re-select the music folder in settings, and it did a re-scan.  Afterwards, my songs play, but my Poweramp playlists are all 0 songs.

Worse yet, I'm thinking that the playlists don't just show 0 songs because the files they reference can't be found, but that they actually ARE 0 songs -- totally wiped out.  I did an export, and the resulting m3u8 files were all 0 KB.

Any hope?  I'll be crushed if the playlists are lost...

TheoKlink in unfortunately correct. When a rescan occurs, Poweramp's checks for new files and also for the removal of any existing files. Deleted files are correctly removed from the Library (and thus, as a consequence, from any playlists that they might appear in).

By changing the directory structure, Android has effectively deleted all of the files that Poweramp was expecting to see, but it has also added a whole load of 'new' files in different locations. Thus Poweramp's Library will be refreshed with all the new (in fact the same) song titles, but it perfectly understandably considers them all to be different files, and thus not the songs that were previously in your playlists.

If you had exported backups of your playlists before installing the new version of Android, you could have just edited those playlist files to change the folder locations (it's a simple batch text-replace task) but once the contents have been deleted these's not much you can do without a previous backup. Sorry.

Andre

Well then.  Kindof a dangerous system to automatically remove items from a user's playlist just because a rescan determines the files are missing, no?  And to do it without warning, man.  Wouldn't it be better to just keep the playlist intact and have the songs be unreachable?  Let the user clean up the playlist themselves or salvage the playlist depending on the situation...?  If Poweramp is intended for serious music fans, it should respect the hours of work that serious music fans might pour into creating playlists and not be so reckless about wiping them out.

The export is nice, but for that to remedy a situation like this means needing to export/backup after every minor, miniscule change ... adding or removing a single song to a playlist would necessitate another export/backup.  Without that, restoring from an export you'd be clueless as to what small changes you've made recently to get things back to normal.  Exporting constantly like that to make backups is silliness and a flawed strategy compared to Poweramp simply treating playlists as more sacred/untouchable/inviolable and not wiping them out suddenly.  It's a big deal.

Would an M3U playlist have suffered the same fate or are only the built-in Poweramp playlists susceptible like like this?  (For instance, I know that if I have an M3U playlist on my PC, load it into a player like Winamp, and the songs are unreachable, the M3U playlist will be left 100% intact.)

Thanks for the quick replies.

M3U playlists are file based, and Poweramp never edits the contents of the files themselves so they can always be re-read.

However to exist within any list in Poweramp (either one that was created internally or one that was read from a file) the relevant song file MUST be present in Poweramp's Library database. If it doesn't, it can't exist in a Playlist either. So when you delete a file from your device, Poweramp's scanner tidies up the Library (that's it's job) and also removes any references within memorised playlists. Internal playlist entries are gone forever (as the only copy is in the local database) while external or backed-up ones can still be re-read from the file system (and so if a file later comes back, it will reappear in the playlist copy that Poweramp keeps locally).

This is ideal for managing regular additions and deletions of music, but as you point out it's kinda catastrophic for internal playlists if the whole file structure vanishes (such as if Android changes the whole directory structure of an already-established device for no readily explained reason).

As a side note, this used to also happen when you removed an SD Card and run Poweramp - local playlists that contained pointers to now-missing music would be modified to remove any references to those missing files. However a while back Max added some code to catch unmounted file systems and prompt the user to rescan, rather than doing it automatically. Unfortunately, this does not happen if the card is still present on the device but the folder contents have been deleted (OK, technically they have been moved elsewhere by an Android update, but an app can't be expected know that is what has happened).

It's certainly something that needs looking at though, as losing playlists through no fault of the user's is definitely not desirable behaviour!

Andre

This does sound (pun?) like reasonable behaviour, especially concerning the updating songs that are referenced in playlists, and I can appricate that there is no way of knowing why a file isn’t present, and how best to deal with it

However I have to agree with MRink; if there is a problem, don’t just silently deal with it, let the user know, and potentially stop it...

...One suggestion I can think of is to replace the normal scanning operation that detects these files with a "soft" scan.
If nothing is wrong (all files are present and accounted for), normal functionality proceeds.
If a file was found to be missing, show a popup (and notification?) asking the user if Poweramp should proceed with the "normal" operation that would henceforth remove the references to those missing files.

Or if a double scan is too much, just do it when the first file is not found, and have a kind of "apply to all" or cancel.

It would still be up to us to figure out how to fix it and "stop that popup", as we would still be unable to listen to the playlist, but it would give us that chance to rectify the issue ourselves. (Like you say, in this scenario it would be a simple case of editing the playlist).

This (in my opinion) is the only way to overcome the situation, as this will account for any other discrepancies that may be false due to Android or any other influence, like, a really small insect getting into the card slot and somehow blocking the connection (obviously this is absurd, but you get the idea).

Stig.

P.s. you can remove my other topic, sorry ;) 

  • 1 month later...

Recently upgraded to Marshmallow as well and since they have changed the external SD card directory path I have lost all my ratings and my playlists are empty as well. Fortunately I am rooted and I have a nandroid backup from lollipop but I care more about my ratings than the playlists. Is there any way to successfully transfer those over to marshmallow somehow or am I screwed??? Because the backups are always pointed to extsd so everytime I restore the settings it doesnt restore them to the marshmallow directory which is like obd-xxxxx or something like that.

If you change to a new device you should:

- export Poweramp settings

- export all playlists as m3u playlists

but what has been missing for years is the exporting of your ratings

AND New Playlist Manager can now EXPORT your ratings which you later can IMPORT on your new device. Find out more at http://www.theo.klinkweb.nl/Poweramp.html

Although the exported m3u playlists are probably not quite right on your new device, NPM is able to import them and recreate valid playlists again.

 

17 hours ago, TheoKlink said:

If you change to a new device you should:

- export Poweramp settings

- export all playlists as m3u playlists

but what has been missing for years is the exporting of your ratings

AND New Playlist Manager can now EXPORT your ratings which you later can IMPORT on your new device. Find out more at http://www.theo.klinkweb.nl/Poweramp.html

Although the exported m3u playlists are probably not quite right on your new device, NPM is able to import them and recreate valid playlists again.

Appreciate the help. If I can get my ratings back that would be fantastic.

 

9 hours ago, TheoKlink said:

Kusoan,

Give it a go and let me know how you get on.

Rather annoying to have to do a workaround like this but that worked perfectly. Thanks. Saved a lot of months of ratings. Id recommend it to other people but it seems my situation was rather unique in that I am rooted and had a backup of lollipop so I could boot that back up and do this workaround. Wouldnt work too well for people who have already upgraded to MM and lost everything. Guess it could be useful to backup the ratings every now and then in case of a future incident where Google or Samsung pulls this crap again.

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