Large playlist issues (a trio)

[gandhicrushkill]

First-time caller, long-time listener here. Running GMMP on a Unihertz JellyPro currently on Android 7.0. It's a dedicated unit for music only, with a nearly 45,000-song library on a micro SD card. Been sifting through the forum archives trying to find answers first, but to no avail, so here's my list of questions/issues:

• INABILITY TO START PLAYLIST FROM SONG: I keep my shit on shuffle like 99% of the time. In Classic GMMP, I was able to choose whatever song I liked in a playlist & it would shuffle/play through. In the current version, anytime I select a song whether it be in a folder, the library, or a playlist it plays that song & ONLY that song on repeat. No, I don't have repeat on. No, I haven't selected something with just one file. Is there a toggle somewhere I'm missing, or is this just how it is? If the latter, that's a very poor design choice.

• LARGE LISTS TAKE FOREVER TO DISPLAY SONGS: There seems to be a great deal more lag than with Classic GMMP across the board, including wait time for track skipping. Most annoyingly, large playlists (1000+ songs) take an interminably long time to list the tracks. Sometimes they never show up, even after 24 hours. Often I have to rescan everything to have them come up or even restart the device; it works the first time, & then fails thereafter. Is this a memory issue? Inability of the app to handle the draw? I hate not being able to scroll through when I had much less of na issue in Classic.

• UTF-8 ACCENTED CHARACTERS: Yes, I saw the pinned solution & have tried it several times. Yet on a couple playlists exported from iTunes, nearly every file with accented or punctuated track info will not display anything but file info. For example, the song "Alarm Call" by Björk is listed as a 0kb file named 08 Alarm Call.mp3. This is only on a few playlists & not in the library or GMMP-built smartlists. For the record, I still manage my music through iTunes 12, on a 2013 Macbook. I've resaved exported playlists as UTF-8 via Word several times with zero fix. Am I doing something wrong? Am I stupid? Is there some weird confluence of technological wonkery playing havoc?

[GoneMAD]

• INABILITY TO START PLAYLIST FROM SONG: I keep my shit on shuffle like 99% of the time. In Classic GMMP, I was able to choose whatever song I liked in a playlist & it would shuffle/play through. In the current version, anytime I select a song whether it be in a folder, the library, or a playlist it plays that song & ONLY that song on repeat. No, I don't have repeat on. No, I haven't selected something with just one file. Is there a toggle somewhere I'm missing, or is this just how it is? If the latter, that's a very poor design choice.

That's not the default behavior. When selecting a single song the contents of the folder / library view are all added to the queue. The setting is named something along the lines to "queue entire album" or something like that. I'd have to check when i have my device in front of me, but yea you would have had to go out of your way to change the setting that causes this.

• LARGE LISTS TAKE FOREVER TO DISPLAY SONGS: There seems to be a great deal more lag than with Classic GMMP across the board, including wait time for track skipping. Most annoyingly, large playlists (1000+ songs) take an interminably long time to list the tracks. Sometimes they never show up, even after 24 hours. Often I have to rescan everything to have them come up or even restart the device; it works the first time, & then fails thereafter. Is this a memory issue? Inability of the app to handle the draw? I hate not being able to scroll through when I had much less of na issue in Classic.

I've loaded playlist files with 16k+ files in less than a second. Your playlist file is likely not referencing the full path OR relative path to the playlist and therefore GMMP has to go through a long process of finding each file on the device. Usually saving the playlist once loaded will fix this as it saves with full paths.

Contents of the playlist need to be in the library to show up / play. Sounds like your storage sucks and its unmounting itself causing the scanner to remove from the library. In the advanced scanner settings you can disable the "clean" stage of the scanner.

• UTF-8 ACCENTED CHARACTERS: Yes, I saw the pinned solution & have tried it several times. Yet on a couple playlists exported from iTunes, nearly every file with accented or punctuated track info will not display anything but file info. For example, the song "Alarm Call" by Björk is listed as a 0kb file named 08 Alarm Call.mp3. This is only on a few playlists & not in the library or GMMP-built smartlists. For the record, I still manage my music through iTunes 12, on a 2013 Macbook. I've resaved exported playlists as UTF-8 via Word several times with zero fix. Am I doing something wrong? Am I stupid? Is there some weird confluence of technological wonkery playing havoc?

Sounds like bad tags and nothing to do with the playlist not being UTF-8. The file wouldnt even show up if there was an issue with the playlist file (playlist view only shows files that it can find).

[gandhicrushkill]

Heard on all issues; will investigate when not at work in bestial heat & report in after.

[GoneMAD]

"enqueue all on selection" is the option. It's under library and folder settings

[gandhicrushkill]

So I wanted to get back to this, but haven't been able to as yet because busy.


• INABILITY TO START PLAYLIST FROM SONG: Yes, you were correct; enqueue was deselected & I have no idea why. Rechecking it fixed the issue.

• LARGE LISTS TAKE FOREVER TO DISPLAY SONGS: The main issue was with a smart playlist I'd made. I recreated it in iTunes & found it was about 33,150 songs long, some 74% of my entire library. Something about that size seems to not make GMMP want to play nice. I sloughed off about 1400 tracks, exported as a regular playlist, & so far it seems to be doing well. Soon I'll try redoing as a smart list again.

• UTF-8 ACCENTED CHARACTERS: This was the big one. In preparation, I completely updated the OS on the Android phone I use as a player, uninstalled & reinstalled GMMP, AND converted all tags in my 44,600+-song library to ID v2.4. Issue remained. To track the issue, I made a playlist in GMMP, then dumped it onto my Mac, threw it in iTunes, & then re-exported it using both the iTunes internal function & an app called iTunes Export. Those results were put BACK onto the player & reimported into GMMP.

Wouldn't you know it, those same characters had problems, even though they originated on GMMP with perfectly fine text, & even though they were (supposedly) saved in UTF-8 format both by the apps & in Textedit. So, point of issue found. Next, find a solution.

It came in the form of Playlist Export, an OSX app created by Eric Dougherty, who also did the aforementioned iTunes Export. (There's also an open-source Windows version available.) For $5 & change, this beast solved the issue & more by letting me definitively export as UTF-8, but also change source paths without a need for mucking about cmd-Ring in Textedit & gave me the option to export the playlist track files if so desired.

So yeah, if you have a Mac & still use iTunes (not sure if it work with Apple Music), & you use GMMP on your devices but have the tag issues, this is your solution.