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I use Banshee 2.2 to synchronize music and podcasts to my Android 2.3 device. On the device, I'm using PowerAMP to play music.

When I open PowerAMP and look at the playlists, each one is repeated a dozen times. So, for example, I have a playlist called "Pop". After a dozen syncs with my computer, I now have 12 playlists called "Pop". 11 are empty, and one has the actual playlist in it.

At first I thought this was a problem with PowerAMP, but since I have tried the Android default music player and a few other music apps, the problem is repeated no matter what I use to play music. So it seems this isn't an app specific problem, but a system wide one.

I have scoured the onboard memory and the SD card, but I have no idea where the playlists are stored. (Note my phone is not rooted, nor do I intend to.)

How do I clear out the empty playlists and stop this behaviour?

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This problem may have become moot. After an upgrade about a day or so ago, PowerAMP now seems to check for m3u files instead of the Android system playlists. I am not 100% sure of this, or if it will be a long term solution, but I thought that it was worth mentioning. – Dave M G Nov 5 '11 at 5:10

1 Answer

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This sounds to me like a similar problem I have had with duplicating images in the gallery. I fixed this by clearing the gallery data, and allowing it to rebuild next time the media scanner ran.

I would suggest trying the same technique. I would imagine that whereas I deleted the data from the Gallery App, you should try clearing data from the stock Android Music Player, or failing that from PowerAMP.

Settings-Applications-Manage Applications-All-Gallery-Clear data (confirm). This doesn't delete your media itself, just the database that details where the media is. The media scanner will rebuild this database automatically next time it scans.

It would be prudent to backup your phone contents before you try this.

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Unfortunately, this did not help. I did as you instructed, and now PowerAmp can't seem to find any music files at all, even though the files are still on the SD card. – Dave M G Oct 31 '11 at 15:36
hmm that shouldn't happen. Has the media scanner run since you cleared the data? It should do this when you start PowerAMP, or when you boot the phone or when disconnecting the phone after you've connected it to a PC over USB. – fearoffours Oct 31 '11 at 15:41
Yeah... this isn't good. I rebooted the device, and I also uninstalled and reinstalled PowerAMP. I reselected the folder where the music is, selected rescan, and it just says "scanned two folders and zero files". If I plug in by USB and check the folders, all the music is there. So... yeah... I don't know what's up with that. – Dave M G Oct 31 '11 at 15:57
Hmm, could try clearing data on the stock Android music player. That's forced a successful rescan for me before. – fearoffours Oct 31 '11 at 17:43
Okay, got the scanner to find the music again. Turns out the directory was marked differently than it was before. Now that I had the right directory, it found it. However, the original problem has returned. I have about 1 million duplicates of every playlist I have ever had. – Dave M G Nov 1 '11 at 1:59

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