If you can't find your answer below, send an e-mail to droid.parallel@gmail.com

What is this app for ?

This application allows you to backup your playlists to your sdcard. It doesn't save your music files, only the playlist content.
You can think a playlist as a text file containing a list of file names referencing your songs. It stores references to your songs but not the songs themselves.

Anyone using an Android to listen to music have probably already faced a problem causing your playlists to disappear and you have to recreate them all over again.This can happen for several reasons and many of them can't be prevented, so this motivated me to create this app to save my playlist to m3u files that can be restored by android or be used on other devices (on your PC, for example).

Does it protect my music files ?

No. This app does not save your songs (mp3 files), it just saves your playlist metadata allowing you to restore your playlists or use the playlists in other devices.

My backups are saved on internal memory instead of sdcard

Playlist Backup app asks Android for the SD Card location in order to save your backups on the sdcard, but on some devices (namely Samsung's), Android says sdcard is located at /mnt/sdcard, when it is in fact located at /mnt/sdcard/external_sd. In this case, there is no way to determine the correct path to the real SD Card, except using hacks.

Changing location of backup files (backup directory)

The application allows you to choose where your backups should be saved to. In order to this, just go to the Preferences screen, and click on the Backup Directory option. You will be able to select any directory you want to store your backups.

What is the format of backup files?

Playlists are formatted following the M3U format. This format is well understood by almost all players.

Why playlists are saved with "'txt" file extension instead of "m3u" ?

This is only to prevent the system from loading the backup files automatically. If the backup files were saved as m3u the system would load them back and could cause side effects. Some side effects we could expect from it are:

• Duplicated playlists: sometimes when the system reads a playlist from a file, it didn't link it to the existing playlist, instead, it creates a new playlist with same name.
• Changes to system playlist being lost: when the playlist is linked to a file, if you delete or reorder a song in the playlist, the file won't be updated and the playlist will, later, reload the system with previous content from the file.

You can change the file extension for backup files on Preferences >> File Extension

Why is there a ".nomedia" file on backup directory

This is only to prevent the system from loading the backup files automatically. The ".nomedia" file tells android to ignore the content of the directory from Android Media Scanner.

You change this on Preferences >> Hide from MediaScanner and define if this .nomedia file should be added to the backup directory.

Why should I contact the developer by e-mail instead of just writing a review ?

If you found a problem or have a suggestion, you can contact the developer by e-mail anytime. When you write a review, there is no way to contact you back if we need more information about your comment.

Some problems may occur only on specific devices in certain circumstances, if we can contact you back to understand this scenario it will be much easier to fix the problems.

Can I keep multiple backups of a playlist ?

Yes, just check the Keep Multiple Backups option on Preferences.

Can it break my playlists ?

No. Most of the time it only reads the system to get playlist information, so it can't break anything.

There are only three situations in which it modifies the content of playlists:

1. Import Playlist screen: it loads the content of a file and adds the songs to selected playlist
2. Poweramp Playlist >> Sync with System function: it adds content of a Poweramp Playlist to the System Playlist of same name.
3. Delete Duplicates function: It finds the duplicate songs in the playlist and remove them

Why I can't import files into a Poweramp Playlist ?

Currently, Poweramp doesn't support third-party applications modifying its playlists. We can create or remove a poweramp playlist but can't add, remove or reorder songs on the playlist.

We are expecting to see this fixed on Poweramp 2.1 that will be available soon.

Why is the sync function one way ?

Same reason explained on Why I can't import files into a Poweramp Playlist ?

Why the app can't find my playlists? (Google Play Music users, please read this)

Some users have reported on Google Play comments they can't find their playlists on the app. Unfortunately we can't investigate a problem if not enough information is given, and we can't contact users from comments.

PlaylistBackup App, as many other media players on market, loads playlist data from standard Android Media Library. The problem happens when some media player stores its playlists in an internal database rather than on Android Media Library. In these cases Android Media Library will remain empty even if you have plenty of playlists created on your player.

One example of application that doesn't use the standard media library is Poweramp App, it stores all information internally so you won't find any of it's playlists in any other media player. The advantage in this case is that Poweramp developer offers a way for other apps to access its internal database, that's how PlaylistBackup can read playlists from it.

How to check if this is your case, try to download a different music player (such as Winamp, for example) and check if your playlists are listed on it. If other players can see your playlists but PlaylistBackup doesn't, contact me by e-mail so I can check what's wrong.

A known case is the Google Play Music app, that has it's own database.

Please take a look at Notes regarding Google Play Music section of this document.

How to make my exported playlists more portable ?

If you want to use your exported playlists across different devices (tablet, phone, pc, etc) you can do the following. First you would like export the playlists with m3u file extension instead of txt, to change this just go to Preferences >> File Extension and change the value from txt to m3u.

Another way to make your exported playlists more portable is to change the way path to song files are written to backup files. Under Preferences >> Path Replace, select one of the options below:

• None (Default):
• Relative to SD Card
• Custom

See What is the Path Replace preference? for more details.

What is the Path Replace preference?

Song files are stored generally on android's external storage (sdcard) and this path can be different from device to device. For example, most devices have the SDCARD mounted as /mnt/sdcard, but on Samsung Galaxy S2 sdcard is at /mnt/sdcard/external_sd/. This can be a problem if you get an exported playlist from a normal phone and try to import on a Galaxy S2 phone as your songs won't be found and your playlist will be empty.

To solve this problem you can change the Path Replace preference to remove part of the song file path on export. In order to make it clearer, I will show two examples for each option, considering normal devices as well as Galaxy S2 devices. Imagine you have a song file stored at your SDCARD on Music directory as below:

1. General: /mnt/sdcard/Music/some_song.mp3
2. Galaxy S2: /mnt/sdcard/external_sd/Music/some_song.mp3

Not this is how your exported playlist will look like for each available option:

Options:

• None (Default):
  1. General: /mnt/sdcard/Music/some_song.mp3
  2. Galaxy S2: /mnt/sdcard/external_sd/Music/some_song.mp3

• Relative to SDCARD:
  1. General: Music/some_song.mp3
  2. Galaxy S2: external_sd/Music/some_song.mp3

• Custom: In this mode you can customize what part of the file path to replace, so you can fill like:
  • Find: /mnt/sdcard/external_sd/Music
  • Replace With: (empty)
  • Result: some_song.mp3.

Can't Import Playlists back from backup files

First it's useful to understand how the Import process works. When you choose a file to import to your playlists, the app does the following steps:

1. Reads the content of the selected file, each line is considered a new song (unrecognizable lines are discarded)
2. For each song read from the file, checks if it exists on Android Media Library and gets its internal ID. If the song can't be found, its discarded.
3. For each ID got from Android Media Library, inserts the ID on the selected playlist

So generally if your files aren't being imported properly to your playlists it's probably because the song was not found on android media library.

This can happen for two reasons:

1. File path from backup file does not match the song actual path
   • For example, if your song from backup file is as /mnt/sdcard/Music/Some Artist/song.mp3 but the file is actually stored at /mnt/sdcard/Music/song.mp3
2. Song doesn't exist on android media library
   • If the song was deleted
   • If the song is available but its parent directory is marked not to be scanned (contains the .nomedia file inside)
   • Android Media Library is still scanning your files for media
   • Android Media Library's database is corrupted and scan can't be completed, in this case you will find many musics on your library but some will be missing. If this is the case you can solve the problem going to Settings >> Applications >> Media Storage and click Clear Data (This will clear all your playlists but won't delete any of your song files).

What is the import logic used to restore playlists?

When you choose a file to import to your playlists, the app does the following steps:

1. Reads the content of the selected file, each line is considered a new song (unrecognizable lines are discarded)
2. For each song read from the file, checks if it exists on Android Media Library and gets its internal ID. If the song can't be found, its discarded.
3. For each ID got from Android Media Library, inserts the ID on the selected playlist

But how does PlaylistBackup app finds the appropriate song ID on Android Media Library?

You can choose between three strategies which one the app should use (available on Preferences >> Import >> Import Logic):

• Strict: Checks for the full file path on the Android Media Library (ex: /sdcard/Music/my_song.mp3). This won't match a song on /sdcard/Music/favorites/my_song.mp3, for example.
• Flexible: Checks for songs with the same file name (my_song.mp3), ignoring the entire path of the file. This way you will match songs even if you moved them to other directory, but you can have problem if you have songs with same file name in different directories (will use the first one found).
• Smart: (Default option) Is a mix of the Strict and Flexible strategies, it will try to find the song using the Strict strategy first, and if it doesn't find any song it tries to use the Flexible strategy. The problem with this option is that it is slower than other options, because it has to check for each song twice.

Notes regarding Google Play Music

It was added recently support for Google Play Music playlists. Unfortunately there is no official API to access data from Play Music so this support is unstable, as Google may change the interfaces available without notice, breaking Playlist Backup app. Additionally, we have no warranty that Google will keep Play Music interfaces available for external apps, so it is possible that they just drop this support and keep us from reading its playlists.

Please be patient if you are unable to see your Play Music playlists after updating the Google Play Music app. In this case, contact Playlist Backup developer so I can try to fix this integration as soon as possible.

Note: This actually happened only one day after the release of the support to Play Music by Playlist Backup. A new version of Google Play Music changed its interfaces and Playlist Backup stopped working.

Final Note: it was google's idea to not use Android Media Library making all Play Music private, so don't blame other apps for being unable to read its data.

STATUS MSG: 'Unable to locate one or more songs in Android Media Library' (Google Play Music cloud)

Current implementation of Playlist Backup works only if you use Google Play Music with songs stored in your device. If your songs are stored in the in the remotely (in the cloud) they won't be available for other android applications, even if you make them available offline.

Playlist Backup app needs to look up your songs on Android Media Library in order to retrieve the physical location of the files in the phone storage. When songs stores in Google Play Music cloud are made available offline, Play Music puts them in a private area of the storage not available for other apps in the phone.