Author Topic: Playlist file references not updating  (Read 2349 times)

kingjon

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Hi

v 3.1.6454/Win10

I'm fairly new to MusicBee and have been doing some library organising - all going well apart from playlists.  There are two distinct issues but very likely the same root cause for both:

1. File references are not being updated when I make organisational changes in the library

2. When I then go to manually fix these links, it appears to work but if I click out of the playlist then back in, the change is not saved and I have the broken file reference again.

An example of exactly what I am doing:

Part of my library re-org is to set album artist to Various Artists for compilations so that in the Music explorer view and on a DLNA client, I do not see every artist for whom I have one track on a compilation.

Problem 1
1. Select all tracks of a Compilation Album in the 'Music' view
2. Right click > Edit > Set Album Artist = Various artists
At this point, because I have MusicBee set to auto-organise my media files, MB will physically move the files in this compilation from wherever they currently are to a new Album folder under Various Artists.  So far, so good

3. In the 'Music' view, expand Playlists and select a playlist containing one of the files I have just moved (my playlists were imported into MB as M3U files and are saved in the MusicBee/Playlists folder as M3U files)
4. The file that I have just moved has a ! against it in the library because MB has not updated the M3U file (if I open the M3U file directly, I can see that it is still pointing to the old file location)
Is there a setting somewhere that tells MB to keep playlists updated?  I had expected it would just do it, as long as I was doing all my library updates within MusicBee (which I am)


Problem 2
At this point, for whatever reason, I have some broken links in my playlists.  My next step (after restarting MB, rebooting etc.) was to try to fix the links manually - there are a LOT but I could do it.
1. Select playlist with broken link (denoted by the ! symbol)
2. Double-click track with ! symbol
3. MB prompts with 'XXX could not be found.  Would you like to locate it?'  
4. I choose Yes then go and find the track (in this example, in the relevant Compilation Album folder under Various Artists).  I find it, select it and the playlist link is updated - all looks good, I can play the track, the ! is gone etc.
5. I click out of the playlist (into another playlist or a different view, whatever) then click back into the playlist I just fixed - the ! is back and the playlist is pointing to the old location again.

I've tried this many times now with different playlists and results are always the same.  If I go and manually fix the link in the M3U file then MB picks this up and doesn't revert it back, but clearly that's not a solution.

I've tried making other changes to playlists from within MB (adding tracks, reordering etc.) and this all works fine so the problem seems to be specific to fixing links broken by library reorganisation.

Any suggestions?  Hopefully a setting somewhere.  Let me know if any screenshots would be useful.

Thanks

Jon

Steven

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its possible your playlist indices file is corrupted.
try deleting MusicBeeLibrary.pidx in the root Music\MusicBee folder

kingjon

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Thanks for the speedy reply - this worked and I can now fix the broken links and the playlists get updated when I reorganise files, amazing support, thank you!

I've noticed that the MusicBeeLibrary.pidx hasn't been recreated, though - should I be worried about that?  I tried restarting MB assuming it would reappear but it hasn't...


kingjon

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Hi, I'm afraid this problem has come back... Fixing playlist references in MusicBee does not save the change - if I click out of and back into the playlist it is reset back to the bad reference.


As per my previous comment above, the pidx file hasn't been recreated (at least not in the same location) so I'm stuck again.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

Jon


Steven

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by chance i discovered there is a remaining bug. This should fix it:

http://musicbee.niblseed.com/V3_1/MusicBee31_Patched.zip
unzip and replace the existing musicbee files

kingjon

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Hi, sorry for the long delay but I'm finally getting some time to spend with my music library again! 

In the meantime, I updated MB to the latest version (3.1.6512).  If I fix a reference from within a playlist, it's fine (so I guess the patch above was included in 3.1.6512) but if I update a track from elsewhere in the library, e.g. changing the album name, this leads to a broken link in the playlist...

Should I install the  above patch on top of 3.1.6512?

Thanks

Jon


kingjon

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