Exporting empty playlists?

[jeruenchen]

Hi everyone! I'm new to the forum.

Being fed up with iTunes' limitations and bugs when synchronizing to devices, I switched to MB a few months ago and have been very happy with the software.

I still use iTunes to put music on my iPhone using playlists. I.e. export a playlist in MB and import it to iTunes, then copy the iTunes playlist to the device.

This system worked perfectly until a few days ago. As far as I know, none of my MB or iTunes settings were changed but all of a sudden whenever I import an exported playlist to iTunes, it imports an empty one. So, iTunes shows a new playlist with the correct name but with no music in it!

I have been searching the web/this forum, downloaded the iPhone plugin, etc. etc. but haven't found a solution.

Any advice? Thanks in advance!

[jeruenchen]

I actually figured it out by myself!

The playlists that turned up empty in iTunes all had a track in them with a VERY long title. I shortened it and that seems to have fixed the problem.

Funny though, instead of just not adding the one track it had difficulties with, iTunes decided to not import any of the tracks included in the playlist!

Who knows, maybe this info might end up being useful to somebody else at some point in time...

[psychoadept]

Welcome to the forum and thanks for the follow up. Glad you worked it out. 

Do you know if it was just the title field being too long, or might it have been a file path that was too long? (Would probably only happen if you're using auto organize)

[jeruenchen]

Thank you!

Very happy I figured it out because this is the first music software setup I'm actually happy with. It took me quite a while though as the playlists in question were VERY long ones .

Good question, and no, I don't know. But I can tell you that i AM using auto organize (great function!).

[psychoadept]

I would think even iTunes should be able to deal with longish tags, unless maybe it's a whole novel, lol. One thing you might try, to see if it makes a difference, is replacing <Title> in your auto organize template with $Left(<Title>,50) or something like that. Maybe 30 if it's still giving you trouble.

If I'm right, that would let you keep the whole title in the tag but limit the filename. I do that for album and title in my template. It mostly only affects classical releases, which can get cumbersome.

[phred]

Since Windows has a 260 character limit for filenames, I use the following in all my renaming, moving, and exporting processes:

Code

$RemoveSortWords($Left(<Album Artist>,50))\$Left(<Album>,50)\<Disc-Track#> - $Left(<Title>,50)

This ensures that the filename will never exceed 160 characters.