Author Topic: "Add to Playlist" is Breaking My Playlists  (Read 1422 times)

jhackett

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Hit a bug I've seemingly never encountered before in years of using MusicBee, have tried a lot of things to figure out what the problem is. Will try to keep it brief.

Windows 10
Latest version of MusicBee (non-portable version)
Have not recently moved my music library.

I noticed yesterday that my musicbee playlists were broken - none of the files were properly linked anymore, all red exclamation points. The files had not moved from their location. Click to play them, get a "Source File Could Not Be Found" error. This is only happening for the playlists I created in MusicBee as m3u files, not the auto-generated "top 25 tracks" etc - those are fine, the rest of the library is fine.

I keep all my music files in:
C:\Users\[user name]\Music\Old music\

Long story short, I open the m3u files in textpad and find out that for some reason, all my music files are using relative paths linked as:
Playlists\Music\Old music\[etc etc, the folders where the file should be and has always been]

Which isn't quite right. So, I edit the files using crtl+f Find and Replace in a word doc, paste it back into the m3u text file and hit save. The relative path in the m3u files is now:
Old music\[etc etc, the folders where the file should be and has always been]

Now, everything is fixed!

Except - when I "Add to Playlist" I uncover a problem. Even after fixing the m3u file, MusicBee changes the path within the m3u file so all of the music linked is broken again. Here's what happens:
The relative path that works:
Old music\[etc etc, the folders where the file should be and has always been]
The relative path that appears in the m3u file when I add any new song to the playlist, any of them at all:
\Music\Old music\[the correct path, etc etc]

Which means I have to edit the text m3u file all over again to get it to work.

This breaks the playlist for every song, again. I can't wrap my mind around what the problem is. I've tried "Re-link Music File Paths". I've tried re-scanning the whole library. I've tried flipping back and forth between m3u and mbp, moving where the playlists folder itself lives (right now I keep them in "C:\Users\[user name]\Music\" but that doesn't make a difference truly). I re-downloaded MusicBee to make sure I'm up to date, made no difference. There really isn't many other settings available to me that I can fiddle with that are playlist-only. I have not seen this issue anywhere else on the internet. I'm baffled by why musicbee playlists would overwrite paths that work and select relative paths that don't work. It didn't use to do this until this week.

Any help at all would be appreciated, thanks!

frankz

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What did you change about your system or settings between when it worked and when it stopped working?  Musicbee isn't able to somehow change its own behavior unprompted.

For example, did you change this setting (should only apply to exported playlists, but if you're exporting to the same directory as the library playlists then maybe it's a thing, who knows)?



...or something in the organization settings?

jhackett

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Appreciate the thought, but I've tried adjusting all those settings and it doesn't seem to have an effect on why it's breaking the links between the file locations and the playlists. Below is a screengrab of my current settings:



I've checked and unchecked relative paths, unix path convention, etc. I understand those only effect exporting playlists anyways so I didn't expect them to have much of an effect, either, but went through them step by step to be sure. I've changed where the library playlists are stored a few times (moving into "music/playlists", "music/old music", and now just "/music", none of them changed the outcome of what's happening, either. Also flipped back and forth between m3u and mbp, same deal. Not many other playlist settings left after that, I imagine.

As for anything I might have changed in settings that could have caused this, I moved where the Playlists folder was stored a few weeks ago, but the playlists continued to work for a while anyway during that time and only broke recently. I would love it if there was something obvious I did that I'm just missing, but I've fiddled with so many settings in the last 24 hours to fix this that I'm surprised I haven't broken it further. There's just something weird about how the musicbee changes the relative paths within the m3u file only when I add a new song - it seems like a setting beyond my control, or atleast what's apparent in the Edit Preferences menu