Playlists Not Updating

[ptzink]

I am not sure if I should be posting this in the beta section as it may be an issue with v6 as well. I am currently running beta 7.0.12. I have exported several playlists from iTunes in m3u format and Sage imports them fine. Recently, I cleaned up the playlists and re-exported them from iTunes as well as deleted some playlists all together. When I start Sage and rescan my media, the old playlists still show up and some of the new playlists are not there. Is this a bug or normal behavior? Does Sage not scan for new playlists everytime?

[GKusnick]

I believe it's by design that once a playlist has been imported into Sage, it does not get re-imported even if the external playlist file changes. Presumably this is because you might have edited the playlist in Sage and wouldn't want those changes lost.

However new playlists that haven't been imported before should be picked up by an import scan, unless the playlist file is somehow malformed and can't be read by Sage. There were some changes in this logic in 7.0.12 so if it's not working right you should submit a bug report (with logs).

[ptzink]

Greg, thanks for the response. That is unfortunate if the playlist behavior is by design. That seems really counter intuitive to me to import external playlists, but then only allow those playlists to be updated/edited in SageTV. Does anyone know of any 'switch' in the .properties file or elsewhere that will alter this behavior? Ultimately, what I am trying to do is to have my iTunes playlists (including smart playlists) in Sage. I can run a script everyday to export iTunes playlists to m3u playlists to be accessed in Sage. Running the script on regular intervals is essential to update smart playlists that rely on 'last played' and other metadata. However, if Sage doesn't update based upon the original file, then this will not work. I would still love for STV to have some form of iTunes integration (outside of slimplayer). Any suggestions would be appreciated.

[pvrpenguin]

Agreed. Since all my music is managed by iTunes I'd much rather use that interface to maintain my playlists since it is much easier to convenient to use. SageTV should just treat external playlist files the same as any other media file and update them during each refresh cycle. To me this seems like an easy change that would make the music library much more usable out of the box.

Does anyone actually use the SageTV UI to create and edit playlists? Using just a remote this process would be very painful especially with a large music library.

@ ptzink: Did you log a bug/feature request for this?

[ptzink]

@pvrpenguin - I did not submit a bug report as it sounds like this is not a bug, but rather the functionality of the software. If someone tells me otherwise, I will be sure to submit a report. Regardless, I would like to see this behavior changed or at least the option to enable/disable playlist updating.
Not to digress or derail this thread too much, but is anyone aware of a nice '10 foot' front end for iTunes that I could use as an alternative to Sage? I have been Googling but have found nothing so far. I would much rather just see Sage's music functionality improve, but that doesn't seem too likely as it is not the developers' focus.

[sdsean]

Well what I can say is that there were several bugs around playlists in general b/c I filed them.

Given that we are still in beta, I think you can get them to focus on some music related stuff, as I have already done that, specifically with playlists. . .

For 1, it would totally just ignore a playlist if it couldn't resolve one file, which is of course dumb. Starting in .12, its supposed to send system messages for files that it can't resolve out of a playlist, and still do the import.

I believe a media re-scan should pickup changes for playlists so I would file a bug. . .given that I can also tell you that I was having issues previously where it simply couldn't resolve paths to files that were indeed there. . . so there may still be a bug with that (haven't tested it yet).

Also, no there are no good 10 foot UI's for Itunes, however a MCE remote does work pretty well with the normal GUI which is kinda strange. . . I'd stick with ITunes to create playlists and then play them in sage. . .

I did submit an enhancement request to be able to play music and video (with on sound) at the same time. .. but I was told that'd be a lot of work they'd have to tackle in the future. . .

That being said. . . I'd still like to see Fanart getting used in the new UI like it does in SageMC, better visualizations, and better filtering / sorting since I have so much darn music (i Loved SageMC's letter selector).

I think depending on what you need or want they'd oblige within reason. . .

[ptzink]

@sdsean - I submitted a bug report for the playlists not updating at every scan. We will see what comes of it.

[ptzink]

I have an update for everyone on this. I have been exchanging emails with Sage support about this issue. After some coercing from me, I convinced them to add recursive playlist updating to the next beta build of Sage. Here is a quote from the support team:

so there's a new property for V7.0.13 which'll do this
called "fully_reimport_playlists_every_scan" and it defaults to false.
Essentially what it does is every time it does the library scan; if it finds
a playlist file that corresponds to an existing playlist, it'll remove
everything from that playlist in SageTV and then replace it with all the
data that's in the playlist file. So it'll preserve playlists that are fully
created w/in SageTV; but synchronize playlists that come from external files
with changes to those external files (but changes made in SageTV to
playlists that originated from external files will be lost).

If this works as advertised that would be great. Hopefully, this plus an iTunes exporting script that I found here plus a daily action that runs this script will equal updating iTunes playlists in SageTV. Can't wait! Supposedly, v7.0.13 will be out with the next week. This may get me to finally upgrade my production machines to v. 7.

[greggerm]

Thanks for pursuing this issue, and getting the devs to add in the code! (*and thanks to the devs, too!)

Success story:

I didn't know that SageTV imported M3U's only once, never to do it again for a playlist with the same name... after creating a Christmas playlist for my visiting family today, I updated it on my desktop computer, pushed it to the server and it didn't update after a ton of media refreshes on the settop box and on the desktop client of Sage.

Panicked, I deleted all the visible playlists and refreshed again. Nothing! Ack!

Thankfully, I remembered there is a wonderful resource here on the forums, so I looked up M3U and found my answers! Sage defaults to importing playlists once, then never again. I probably could have renamed the playlist and gotten it to work, but instead I added the sage.properties code above and all is working brilliantly again.

Today will mark the first time I am really employing Sage in a musical role. We'll see how it goes!

-Greg