Playlist Problem - files in playlist but SS only sees one file

[JohnsonChris]

Hi there,

I have an odd problem with my m3u playlists. The m3u files export without a problem, squeezecenter picks up the files and "most" are working ok.

Whilst all the tracks are listed in the file, squeezecenter on some of the playlists only recognizes a few of the tracks. Interestingly and I'm not sure if this is relevant, often the filenames contain a special character (such as an upside down question mark). They're not there for any reason, they seem to have been added as part of the metadata they pulled in from the ripping process.

Here's the background...

I have re-ripped all my CD's to both flac and mp3. Everything is under a common directory structure.

M:\Music Library\
\___________> mp3 \ Artist \ Album \ track.mp3
\___________> flac \ Artist \ Album \ track.flac

MP3 is for my itunes installation, and flac for the squeezebox players. I build all my playlists from iTunes and then export them to m3u formats using this tool. http://www.ericdaugherty.com/dev/itunesexport/

Because SqueezeServer is running on my NAS box. I have to edit the m3u file and do a search and replace so the file references are changed as below....

From...
M:\Music Library\MP3\Artist\Album\Track.mp3
To ..
//volume1/public/Music Library/MP3/Artist/Album/Track.flac

End result is everything seems to work. But I have one playlist that simply won't play any of the tracks in the file, apart from one track, with this special character.

I'll try and rename the filename to see if it takes away the problem but I wanted to ask if anyone else has seen this type of problem? Are m3u files the best files to give SqueezeServer for playlist management?

Cheers,
Chris

[JohnsonChris]

So special characters don't seem to fix the problem. I've also noticed that the playlists are missing loads of tracks. In iTunes one of my largest playlists has 6735 tracks, the same playlist in SqueezeServer, after the changes above have been made, only show around 500 tracks.

Am I missing something, I know the file references are valid - all the tracks have been dual-ripped at the same time with exactly the same naming convention. This seems to be down to how SqueezeServer is reading the m3u file.

Current version of SS is 7.5.0-30464, has anyone else come across this???


Cheers - Chris

[JohnsonChris]

I've checked the logs and I can see this error repeating when I start a new music scan...

[10-06-22 22:22:04.0025] Slim::Formats::Playlists::Base::playlistEntryIsVal id (120) Warning: file:///share/Public/Music%20Library/FLAC/_Playlists/share/Public/Music%20Library/FLAC/The%20White%20Stripes/Elephant/13%20%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%E2%80%9C%20The%20White%20Stri pes%20%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%E2%80%9C%20Girl,%20You%20Hav e%20No%20Faith%20in%20Medicine.flac found in playlist:
file:///share/Public/Music%20Library/FLAC/_Playlists/4%20-%20Star.m3u doesn't exist on disk - skipping!
[

Checking the m3u file itself, this is how its shown....

share/Public/Music Library/FLAC/The White Stripes/Elephant/13 – The White Stripes – Girl, You Have No Faith in Medicine.flac

So I'm getting somewhere - just not sure whether the scanner is unhappy with my use of spaces, the structure of the m3u file, or the actual FLAC file itself.

Anyone able to let me know?
Cheers - Chris

[Tony T]

Did you notice this:


Girl,%20You%20Hav e%20No%20Faith%20in%20Medicine.flac


Is there a space in Have? (Hav e), or is it the formatting of the message?

(use {code} ..... {/code} in the message when posting, replacing '{' '}' with '[' ']')

[JohnsonChris]

nope its becuase of the way I copy and pasted the log entry. I've tried another track with the same problem with the /code tags



[10-06-23 01:03:02.7416] Slim::Formats::Playlists::Base::playlistEntryIsVal id (120) Warning: file:///share/Public/Music%20Library/FLAC/_Playlists/share/Public/Music%20Library/FLAC/Kathryn%20Williams/Relations/12%20%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%E2%80%9C%20Kathryn%20Williams %20%C3%A2%E2%82%AC%E2%80%9C%20All%20Apologies.flac found in playlist:
file:///share/Public/Music%20Library/FLAC/_Playlists/New%20Albums.m3u doesn't exist on disk - skipping!

[Mnyb]

The default playlist limit in squeezeboxserver is 500 songs

Are you running a recent version ?

settings > advanced > performance > "Maximum Playlist Length"

Normally there is no point with an 6735 tracks playlist, unless one want's to shuffle them. There are other ways to find songs if they are well tagged.
But sbs/ss/sc does not do this efficiently it has problems with big playlists,. You may get performance problems shuffling such a large list

So I use Erlands splendid Dynamic Playlist plugin:

It can do things like randomly picking songs from a large playlist, it does so almost like the random function it picks and loads 10-20 files at the time(a configurable setting) and keeps doing this from a playlist you selects.

It seems also typical that iTunes users have large playlist ? I don't use iTunes is the interface geared in such way that you tend to build playlists of everything instead using artist albums and genres ?

[JohnsonChris]

Thanks Mnyb, and you're correct this particular playlist is there to shuffle and play over a day or so. Other playlists are much, much smaller!

I can also confirm I had removed the playlist limit from SS, setting the value to zero. Version of SS is 7.5.0-30464

I'll carry on looking into these errors in the scannerlog, I just cannot work out why it doesn't like the the file refernce, I know its valid.

Thinking about it - the share/public/.. notation is a symlink, pointing to /HDA-DATA/public/...

Do you know if SS is happy with soft links?
C.

[JohnsonChris]

ok so symlinks are not the issue it doesn't matter if I'm using the true path or the symlink path.

So I'm still trying to find the root cause on this. I've opened up the m3u file in vi and I can see the formatting is different to how I see it when I open the file in notepad. Here's what I see in vi



/share/Public/Music Library/FLAC/Kathryn Williams/The Quickening/11 â~@~S Kathryn Williams â~@~S Little Lesson.flac


But one of the tracks which is detected, shows the same format, here's a track which is picked up and added to the playlist.



/share/Public/Music Library/FLAC/Norah Jones/Feels Like Home/02 â~@~S Norah Jones â~@~S What Am I to You¿.flac


I'm completely stuck trying to work out why the scan is failing and why my playlists are not populating. I've enabled debug and there is no additional information displayed and I've run out of ideas or where to go from here.

Can anyone help - I really like having my playlists and not having them working is a real pain for me.

Cheers,
Chris