Importing M3U Playlists into Music Module

[jgsouthard]

I know that several of us have been frustrated with the erratic behavior of the SageTV Music module when it comes to importing existing M3U playlists and automatically creating SageTV playlists out of them. Sometimes it works, and sometimes is doesn't.

We've been speculating as to what causes SageTV to ignore a playlist, but I haven't seen a definitive cause. At one point I thought that certain characters in the filename and/or directory path for any item in the list would cause SageTV to ignore the list, but I've since convinced myself that this isn't the cause.

I think I finally understand when and why it doesn't work. Although I believe that what I'm seeing represents a bug/limitation in SageTV, I've found what I think is a workaround.

Once you have imported a playlist of a given name into SageTV ONE time, it will never let you import another playlist of the same name. Apparently the name gets stored in wiz.bin -- I can't find playlist info in sage.properties -- but it apparently doesn't get deleted even if you delete the playlist.

If you modify the playlist and re-import a new one of the same name (i.e. "Refresh Imported Media" in Setup), it won't update the playlist with the changes. If you completely delete the playlist in SageTV, it won't import the new version of the playlist. So if at any point in time in the past you have imported a playlist of a given name and then later deleted it, it will never let you re-import another playlist of the same name.

BUT -- If you change the name of the playlist to a unique name that you have never used in SageTV, the playlist seems to import fine.

My workaround is that I'm now naming all of my SageTV playlists using a date-coded name -- e.g. <playlist>_060903.m3u. This gets imported fine into SageTV, at which point I delete the older version of this playlist, if any. This is messy and I don't like it, but it appears to work.

I believe that this represents a ridiculous limitation of the Music module (only one of many ridiculous limitations of the neanderthal Music module), but at least I've found a way to finally get my playlists into SageTV.

[geogecko]

Interesting. So, it appears to also be a problem with certain characters, and that a playlist is named the same. I cannot confirm this yet, but it is interesting.

I'll have to update one of my playlists, and only include one song, and see if I get the same results.

[jgsouthard]

Originally Posted by geogecko

Interesting. So, it appears to also be a problem with certain characters, and that a playlist is named the same. I cannot confirm this yet, but it is interesting.

I'll have to update one of my playlists, and only include one song, and see if I get the same results.

I would appreciate some independent confirmation, since I've had relatives visiting which limited my time for additional testing. At his point, consider this a hypothesis to be tested rather than a definite statement of behavior.

I'm working with a moderately large database of ~3,200 songs, and I have now gotten SageTV to accept some playlists with > 600 songs, so I don't think there are any routine characters in paths/filenames that are causing problems (certainly not apostrophe or ampersand, two of the characters that I earlier suspected of problems).

Other than using new/unique playlist names, the only other thing I've noticed is that it can sometimes take a few minutes after hitting "Refresh Imported Media" before the new playlists appear).

[geogecko]

Oh, the characters I was talking about, were characters such as Spanish characters, such as an i or e with the apostrophe over the top. Not sure if you noticed that or not. I had one song that had a character such as this, and once I reripped it, and changed the offending character to a standard English character, the playlist showed up. Hopefully, I'll be able to confirm sometime this week on the other issue.