Page 1 of 2

Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_!

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2011 5:57 pm
by blaubeer
Call for petition: I did NOT remove my hard drive, no. The only thing i did was to remove my music files because of reorganization of my hard drive files: All of my playlists are _empty_. This is a massive softare failure - please recognize this!!! MM is claimed to be a software for "collectors" - yes, I am. This one BUG results in a massive loss of life quality and work efficiency for me. It takes months till I organized my Music, Jingles etc.

I have been a real fan of this software for years now and recommended it whenever talk came up to music software. This BUG is a reason for a massive loss of believe in Media Monkey, YES. Please, give a statement if this BUG will be cleared in a near future. And NO - this is not a small failure, this is a horrible.

Very, very disappointed: Maik (Dresden, Germany).

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2011 6:07 pm
by Lowlander
As Playlists are in the database linked to the files in the database the removal of the files will also remove them from the Playlists.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Sun Sep 04, 2011 4:08 am
by rovingcowboy
you removed the files. how?
just by going in to explorer and cutting them out or sending them to another hd for safty?

if so then the mediamonkey database should still have the url information to them in it.
just put them back in the same folder set up on your hd and monkey should find them again.

or just put them back on the hd and go to file find missing song. it should find them and in doing so
the playslist should then show them again unless you updated or tried to change one of the playlists then it might not find
any of them?

but if you did just move them off then back on to the hd in the same location with mediamonkey closed. then none of the data in monkeys database was changed. how ever if you reformated the hd and did not back up monkeys database because
you just wanted to do a clean install. well then its a clean database too just like the first time you installed mediamonkey.
:( which makes for a very long repair of the database and most people only do that mistake one time.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 9:02 am
by blaubeer
Hello there,

thanks for your support. For me personally, this bug leaves me in tears about a great product:

@rovingcowboy: My Playlists are just empty - so I don't even see which tracks they have consisted of. "find missing songs" won't work; I use the "folder monitoring" function of MM. I only moved my music files within the same HDD. Yes, I could roll back all the file moving changes and run the backup machinery (I do backup mm.db et cetera automatically)

Can't understand why playlist's contents are not just set to an inactive / "files not found" state or anything like that when files changed their location. This should not be too tricky to implement .. Why not saving encrypted playlist-data within a special tag / the "comment" tag field? Could anyone explain this bug? It seems silly: MM works based on Tags, not on folder structures. Why does it lose Playlist entries anyway?

Tried the following: Deleting a file from the original folder. It disappears instantly inside the playlist - there's no warning, no signal. Putting the file back to it's old location doesn't renanimate its listing on the playlist. This is so .. silly. The same would happen when a music-files only HDD crashes, I suppose? Come on ..

Okay, so by now I don't know what I should do when moving to a new machine in the future. Until some days ago I have had a real good feeling, covering all the MM-files in my backups.


Thanks a lot

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 9:07 am
by nohitter151
blaubeer wrote:Hello there,

thanks for your support. For me personally, this bug leaves me in tears about a great product:

@rovingcowboy: My Playlists are just empty - so I don't even see which tracks they have consisted of. "find missing songs" won't work; I use the "folder monitoring" function of MM. I only moved my music files within the same HDD. Yes, I could roll back all the file moving changes and run the backup machinery (I do backup mm.db et cetera automatically)

Can't understand why playlist's contents are not just set to an inactive / "files not found" state or anything like that when files changed their location. This should not be too tricky to implement .. Why not saving encrypted playlist-data within a special tag / the "comment" tag field? Could anyone explain this bug? It seems silly: MM works based on Tags, not on folder structures. Why does it lose Playlist entries anyway?

Tried the following: Deleting a file from the original folder. It disappears instantly inside the playlist - there's no warning, no signal. Putting the file back to it's old location doesn't renanimate its listing on the playlist. This is so .. silly. The same would happen when a music-files only HDD crashes, I suppose? Come on ..
Actually, deleting a track from your HDD would not remove it from the playlist instantly. Probably you have some option like "Remove inactive files from the library" checked under your file monitor / library settings. So that way when files aren't found, MM automatically removes them from the library due to file monitor or when you rescan.
Okay, so by now I don't know what I should do when moving to a new machine in the future. Until some days ago I have had a real good feeling, covering all the MM-files in my backups.


Thanks a lot
Actually, deleting a track from your HDD would not remove it from the playlist instantly. Probably you have some option like "Remove inactive files from the library" checked under your file monitor / library settings. So that way when files aren't found, MM automatically removes them from the library due to file monitor or when you rescan.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 4:26 am
by Guest
Actually, deleting a track from your HDD would not remove it from the playlist instantly. Probably you have some option like "Remove inactive files from the library" checked under your file monitor / library settings. So that way when files aren't found, MM automatically removes them from the library due to file monitor or when you rescan.
Thanks so far - and hands down: In fact, I got this option checked.

I got to remove, delete, sort out tracks nearly every day. It makes sense that deleted tracks do not show up in search results and the "playing now" windows anymore. If I did not check the option Tools>Options> File Monitor>"Remove unavailable Tracks", these files would show up in search results and playlists (NOT grayed out!), and the Now Playing list (grayed out!) - even if the file does not reside in any of the monitored folders anymore (Monitoring is on). This does not make any sense (at least to me and I wonder if it would do so to the majority ou there ... but it makes sense in case of swapping music file volumes, I experienced some time ago) - so I decided to check the "Removing unavailable Tracks" option.

Besides this: I did never _DELETE_ all these tracks that all my playlists consisted of before removing their files. Finally, they have ALL been found separately by the next start of MM - because their new folders reside in a sub-structure of the formerly monitored folders (including subfolders). It was a mistake of the software - it found my files but marked them as deleted .. before. I see: Maybe I just made the mistake of running MM while moving the files ..

MM should handle playlists as separate objects: For many people, they are not only temporary collections, but also constantly growing and evolving sound-sculptures. They shall own an exceptional level of protection. ;-)

Thanks so far and thanks to the team for this great piece of software. Everything is evolving all the time.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 4:39 am
by blaubeer
SORRY!!! I am not that familiar with english language so I did misuse the term "remove"! What i meant was "move" ... i MOVED files and did not REMOVE them. :oops: :oops: :oops: writing the first post, I have been really upset .. in the end: Conclusions stay valid.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 8:34 am
by nohitter151
Guest wrote:
Thanks so far - and hands down: In fact, I got this option checked.

...

Besides this: I did never _DELETE_ all these tracks that all my playlists consisted of before removing their files. Finally, they have ALL been found separately by the next start of MM - because their new folders reside in a sub-structure of the formerly monitored folders (including subfolders).
Well this is most certainly not a bug. Just because the files are not deleted, that doesn't mean that it doesn't look like they were deleted to MediaMonkey. Of course, everyone has a need to move, delete, and sort out tracks. But MM has facilities for this built into the program, so that you can do the moving, deleting, and sorting right from the MM interface (ie. auto-organize, etc.). And when you do it this way, MM knows exactly where the tracks are going.

But moving tracks around using another program can cause these kinds of things to happen. So don't do it that way.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Tue Sep 20, 2011 10:33 am
by Lowlander
And even if you don't want to move files with MediaMonkey if you enabled the File Monitor on source and destination folders you can move outside of MediaMonkey without MediaMonkey loosing track of the files (as long as it is running). Once track is lost you still have Locate Moved/Missing Tracks as last resort (with mixed results).

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Thu Sep 26, 2013 8:38 am
by FiReCRoW
i know this is an old topic .. but the same thing happened to me and i only moved a few files .. yet all my playlists are now empty .. sure feels like a bug to me...

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2013 7:06 pm
by Cienega32
I just experienced this as well and have the same reaction: bug.

I would think that the playlist would maintain its integrity and show the moved files as greyed out; allowing the player to just skip over that selection (and the next, any other missing one) until a valid path was found in the list/database.

That would allow users to rebuild the playlist with the "Find" option and feel more 'user-friendly'. It would, at the very least, allow the user to hunt and find the tune(s) for editing the path in the 'Properties' sheet for each missing entry.

Myself, I had a half-dozen folders with about 5,000+ tunes across them that were all victims of poor tagging and a lack of organization that I pulled in from 3 or 4 different computers that were retired. After weeks of organizing everything and applying proper metadata to all the files, I moved them to a central location/folder and rescanned. Quite a few playlists were either missing the entries or empty all together whenever they were referencing those "updated" tunes.

My initial reaction was to just Right-click>Edit Playlist, thinking the "corrupt" playlist could be edited; allowing me to hit it with a 'Find & Replace' to bulk edit the bad path/location. Needless to say, this was not the case...

I would strongly suggest the result of relocating playlist items be to have the entries greyed out to allow some form of editing.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Tue Nov 26, 2013 8:50 pm
by Lowlander
Cienega32 wrote:I would strongly suggest the result of relocating playlist items be to have the entries greyed out to allow some form of editing.
Which is the case unless you tell MediaMonkey to remove unavailable items (Tools > Options > Library) or removed files from the MediaMonkey Library.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Wed Nov 27, 2013 9:29 pm
by Cienega32
Lowlander wrote:
Cienega32 wrote:I would strongly suggest the result of relocating playlist items be to have the entries greyed out to allow some form of editing.
Which is the case unless you tell MediaMonkey to remove unavailable items (Tools > Options > Library) or removed files from the MediaMonkey Library.
Which would make perfect sense and something I thought I had seen in the past with MM. Perhaps I looked at the wrong menu screen but after reading this thread (after the fact), I inspected what i thought was the option. I'll recheck it when I get to that machine later this evening.

Don't misunderstand my post - the affected playlists aren't "crucial" and most of those affected files had butchered filenames to begin with but it seemed odd that it would happen.

Thanks for the response.

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 2:02 am
by Cienega32
If by "removing files from the MM library" you mean thru the "Add/Rescan" function and following by allowing MM to remove the "missing files", I would consider the impact on the playlists a "misfunction" but are the steps I indeed took. I would think that should be left to the user to rewrite the playlists affected as, in this case, most removal of missing files could be a basic reorganization of the storage (I would think).

Perhaps an offering of options when opening an affected playlist (or thru <right-click>:
"Search for the missing,
Edit the playlist (SUB: for individual entries, a bulk wildcard for location changes [tagged files], or a general 'point to a new path'),
Export current playlist as text file (for future reference with missing files in italics or marked as "Missing")
Remove the missing entries and save list or Save as is"
type of function?

Anyway, unless I'm not understanding the options, here's my screen for where you pointed me:

Image

Re: Playlists empty! Call for petition: YES, THIS IS A _BUG_

Posted: Thu Nov 28, 2013 10:18 am
by Lowlander
Remove unavailable items removes items that no longer exist from the database and thus from Playlists as they're in the database. If this is problematic for you (it would be for me) then disable the option.

With the option disable you can go to the Collection (like Music) > Files to Edit > Dead Links node to get a list of all files that MediaMonkey can't find (only files on connected media will be listed). Select the files and use File > Located Moved/Missing Files (won't work well on renamed files).
You can export Playlists using either File > Export to Playlist on selected files or Tools > Scripts > Export All Playlists.

As MediaMonkey is a database driven application (like most media software) it is recommended to do any file movements within MediaMonkey. There are plenty of tools/ways to achieve this, the most powerful being Tools > Auto-Organize Files.