Hi,
I wanted to document a bunch of issues that make playlists less useful
than they should be, and wanted advice on whether to file these as a
single bug report or separately.
SlimDevices has decided not to provide playlist editing in SC (which I
agree with) but that means that since you must edit your playlists
outside of SC, you really need SC to pick up playlist changes
automatically and instantaneously.
As it is now, we have neither, and using playlists is very clunky:
1. Making changes to an existing playlist or adding new playlists to
your playlist directory is not noticed by SC when selecting the
"Browse Playlists" menu. You must at least manually run a playlist
rescan to pick up changes.
2. Rescan playlists is extraordinarily slow for what it does. I have
7 playlists, with a total of about 650 songs and 7 radio stations.
Any time I make a change to a playlist, rescanning just playlists
takes about 127 seconds, broken down as follows:
actual playlist scan: 6 sec
merge various artists: 45 sec
database cleanup #1: 45 sec
database cleanup #2: 22 sec
database optimize: 9 sec
Given that I'm not changing my music library, why does it have to
do anything other than the actual playlist scan? At the very least
the code could keep track of whether there have been any music
folder changes found in scanning playlists, and if there have been
none, skip those steps. But is there really any need for these
additional steps at all?
3. If you remove a playlist file and then rescan playlists, the
removed playlist is still shown in the SC interface.
4. There is no way to organize your playlists hierarchically in the
"Browse Playlist" menu; I would make more playlists if there were
any sane way to organize their display. An interface more like
"Browse Music Folder", which is what we had years ago, would work
a lot better.
I suspect you could fix these problems without changing the DB or
basic structure of the code. You know the path to the playlist file
so you can recover the directory hierarchy relative to the
playlistdir. You have timestamps for the playlist files so you can
refresh a playlist that has changed on disk as needed and only as you
browse into it.
Not having directory timestamps makes handling additions and deletions
harder, but if you set playlist timestamps to the larger of the
modtimes of the playlist file and its directory, you can efficiently
refresh if needed as you browse into a directory.
But maybe it's easier to just do something more like Browse Music
Folder, and directly traverse the directory hierarchy rooted at the
playlistdir? Maybe scanning a playlist file is fast enough that it's
not even worth scanning and storing contents in the DB and all the
hassle of detecting need for refreshing based on timestamps?
thanks,
Greg
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