Smart Playlist on the Web Interface

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone!

I did a quick search of the forums, and found no one with this specific problem. I am running FreeBSD 6.0 with sqlite2 and the latest nightly of firefly (svn-1696), I was running svn-1539 (if I recall correctly) and upgraded hoping it would solve the problem but it did not, I get the same results.

When I go into the web interface to add/edit/remove a SmartPlaylist (/smart.html) nothing shows up. I know the lists are there because they do show up and WORK in iTunes. Simply the web interface doesn’t show them so I cannot edit them. Even if I add a new list, finish and save it, the web interface will reload, and it doesn’t show up. But if I switch to iTunes, disconnect and reconnect the new playlist shows up….

Any suggestions? There is nothing out of the ordinary with my naming schemes (I do include spaces) but no special characters (%^&*#, etc). The rest of my library works and have not had a problem playing any of the songs.

I forgot to mention that when I first installed the nightly build many moons ago it was working flawlessly and just one day out of the blue it started exhibiting the above behavior?

Corrupt database? I have not deleted the database file and rebuilt it… I hate to lose my current playlists though. Should I try to deleting the sqlite db and rebuild it?

Any other suggestions?

[Anonymous]

Ok, it seems that I have figured out what the cause may be. I have opened the database file with sqlite and have ran sql commands on the database. First thing I did was remove the spaces in the names of the plalists. Didn’t help.

I noticed one of my playlists was rather long (maybe 25 lines). So I simplified this to a single line and viola, my playlists now show up on the web interface. I add back my entire playlist and again they disappear. So why is this? Is there a limit to the number of lines that are allowed? Obviously the database itself allows that many characters, why would that interfere with the web interface? It is also possible that I had an error in my playlist, but would it still be playable in iTunes if that were the case?

Here is the playlist causing the problem…

SELECT * FROM PLAYLISTS WHERE ID=6;
6|ClassicRock|1|68|fname includes “zz top” ||
fname includes “zztop” ||
fname includes “thorogood” ||
fname includes “skynyrd” ||
fname includes “skynard” ||
fname includes “rolling stones” ||
fname includes “foreigner” ||
fname includes “journey” ||
fname includes “doobie brothers” ||
fname includes “zepplin” ||
fname includes “creedence clearwater” ||
fname includes “creedance” ||
fname includes “motley crue” ||
fname includes “love in an elevator” ||
fname includes “lindsey buckingham” ||
fname includes “Allman Brothers” ||
fname includes “Nazareth” ||
fname includes “Steve Miller” ||
fname includes “Pink Floyd” ||
fname includes “Come Together” ||
fname includes “Autograph” ||
fname includes “billy joel” ||
fname includes “marshall tucker” ||
fname includes “outlaws” ||
fname includes “Stevie Ray Vaughn” ||
fname includes “Blackfoot”|0||0

Any ideas?

Are the “smart playlists” not designed for this type of use? Should I be using .m3u flat files instead? I suppose I could create my own interface with PHP and Apache, but why reinvent the wheel?

Thanks guys!

P.S. Are the smart playlists case-sensitive, specifically the “fname” and “path” directives? Or does it simply depend on the host file system? Does it depend on my Case Sensitive option in the config file, or that simply for the actual access to the files?

[fizze]

Check out this link: http://trac.fireflymediaserver.org/wiki/SmartPlaylists

Actually I don’t think its case sensy. But yes, smart playlists are exactly designed for that kind of queries.

Anyway, there are a lot of ORs in there, so im sure the performance isnt exactly thrilling.

It seems like a really sweet playlist though 🙂

[rpedde]

@dsailor wrote:

I noticed one of my playlists was rather long (maybe 25 lines). So I simplified this to a single line and viola, my playlists now show up on the web interface. I add back my entire playlist and again they disappear. So why is this? Is there a limit to the number of lines that are allowed? Obviously the database itself allows that many characters, why would that interfere with the web interface? It is also possible that I had an error in my playlist, but would it still be playable in iTunes if that were the case?

No, there shouldn’t be, and I can’t off the top see a reason that it should be that way.

Are the “smart playlists” not designed for this type of use?

It should work, although with the version you are running that gets translated into a sql query on the back end, and likely that’s a pretty inefficient query.

Should I be using .m3u flat files instead? I suppose I could create my own interface with PHP and Apache, but why reinvent the wheel?

I’d have done that by ‘genre’ tag, but that’s just me. 🙂

But it should work. I’ll see if I can replicate this.

P.S. Are the smart playlists case-sensitive, specifically the “fname” and “path” directives?

terms that translate to “like” querys (startswith, endswith, includes) are all case insensitive. “=” is not.

Or does it simply depend on the host file system? Does it depend on my Case Sensitive option in the config file, or that simply for the actual access to the files?

Yup, that’s for file access — whether a playlist referring to “SOME FILE.mp3” and “some file.mp3” are referring to the same file or not.

Shouldn’t be a factor here.

— Ron

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