M3u file won't parse properly

General
1

Hello
I have created a new m3u playlist locally based on a working m3u playlist. But the new playlist does not seem to parse properly, presenting itself in Iris as just the path text.

local:track:Compilations/1001%20albums/1001Commenters%20Additions/Live%20-%20Throwing%20Copper%20(1994)/01_The_Dam_At_Otter_Creek.mp3
local:track:Compilations/1001%20albums/1001Commenters%20Additions/Larry%20Norman%20-%20Only%20Visiting%20the%20Planet%20(1972)/10%20-%20Readers%20Digest.mp3
local:track:Compilations/1001%20albums/1001Commenters%20Additions/Larry%20Norman%20-%20Only%20Visiting%20the%20Planet%20(1972)/09%20-%20Why%20Should%20The%20Devil%20Have....mp3
local:track:Compilations/1001%20albums/1001Commenters%20Additions/Larry%20Norman%20-%20Only%20Visiting%20the%20Planet%20(1972)/08%20-%20Pardon%20Me.mp3
local:track:Compilations/1001%20albums/1001Commenters%20Additions/Larry%20Norman%20-%20Only%20Visiting%20the%20Planet%20(1972)/07%20-%20The%20Great%20American%20Novel.mp3

I checked the file paths and they look good to me.
I cannot see any difference between the m3u file that works and the one above. Is there a formatting secret that one needs to know for m3u files?
Any thoughts are most grateful.
Thank you

2

A little testing reveals that changing the txt file encoding format from UTF8 to UTF16 does all sorts of strange formatting things in the Iris page. Therefore, I am deducing the m3u does not like some special characters like (). Is there a way to change the character decoding to accept strange & foreign characters in the file paths?

3

Mopidy-M3U has a default_encoding option: Mopidy-M3U — Mopidy 4.0.0a2.dev24+g158e94e documentation

4

Thank you for the info. Why didn’t I think to read the manual? It works better but I still have issues with brackets . Many thanks

5

Hello
After more investigation, I am struggling to understand how the m3u file is read. But be aware that my playlist has 10K lines, so parsing such a large file maybe an issue either for Mopidy or for Iris & Muse interfaces that I am testing.
If I use

local:track:

I get an arbitrary list of unusable or dead entries Iris & Muse.

When I test

file:///var/lib/mopidy/media

which is the entry that Iris creates when I add a track to a playlist, Iris & Muse are unable to identify the tracks and the playlist is empty.

When I test a direct path to the mp3 file

/run/media/admin/MUSIC_FAT/

Iris and Muse list the mp3 file names as per the playlist path, without any mp3 metadata.

Is there a limit to the number of tracks a playlist can have and is there a better way of setting the path?
Thanks

6

These are from Mopidy-Local. Only tracks that Mopidy-Local knows about (found during scanning) can be used. These will be somehow based on the path but might not be easy to work out.

These are from Mopidy-File. Every time you do something with these URIs, Mopidy has to re-read the file metadata from disk. For a large playlist this will be very, very, very slow. I expect this is why it appears empty.

This has no scheme, it is bare file i.e. no metadata.

The best way for large playlists would be to use local:tracks. But Local track URIs are supposed to be generated by Mopidy-Local and it’s not really designed that you will manually work them out based on the file path. They are encoded, maybe URL encoded and/or hashed, I don’t remember. So you really have to first find your tracks in Mopidy (via searching, or browsing, whatever) and then you take the corresponding URIs for each and add them to your playlist. If you are starting from an existing list of paths, this is the opposite way round. I’m not sure how other users handle this. I don’t think we have a way to convert a bunch of paths into their corresponding Mopidy-Local tracks but it could be added. It seems useful.

7

My mopidy URLs are hashed…

http://************:6680/iris/library/browse/ZmlsZTovLy92YXIvbGliL21vcGlkeS9tZWRpYS9MT1dERU5fTVVTSUMvTVVTSUMvQ29tcGlsYXRpb25zLzEwMDElMjBhbGJ1bXMvMTAwMSUyMEFudGhvbnklMjBBbmQlMjBUaGUlMjBKb2huc29ucyUyMC0lMjBJJTIwQW0lMjBBJTIwQmlyZCUyME5vdyUyMDIwMDU=/1001 Anthony And The Johnsons - I Am A Bird Now 2005

I have a thread on database size so maybe this explains why I am not getting errors with local:track:
https://discourse.mopidy.com/t/is-there-database-size-limit/5923