ARC oddity with smart playlists

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1

This is not a request for support. It’s just to inform Roon about one of the countless quircks and oddities in ARC.

I have a few smart playlists that only have Tidal tracks in them. When I tried to play one of these away from home on ARC, it suddenly appeared to be completely empty, while it should be populated with quite a few tracks. As you can see, the playlists are empty.

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But then I got an idea… I decided to copy the playlist. And this copy appeared fully populated. Why?

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This happens both on an iPad and on my Samsung phone.

2

But the story continues… a few minutes later, I decided to copy one playlist again, but now not on my iPad but on my phone. The track count is completely different…

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3

Could this be because the filter function isn’t implemented in the phone version?

4

I doubt it, but who knows..? I would think it’s the exact same playlist, because it’s a copy of a smart playlist of which the definition is stored on Roon Server.

5

A Smart Playlist isn’t a static playlist though. I think it is essentially using the bookmark and filter functions, and it is possible that if the filter isn’t implemented on the phone app (last time I used it, it wasn’t), then it’s possible that you get a different result with a Smart Playlist across different Roon remotes.

6

You might be right… although I’m doing it not on Roon Remote but on ARC. ARC on a phone is the same as on a tablet.

7

Another thing with this ‘smart’ playlist is, it doesn’t update itself. The playlist simply contains all tracks from all my Tidal albums that didn’t have any tracks played for six months. So when a track is played from the playlist, all tracks from that album should disappear from the playlist, but they don’t.
It used to work, but it doesn’t anymore.