· I seem to have accumulated a number of playlists that appear in the left column by title, but are empty - as in no files. The no files is not the problem. The problem is that I cannot delete the playlist name. Further, if I click on the "Playlists" header - where you click to add or delete a playlist - the empty playlists do not appear at all. So only the titles of these ghost playlists appear, and only in the left column. How can I delete these?
Certainly. When I click on the three dots all I get are options for sorting. However, if I click on “Playlists>” a listing of the playlists opens as shown in the attachment. The three dots option is available for deleting, exporting, tagging next to each playlist. More interesting, though, is that the ghost playlists I’m talking about do not show up in this screen, even though they still show on the left column. I’ve highlighted playlists on the left that map to themselves on the right. Note the jump from Mavis Staples to Otis Redding on the playlists on the right. On the left you’ll see the ghost playlists.
The ghost playlists are empty file names. A normal playlist can be edited from the screen on the right, but since the ghosts don’t show up on that screen I can’t figure out how to get rid of them.
And to answer Jim_F’s solution: I can’t add files to the ghost playlists since they don’t show up in the listing, ie pick a file → go to three dots at top → scroll to add to playlist → playlist is identical to the listing shown in the attachment. No ghost playlists are shown to add files to.
I do use iTunes to import files into Roon and have used it to construct playlists in the past. Right now, though, there are no playlists in iTunes. You bring up an interesting question - these could be ghost playlist names in iTunes and not in Roon. I’m not sure how playlists are stored in iTunes. I seem to remember they had a specific designator like xxxxxx.plst or something like that.
I think both you and @Mr.Flibble are on the right track here - see if you can locate the subfolder holding all your empty iTunes playlist folders, and move them to a location not actively being watched by Roon.
Then, reboot Roon and see if you still see these ghost playlists. Thank you!
I think I may have screwed the pooch on this one. The problem seems to be in iTunes, not in Roon. In iTunes the playlists file data are stored within the iTunes library files, not as separate file types. I do have backups of the entire library, which is also the main Roon library, but I fear that if I restore from backup on iTunes I’ll be reverting to less organization within Roon.
The only problem these ghost playlists cause is my having to scroll through/past them in the list of playlists. At this point I would rather live with that inconvenience than potentially screw up Roon and iTunes by reinstalling the complete backed up library.
That all makes sense @robert_vanarsdall - one good thought around this is you could set your playlists to be listed by most recently modified, and simply ignore the blank playlists, which would eventually be at the bottom of the list.
Or, you could rename them something like “zzz-playlist1” and sort alphabetically.
Certainly, let us know if you change your mind and wish to continue to troubleshoot.
This is really becoming both interesting and perplexing. Following Benjamin’s suggestion to sort the playlists by Date Modified or to rename them to something like “zzz”, I first tried to rename the ghost playlists. There is apparently no way to do this. Clicking on the name, either on the left or in the Playlist panel won’t allow it.
But then I noticed this - note the playlist origin in the Playlist panel and the number of playlists in each:
13 playlists. But the actual number of playlists if I scroll down the panel and count is 18 playlists.
When I click on the “iTunes” folder under Playlists in the panel showing 11 playlists it shows me the 11 ghost playlists that are the problem. Note they all have no files, they are only playlist names.
When I count the total number of playlists in the left column in Roon, it shows 31 playlists, but doing a side-by-side comparison of the left column vs. the playlist panel shows there are really only 20 actual playlists.
What this is telling me is that Roon is watching two sets of playlist information, one “real” - the 20 playlists with files, and the other “ghost” - 11 playlist names without files.
Roon shows the iTunes playlist count as 11 in the Playlist panel, which is the ghost playlist count. Roon doesn’t give the count for the 20 actual existing iTunes playlists though they show up on the left column, nor does it allow me to select where they are located. Perhaps since Roon is watching a single iTunes folder it can’t differentiate, but it would seem that Roon would then count 29 playlists in the iTunes folder, 20 real and 11 ghost.
It would be nice to be able to do something like right-click on the iTunes or Qobuz icon in the Playlist panel to see the file location path.
Went to iTunes File → Library → Show Duplicates - File → Library → Export
Opened XML file and searched for ghost playlists by name. They are not in the exported XML file and I do not find Playlist Items block listed
Not to be dense, but I cannot find the “Options” screen you posted under any of the Settings in Roon. It isn’t under General, Storage, Services, Setup, etc, at least that I can find. I don’t need any of the iTunes playlists, so turning off the import would be simple. But if they aren’t in the XML file in iTunes, they wouldn’t be imported anyway.
Since the XML file did not contain the ghost playlists, your second option is, “It’s possible the Roon has stale cached playlist objects.”
Apologies for not including this information - you’ll need to acess Roon Settings > Storage > Click the three dots to the right of your watched folder > ‘Edit’ > Toggle off the playlist option > save.
Thanks! That last clue isolated the problem and corrected it. As we surmised - somehow Roon was reading two sets of iTunes Playlist data.
Following your first option - toggling off the import iTunes playlist - showed me that Roon is watching two folders, one called “iTunes” and the other “iTunes Media”.
At some point I must have reinstalled a copy of iTunes, which creates its own folders when it does. This discovery also shows that files I have imported to Roon recently are inside the “iTunes Media” folder and not up a level in the main library by artist name.
Just to test, I turned off “import iTunes Playlist” in the Media library and nothing changed in Roon. I then turned the toggle back on in the “iTunes Media” folder and turned it off in the main “iTunes” library. The ghost playlists disappeared.
Thanks for your help in this. Not only are the ghost playlists gone, but you’ve helped me to clear up some filing problems.
