Inconsistent Playlist Addition Issues (ref#2RJYBT)

Support
1

Hi! What’s not quite right with Roon?

· Music won’t play or issues with my library

Music won’t play or issues with my library

· Local files won't import or appear

Tell us what's going on

· Some playlists are added, others not..

Tell us about your home network

· Roon Nucleus One and router

2

Hello @vilavedelle29

Thank you for reaching out to Roon support.

We will need a bit more to work with.

  1. Where are these playlists coming from? Playlist files on your storage such as M3U or M3U8, playlists from TIDAL or Qobuz, or ones you created in Roon?
  2. Please name two or three that were added and two or three that were not. The names alone are enough.
  3. For one that was not added, where does the file sit on the Nucleus One, and are the tracks it points at already in your library?
  4. When did you last see this working?

With that we can pull a set of logs from your Nucleus One and follow what happened to the ones that failed.

3

Thanks vadim for your support, willing to find out what’s wrong, cheers…

4

Hi again @vadim, dad a little help from Claude.ai, this is what he says:

Title: Nucleus One ignores 252 of my M3U playlists (“Intentionally ignored playlist” in logs)

Hi,

Setup: Roon Nucleus One, music on the internal SSD (Music folder), ~340 M3U playlists stored inside the album folders, relative paths. With the Core on my Windows PC, all of them were imported fine.

On the Nucleus, only 45 playlists get imported. The logs show the rest as:
“Warn: [storage] [directory] Intentionally ignored playlist: /roon/sys/storage/mounts/InternalStorage/Music/…”

What I found:

  • On 23 Sep I used Roon’s Import function from my PC several times. It uploaded music and playlists into “Roon Imports” (including a “Playlists” folder with older versions of these M3Us).
  • Afterwards I formatted the SSD and copied the music into the Music folder via SMB.
  • All 252 ignored playlists are exactly the ones that had been uploaded through that Import function. The ones that never went through it import normally.

What I’ve tried, with no change:

  • Deleted the remaining “Roon Imports” folders
  • Force rescan and Core restart
  • Clean up library (it removed a large number of items)
  • Moving all M3U files off the Nucleus and back
  • A renamed copy of an ignored playlist, and editing its content (added #EXTM3U)

The files are fine: same format as the working ones, and all referenced tracks exist and are in the library.

It looks like Roon keeps a record of these playlists from the Import and keeps skipping them. Is there a way to reset that state so they are imported again? Happy to send logs.

Thanks!

Edit: Update: I reset the Roon database completely (renamed the RoonServer folder, fresh Core, fresh scan of freshly copied files, no leftovers from the Import function). Result is identical: 46 playlists imported, ~335 logged as “Intentionally ignored playlist”. What criteria does Roon use to intentionally ignore an M3U file?

5

Update: solved (or at least worked around), in case it helps anyone else.

Quick recap: with the Core on my PC, Roon read all my M3U playlists. After moving to a Nucleus One (music on the internal SSD), it only picked up about 46 out of ~397. The log showed “Intentionally ignored playlist” for the rest.

What I ruled out: path format, encoding (UTF-8 with/without BOM, CRLF), long names, track order, playlist location inside the album folders. I even reformatted the SSD, copied everything again, ran Clean up library and started with a fresh database. Always the same ~46. Oddly, almost all of the ignored playlists had every line correct, while some of the accepted ones had broken lines, so I never found a pattern in the files themselves.

What worked: instead of keeping the M3U files inside each album folder, I copied a single Playlists folder (via SMB) directly inside the Music folder on the Nucleus, i.e. Music/Playlists. Every playlist in it uses relative paths like ../Artist/Album/01 - Track.flac, so they resolve from there to the music. Result: “Imported: 416 playlists”.

Important: don’t use Roon’s Import function for this. I tried that first and Roon placed the folder under Roon Imports//imported at …/Playlists. From there the relative paths don’t point to the music, so it failed.

A few other things I learned along the way:

  • Force rescan does not re-read M3U files in folders that haven’t changed. Roon only looks at a playlist again when the file itself changes.
  • If you copy playlists before Roon has finished importing the albums they point to, the log shows “got mod for unknown file”. In my case Roon still picked them up a couple of minutes later, but the safest order is: copy the album, wait for it to import, then copy its playlist.
  • If a playlist was skipped because its album wasn’t there yet, updating the file’s modified date (or copying it again) makes Roon read it again.
  • Sorting playlists by “Modified” uses the M3U file’s own date, not the import date, so newly imported playlists may not appear at the top.

I still don’t know what criterion Roon uses to “intentionally ignore” playlists inside album folders. If anyone from Roon can explain it, I’d be curious. But with a central Playlists folder it works reliably for me.

Thanks to everyone who took the time to reply.

7

Did you review both official FAQs on Playlists? Here’s the relevant one:

At the very bottom you’ll find this highlighted note;

Many early CD ripping programs automatically generated M3U files that were merely carbon copies of the album. When those text files were imported, Roon customers would end up with thousands of unwanted playlists. To prevent that, Roon ignores any M3U file that’s an exact duplicate, in the exact running order, of the folder contents. Try changing the numbering of one or more tracks in the folder so they’re not sequential, then generate a new M3U file.