· Some of my newer iTunes playlists are missing songs in Roon. These are songs that I can see and play in Roon when I navigate to them, but they do not show up in the playlist. However, if I go to iTunes and rename the playlist, then name it back to what it was, all the songs will suddenly appear in Roon. Presto!
I hoped that would be the end of it, but I often have to close Roon on my PC (my Roon server) and restart it in order to use the Displays function. (It's a whole other story.) When this happens and I reopen Roon, the iTunes playlists are missing the songs again! They were all just there moments ago, but the act of restarting the Roon software makes Roon somehow "forget" them. So then I go into iTunes, rename the playlist, name it back, and presto again they're all there.
Obviously I found a workaround to the initial problem, but I would love to not have to go through this rigamarole (renaming playlists in iTunes) every time I use Roon. Any ideas?
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Your logs explain all of this, including why the renaming trick works and why restarting undoes it. And you can stop doing the renaming.
You have two iTunes library files in D:\Music\iTunes</code>:
iTunes Library.xml
iTunes Music Library.xml
Roon reads both, and it reads iTunes Library.xml first. The problem is that this file is stale. Internally it is dated 25 July 2023, nearly three years old, while the other one is the file iTunes actually keeps up to date.
Both files carry the same iTunes library identifier, so Roon treats them as one library and uses the newer of the two. Once it has read the current file, it correctly ignores the old one, and you can see it saying so:
[itunes] file is older than cached file, ignoring
But when Roon Server starts fresh, it has nothing to compare against yet, so the 2023 file is read first and accepted, and its three year old playlists are what get written. That is exactly your symptom: restart Roon, and the newer songs are gone.
It also explains your workaround. Renaming a playlist in iTunes makes iTunes rewrite the current file with a new timestamp, that file then clearly wins, and the songs reappear. Restart Roon and the race starts over.
The fix is to get rid of the stale file. Please do this:
Quit Roon Server on the PC.
Go to D:\Music\iTunes</code> and find iTunes Library.xml.
Move it somewhere outside your watched folders, for example to your Desktop. Please move rather than delete, so it can be put back if needed. Leave iTunes Music Library.xml exactly where it is, since that is the one iTunes maintains.
Start Roon Server again.
In Roon, go to Settings, then Storage, click the three dots beside your music folder and choose Force Rescan.
After that there is only one iTunes file for Roon to read, nothing stale can win, and your playlists should survive restarts without any renaming.
Please let us know how it goes. If the songs still drop out after a restart, tell us and we will look again, because that would mean something else is also involved.
One small unrelated thing while we were in there: four files are unreadable and are being skipped, so you will find them under Settings, then Library, then Skipped Files. They are a partially downloaded podcast in a .tmp folder, plus tracks from Grandaddy’s Sumday, The Good The Bad & The Queen, and The Polyphonic Spree. Worth re-ripping or re-downloading those three when convenient.