When does Roon refresh Smart Playlists?

Roon Software Discussion
1

I have several smart playlists in Roon that are time-based. I.e. using focus filters “Added in the last…” and “Not Played in the Last…”. I’m noticing that the number of tracks in these playlists aren’t always updated to reflect the correct values.

An example is the playlist in this screenshot. Supposedly there are 429 tracks that were added in the last 3 months, but not played in the last month. However, when clicking Edit Focus, that number drops significantly, to 116.

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Even when clicking Save in Edit Focus, the number of tracks on the Smart Playlist is not updated. I actually have to make a change to the filter and revert it, then click save before it will update.

I can understand that for efficiency reasons, Roon would not continuously update every single Smart Playlist with every track that is played, but it does seem that the current way of handling it is far from optimal.

Does anyone know how/when Roon refreshes the Smart Playlists?
Does anyone have similar experiences?

ADDITIONAL UPDATE:
While I was writing this post, I had Roon playing music. Coincidentally, one (or more?) of the tracks from the Smart Playlist was played. When looking at the track counts now, it has gone down, in both places. It went down from 429 to 428 on the actual playlist, and down from 116 to 115 in Edit Track Focus. :thinking:

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2

Funny you should mention this. Just this morning I noticed a pretty long lag in updating a SP for the first time. I wonder if SPs involve their cloud servers for some weird reason?

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3

People moaned on day one about sluggish performance with SPL’s didn’t they. Not sure why it would call home it’s a focus in the end of the day.

4

I wonder if the sluggishness could have to do with streaming services? I don’t have any right now and have not seen any lag, yet…

5

I have none either.

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7

I do have Qobuz, but only for discovery of new music. If I like something, I buy it . All albums/tracks in my library are from local storage. So in my case, this should not be a contributing factor to the lag.

8

I am getting a real lag when tagging a playlist and having a smart playlist where that shows tracks with that tag

9

That is indeed also quite unpredictable.

I have a setup in which I have multiple SPL’s which I have tagged. I then have a master SPL with a focus on those tags. I’ve noticed that after a restart of the Roon server, the master SPL often only contains tracks from one of the child SPL’s.

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10

I have exactly the same problem!

11

Ok this is getting interesting. I predominantly use imported m3u playlists that I create using Synology Audio Station. I also have “Show playlist links” turned on in my settings. Whenever I restart Roon, which is only for updates, all of the playlist links disappear. I have to run a multi-file search and replace on the m3u playlists to modify their content in a harmless way, perform a force rescan, run another search and replace, and a second force rescan. Then all my playlist links show again until I whenever I update and reboot again.

My use of imported playlists with playlist links is such a fringe use case that I stopped bugging Roon support about this long ago, once I found the above solution. But what it points to is something about playlist processing integrity that gets messed up during reboots, somewhere…

12

Interesting observation.
SP that picks up any track or playlist tagged as Christmas shows as 172 tracks, even though it should be much more.

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However, if I go into “Edit Focus” it shows 441 tracks.
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13

You guys are putting 60k tracks in a playlist??? Jeeze.

For my system, what could be described as ‘smart playlists’ are built with filters that get translated to Lucene queries, I cap them at ~25k and use some ranking to pick those 25k from the various results of the individual queries (including optionally filtering out recently played stuff). There’s a way to go to the results of a specific query, that isn’t capped and provides the entire result set.
I found that to be a smarter option personally.

14

it eventually updated correctly. just a loooong while

15

It sometimes takes days before my smart playlists are updated. Sometimes, the only way to update them is by tapping the ‘edit focus’ button of the SPL. Just by doing this, the playlists are updated immediately.

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16

I have some SP with time-relation (e.g. added last day). My assumption is, that the next day this SP will be empty at the next day, but it isn’t. Even after “force rescan” or "“edit focus” button the SP will not be refreshed.
(Server is a ROCK).

Any ideas wath is wrong there?

17

Yesterday’s update didn’t fix this problem. I still have to open the focus editor to update a smart playlist. Smart playlists aren’t really useful this way.

18

Thank you for opening this discussion. I’ve been noticing the same issue lately.

At this point, Smart Playlists feel almost impractical. For a platform as powerful and stable as Roon—a music database and library management tool—it’s frustrating to have to manually tweak and save each Smart Playlist to force an update. This seems like an oversight in functionality, especially for users relying on dynamic, time-based filters.

I sincerely hope Roon addresses this soon, as it undermines what could otherwise be an incredibly useful feature.

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19

Have you tried a scheduled restart of Roon server to see if the Smart playlists update at startup?

Over the years I’ve found restarts mitigate many niggling issues…but I don’t or haven’t yet used Smart playlists.

20

My Roon Server resides on a Sonictransporter machine. This doesn’t have this functionality.
I rely on smart playlists that have time-based parameters when I am away from home for a couple of days. But because of the lack of updating, these playlists are not very useful.

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21

I don’t have to manually update the smart playlists- they automatically update, I believe the trigger is when I start or open them.