Importing iTunes Playlists

[GreyBat 0]

Hi. I'm new to Emby, currently trying to evaluate it in contrast to (the evil and over-complicated!) Plex. I have a problem with the "philosophy" behind the importing of music playlists, notably from iTunes, where all my music library is managed.

 

I dutifully exported into m3u format all the playlists that I wanted to bring into Emby, and stored them in my music/playlists folder. Emby found them and tried to import them. Unfortunately, it failed completely to import anything from several classical music playlists, and then I also found many entries in contemporary music playlists were also missing. A little further investigation revealed what I think the problem is.....

 

It appears that Emby tries to validate each #EXTINF entry against an external database (e.g. Musicbrainz) and, if it doesn't find it, it drops the entry completely. An example of this would be the album Raising Sand, by Alison Krauss and Richard Plant. In my library, the tracks in this album are tagged with Artist and Album Artist as "Alison Krauss & Richard Plant". However, in Musicbrainz (and Discogs) the artists are identified as "Richard Plant & Alison Krauss". When Emby imported the playlists containing this album, all tracks of the album were dropped. When I re-tagged the album (in Tagscanner), and re-imported the playlist, they were accepted.

 

For my classical collection, I have chosen to separate concertos and symphonies (actually, anything with multiple movements, creating a single work) into separate albums, so that I can use "shuffle by album" to keep works together. I also have tagged the classical track titles my own way. Since neither the album names nor titles exist on MusicBrainz, none of the entries in the m3u files were imported.

 

While my music library does not strictly conform to iTunes standard (i.e., not all music is in the iTunes folder), it is all named according to what I understand Emby's standard to be, i.e. Album Artist/Artist/TrackName, where Trackname begins with a 2 digit track number (01, 02, 03 etc.) I have spend many hours tagging each track using Tagscanner, and all tracks have embedded artwork as well as all the common tags. All albums (AFAIK) have been correctly imported into Emby (although a few seem to have the wrong artwork associated with them in the Albums display), even though the tracks would not necessarily be found in Musicbrainz etc. I have found that I can also rebuild my playlists within Emby, although it is a laborious process, requiring each missing album to be "Added to Playlist" individually.

 

So, I am left to wonder why Emby is so picky when it comes to importing the m3u files. I'm no expert in the intricacies of m3u descriptors, but those exported from iTunes don't appear particularly complicated - a bunch of 2 line #EXTINF tags is all!. Surely, it should be sufficient to validate that the file as named in the #EXTINF entry exists in the absolute or relative location indicated. Shouldn't it? If it has valid embedded tag info, use it first instead of Musicbrainz. If not, leave it out! 

 

One final point: I have read in other posts in this forum that Emby is looking at supporting more directly importing and updating directly from iTunes. IMHO, if this is indeed developed in the future, the source of the playlists should be taken from the appropriate xml files in the ITunes folder within the music library. This is where the most up to date playlist information is found, and it would avoid the need to export iTunes playlists to m3u files, and it would allow Emby to respond immediately to changes in iTunes playlists. It is also where syncing apps such as iSyncr get their information, and always, in my experience, do an excellent job of synchronizing my iTunes library with my android music players and keeping the information in both up to date.

 

Thanks for taking the time to read my semi-rant!

[Luke 37251]

HI there, can you give an example of a playlist? Thanks !

[GreyBat 0]

Here's one (copied with changed extension because forum won't let me send an m3u file!). It's all classical - none of it imports into Emby.Naxos - Copy.m3u.txt

 

Plenty more where that came from!

 

(BTW - Thanks for quick reply!)

[Luke 37251]

and what music libraries have you setup in Emby, and pointing to what folders?

[GreyBat 0]

One music library: M:\My music, containing only mp3 files (and the odd cover art jpg, even though virtually all mp3's have embedded art.). As I mentioned earlier, all music conforms to m:\my music\albumartist\album\tracknumber title.mp3.

 

Some other general anomalies I came across yesterday whilst trying to match an iTunes playlist to what Emby imported:

 

- When I tagged my music, in most cases, I tagged artists that began with "the" (e.g., The Beatles) without the leading "the", resulting in artists like Beatles, Doors, Byrds, Rolling Stones etc. (The one exception was "The Band" for what I hope are obvious reasons!) Emby failed to import any of these entries.

 

- Emby also did not import entries for Elton Juhn's album, Honky Chateau. I suspect, but cannot be sure, that this may be because of a missing accent over the "a".

 

- Various other albums did not import for reasons I cannot clearly explain. Some appeared too new, perhaps, such as Paul Simon's Surprise. (If I use Tagscanner to search in Musicbrainz for this album, it does not find it in the first 25 hits.) Some may simply be too obscure to be in Muscibrainz database.

 

The point of all this is to re-iterate that I don't think Emby should reject entries in m3u files, simply because they cannot be matched in whatever online database is being used to verify them. The files to which they point should still be assumed to be valid music files that can be played without reference to an external db. (iTunes manages this just fine, and even Emby plays the tracks just fine, if they are played from their associated album!) The same may not be true of video files - I don't know that. It's entirely possible that you need metadata from other sources to be able to handle them properly. But that is not necessarily true of most music files, particularly if they have embedded tags, or cover art can be found in the containing folders.

 

BTW, I believe that Plex handles music files in a similar way, although, for my classical playlists, it did not even create empty playlists. I decided to take the matter up with you guys because it is clear that I am much more likely to get a direct response, that I ever would be from Plex. For that, I am extremely thankful!

[Luke 37251]

What version of Emby Server?

[GreyBat 0]

3.5.3.0 (from Dashboard)

[GreyBat 0]

Now on server beta (3.6.0.86) due to problems with playing imported playlists on Roku. I think these threads are connected!

 

https://emby.media/community/index.php?/topic/67154-music-playlists-wont-play-on-roku-tv/

[Luke 37251]

And everything is normal in the web app?

[GreyBat 0]

Everything is unchanged as far as this thread is concerned

[Luke 37251]

 

 

It appears that Emby tries to validate each #EXTINF entry against an external database (e.g. Musicbrainz) and, if it doesn't find it, it drops the entry completely. 

 

This is not true. What we do is validate the playlist against your emby library. At this time, you can only import playlist contents that are also in your emby library using the exact same path.

[GreyBat 0]

This is not true. What we do is validate the playlist against your emby library. At this time, you can only import playlist contents that are also in your emby library using the exact same path.

I was sure I posted an explanation for this yesterday. Doesn't seem to have appeared......

 

The problem with missing entries in my playlists turned out to be due to the drive letter in the m3u files exported from iTunes. Some paths in the m3u file had the drive letter capitalized, and some did not. I believe that the entries with a lower case "m:" as the drive letter did not "exactly" match the path in the emby database, and were thus ignored. When I manually edited the m3u file to capitalize the "M:" in all paths, all entries were imported correctly into the emby playlist.

 

IMHO, I think emby should be a bit more flexible with respect to matching the case of the drive letter when importing m3u files (at least from Windows). After discovering the cause of this yesterday, I made some efforts to change my iTunes database so that all entries reflected the path to their location with a capitalized drive letter. It didn't work! A re-exported playlist still had some "m:" drive letters and some "M:". So I would think that will be a problem for others. I would think it should be easier for emby to accommodate this than to persuade iTunes to change!

 

Thanks again for your attention to this problem.

[Luke 37251]

Thanks for the feedback.