Four of my eleven music playlists wiped out

[Aldursil 15]

I'm having a very similar issue where I had four playlists out of eleven turn up empty. I went to the .m3u file and they were empty also, I tried copying a backup of the playlist file back to the playlist directory but that did not help either. I created the playlists in Emby 4.8.9 and in 4.8.10 several are now empty.

Edited October 5, 2024 by Aldursil

[Aldursil 15]

I'm having an issue where I noticed I have four playlists that are now empty. I created all the playlists on version 4.8.9 and the files were ok as of 10/2/2024. At some point the contents of the four playlist files was wiped out and there is now nothing in them, What is the best way to get these playlists working again? I did try copying a backup playlist to the userplaylists directory and then changing the directory permissions to emby:myuser and made sure the playlist file permissions were 775 but that also did not bring the playlist back. 

I searched in the emby server logs and did not see anything obvious as to what happened.

Hardware: Rasberry Pi 5

Emby Version: 4.8.10 

Edited October 7, 2024 by Aldursil

[Happy2Play 9780]

Userplaylists directory will always be issue as there is a database factor with the usershares table.

That being said you can only manually manipulate the m3u files that exist in the folder you can not add file to that folder.

But really the only way playlist should go empty is if the media is no longer in the same location the m3u says it is or the content is no longer in Emby.

We would need specific example here.

[Aldursil 15]

Should I be using something else for a music playlist then? I don't want to put a lot of time into creating playlists to have them wiped out and not be able to recover them. The data is still there. The only thing I have been doing is updating the tag data but I don't think that would cause this issue. Do you have something I can search for in the logs which may point to what happened?

[Happy2Play 9780]

Honestly can't say as I have never had a issue with Emby created playlist unless I purposely move media that breaks the playlist as it is now where the playlist thinks it is and nukes the list.

May have to look at editing embedded tags but don't see how that would affect anything as unless you are editing track titles or filenames.

You should check your server logs for references to your playlist name but not sure if debug logging is required or not.

[Aldursil 15]

Are the userplaylist file not used for the playlist? I created a new playlist to get it to show up again in Emby under Playlists and added one music file to it. Then I copied the contents of my backup playlist for the same artist into the newly created file but none of the copied m3u data shows up in the playlist and the original one track I added to create the playlist still shows up. I also rebooted and that did not help either.

[Luke 42077]

hi, did the media files disappear? that is usually why that would happen.

[Aldursil 15]

1 minute ago, Luke said:

hi, did the media files disappear? that is usually why that would happen.

No, I can still  play them from the album. How do I get the backed up playlist files to work again?

[Happy2Play 9780]

Only way I can think of is if you have the backup and restore plugin configured and you have do a full restore to a db that it previously worked in.  Just not this will play havoc on watched statuses and may have to do more than one restore or extract user data from last backup.

As there is really no way to straight up restore a previous playlist without all the other linked info.

I know I can copy and paste info into an exiting m3u within userplaylists as even that empty file is already linked in the database tables properly.

[Happy2Play 9780]

Also if you can not just put the playlist into the playlists folder then there must be something wrong witht the m3u files them selves.

[Luke 42077]

@Aldursilhas this helped?

[Aldursil 15]

No, I just re-created the ones that got wiped out. I hope this does not happen in the future but I am making more backups as I make changes to my Emby install. I wish I could point to a specfic action that I did to make this occur as then maybe it could be fixed as a bug if it was reproducable.

[Luke 42077]

OK thanks for the update. We’ll try to chase down the cause.