Issues managing playlists in GNOME Music

[ivarhill]

I have a local music library (fairly small at ~2000 tracks) for which I have recently found GNOME Music to be a great application to use. However, I am having a few issues with it:

• Not a critical issue, but often when I add new files to my music directory, GNOME Music doesn’t recognize those files added until much later. Other times it updates instantly, so not sure exactly what is going on there. Mentioning this mostly just in case it’s related to the other issues below!
• More importantly, playlists do not seem to work properly or behave as expected:
  • I can create a new playlist, and this does show up in the list of playlists.
  • I can add songs to this playlist - however, no matter what, the playlist shows as empty.
  • Sometimes after restarting the app, these broken playlists also have a generic “no name” sort of label rather than their actual name. I’ll update this post with the exact wording the next time I can reproduce it.

I assume these issues are tracker-related, though I have little knowledge of tracker so I haven’t been able to look at this more in-depth. I did try clearing out the tracker cache, but this does not seem to have made a difference.

Curiously I think this used to work, either back in Fedora 39 or simply for unrelated reasons, as I recall using GNOME Music a bit some half year back and adding/managing playlists seemed to work fine at the time.

I should also mention that my music library is on a separate internal drive, though the XDG directory location does reflect this and there’s also a symlink at ~/Music as a fallback.

For reference I’m on Fedora Silverblue 40 on Wayland. I haven’t noticed anything particular in the logs as I try to make a playlist or add songs to it, though I might not be looking in the right places.

Does anyone have any thoughts as to what might be the issue here? I have attached a few screenshots below:

No playlists added. Looks as expected.

Attempting to make a new playlist. So far working.

Naming and creating the new playlist, still good.

Going back to Playlists, the playlist itself shows up but it does not have the added song.

Going back to try to add more songs, the playlist shows up here too, but actually pressing Add does nothing and the playlist remains empty regardless of what I do. I can keep adding more playlists but they all stay empty.

[Takanu]

I’ve just started using GNOME Music in the same manner (reassigned the Music XDG directory to a secondary internal drive that’s mounted at startup using Disks options) and I have very similar problems.

• I can create a playlist, but can’t add anything to it.
• Sometimes creating a playlist results in a “NO URL” name for the Playlist instead.

I’m using Fedora 40 Workstation, I don’t know what the issue is though given the lack of a dedicated Playlists metadata folder or import/export I’m not exactly planning on using Playlists in a big way.

[ivarhill]

I can reproduce the “NO URL” issue as well, for what it’s worth. Still having this same issue on my end, though maybe in my particular use case it might make sense to use a more playlist-oriented music player to begin with. Still, I do like the relative simplicity of GNOME Music so it’d be good to figure this out!

[sthursfield (Sam Thursfield)]

This could be Can't add songs to playlists (#618) · Issues · GNOME / gnome-music · GitLab ?

[garnacho (Carlos Garnacho)]

It does indeed sound like that issue, and FWIW it should be fixed now with core: Avoid flush prevention on INSERT OR REPLACE {} WHERE {} (!690) · Merge requests · GNOME / TinySPARQL · GitLab .

[ivarhill]

Fantastic to hear! Looking forward to receiving the update