Can't get playlist imports to work
Hi, new user here. I very recently discovered Astiga when looking for something to replace Apple Music, which seems to keep losing some of my playlists for no reason (and I'm just generally fed up with the Apple "ecosystem", where everything is opaque/proprietary).
My needs are pretty basic, just something that can play music from Google Drive, work with Sonos, and import/sync playlists (I don't want any external service to manage them). It looks like Astiga is the best (maybe only?) option for this, so I'm hoping I can get it to work. I had planned to test it out during the trial period, but since playlist imports are not allowed I ended up going straight to premium (as a suggestion, allowing a limited number of playlist imports (even just 1) during the trial would be helpful).
First issue I've run into: so far I haven't managed to successfully get an imported playlist to fully work. I have a couple right now (M3U and M3U8 modified to use relative paths), which when imported show only filenames and say "This playlist contains files that have not been synced. This means their artwork, titles, artist names and more cannot be shown. To fix this: Synchronise your library". After the next sync runs (either manually, or as part of the hourly sync), it's unchanged.
But, then it sort of works? The page says "Currently they also cannot be played individually from this page.", but that doesn't appear to be true... if I click on any of the filenames they start playing, despite still having the yellow "Unsynced" next to them and showing nothing but the filename.
Second issue: when I did the initial setup, the one playlist I had in the Library at the time was imported, but newer ones I added aren't automatically imported (and existing ones aren't updated) when a sync runs, I have to go to Bulk-Import Playlists. Is this expected?
Suggestion: If playlist changes aren't picked up with a sync, it'd be nice to have an easier/quicker way than using Bulk-Import (which takes a while). Maybe restricting to a specific directory to search for playlists, rather than the whole Library? Or maybe a way to import from the Storage location? I can navigate to the playlist and add its contents to the play queue, but I can't import it from the M3U file directly.
Let me know if there's any more info that would be helpful, or anything else you'd like me to try... happy to be a guinea pig if something I'm doing isn't an expected use case.
Comments
The page says "Currently they also cannot be played individually from this page.", but that doesn't appear to be true... if I click on any of the filenames they start playing, despite still having the yellow "Unsynced" next to them and showing nothing but the filename.
Thanks, I removed this (will be in the next build).
This means their artwork, titles, artist names and more cannot be shown.
Looks like there's a small bug here. When we imported your paths, we added a root slash at the start of the path. This makes it not match the library entry.
I changed your data, removing the slash. Can you see the tags and cover art now?
Second issue: when I did the initial setup, the one playlist I had in the Library at the time was imported, but newer ones I added aren't automatically imported (and existing ones aren't updated) when a sync runs, I have to go to Bulk-Import Playlists. Is this expected?
I'm not sure what you mean by this - sync doesn't import playlists. You can add them to the play queue and save them as playlists (click the disk icon at the top of the play queue), but I don't think playlists are created in /playlists/.
I think directly adding playlists would be best, from the storage browser. And also we could add playlists during sync.
Looks like there's a small bug here. When we imported your paths, we added a root slash at the start of the path. This makes it not match the library entry.
Yeah, I had noticed that... was there something wrong/unexpected with the source files, or anything i can do to fix new playlists?
I changed your data, removing the slash. Can you see the tags and cover art now?
Yeah, looks good now. There are a couple of files that don't work (in either the M3U or the M3U8 playlist) due to encoding issues from certain characters, but that may be a problem with the playlist files themselves.
I'm not sure what you mean by this - sync doesn't import playlists.
Hmm, maybe I'm mistaken, I thought I had a playlist after the initial sync. But this was after deleting / re-adding the Google Drive storage, so maybe the playlist was just still there.
I think directly adding playlists would be best, from the storage browser. And also we could add playlists during sync.
Direct adding/updating from storage would be great.
Not sure if it's a feature you'd consider (or is feasible), but it'd be awesome for playlists to be automatically updated during sync... my goal is to have those playlist files be the canonical source, and just import them into whatever player(s) I use, so they can change regularly.
Thanks for the quick answers!
This is a bug on our side, your playlist is fine.
Yeah, better playlist maintenance is a thing on my mind for a while now.