Playlists not synced [#11421]

[mcow]

I checked MMW's Media Sharing settings and found that under the 'MediaMonkey Library' DLNA server's Shared Content settings the playlists were unchecked.... Consequently the playlists were not available to MMA.

When I first noticed that MMA's sync options did not display unshared playlists as candidates for sync, I thought it was a bug, but I've since decided that's a good approach. However, I think that unshared playlists that have been selected for sync from MMW should still be displayed in MMA's options to allow them to be removed from the sync.

I did some further testing on this by selecting items in the Shared Content list and creating new playlists. If all existing playlists are checked in Shared Content when a new playlist is created then the new playlist will be shared. If one or more playlists is not selected when a new playlist is created then the new playlist will not be shared. I had unchecked a playlist a few weeks ago and that has been the cause of the problem.

That's interesting.

I'm not sure whether this should be considered a bug or not. If the user is being selective about which playlists are shared then it is correct not to automatically share new playlists. My case is the opposite; I had selected one playlist to exclude from sharing and had expected new content to be shared automatically.

The potential drawback to not automatically sharing a new playlist sync'd from MMA (which is now automatically added to the sync list) is that some other DLNA client would see that playlist. If that level of fine-grained security is needed ("I don't want my ten-year-old to hear my Cheech & Chong tracks"), I think a better approach overall is to have two servers, one that the "approved" MMA client uses, and blocking other clients, and another server that is more public, with fewer items exposed for sharing.

[rivorson]

For me it isn't a security issue. I have some playlists that exist purely for administrative purposes. The playlist I removed from sharing was an autoplaylist with videos that were added more than one day ago, and I use it to apply my auto-organisation rules on miscellaneous videos so that TV shows that I add aren't automatically moved to the wrong NAS drive before I can tag them. There's no reason to show this list on the DLNA server so I deselected it.

I do agree that setting up multiple DLNA servers would be the right way to go for multiple users, but I'm the only person using my MM server. The rest of my family uses the server built in to my NAS drive because it doesn't require my computer to be on.


I am interested to know what could be causing your problem. Do you have any other apps that could be reading the playlists on the phone?

[rusty]

fyi, this should be fixed as described at http://www.ventismedia.com/mantis/view.php?id=11421 in the next build of MMW (to be posted later this week).

Another possible cause of this type of issue is if multiple profiles exist for a device, one profile being used for Wi-Fi sync, and another used for USB sync. This anomaly can occur for some devices (that don't report a serial # in Android) when upgrading from a version of MMW 4.0 that has synced with the device, and performing a Wi-Fi sync with MMW 4.1 before first syncing via USB (MMA provides warnings about this scenario when initially syncing, so hopefully it'll rarely occur).

-Rusty

[mcow]

I think that unshared playlists that have been selected for sync from MMW should still be displayed in MMA's options to allow them to be removed from the sync.

And so it is now.