Hello!
I was happy to learn what relative paths in playlists mean: That I would be able to share the playlists between windows and linux.
I had to learn that there seems to be no option in Amarok (2.4.0) to save palylists that way per default.
I have organized all my tracks in simple xspf-playlists. When I convert it to e.g. m3u and drag another track I would like to have in that list into it, the following happens:
Instead of adding that track to the m3u playlist, using relative pathnames, a new xpsf playlist with the same name as the m3u one is created, using absolute pathnames again
I hop I could make my problem clear. What I would like to see, is an option to make relative pathnames the default.
Maybe it is possible already but I oversee it.
Please help me to find a solution in sharing my playlists with Windows.
Regards, Marcus

https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=264147

It's simply not implemented. I was under the assumption the XSPF forbids relative paths. Probably because winamp doesn't either so it's become common practice.

Hm well, I am not fixated to XSPF. For me it can be any format which accomplishes this task. Maybe there should be just an option in the settings dialogue to select preferred type. Please

When you export a playlist the dialog has the option to use relative paths.
For the use case of sharing playlists that seems sufficient.

Well, it is very uneasy to export my playlist every time I have to boot to windows
If it would be possible to preselect the favorite style, I could just save all my playlists to a shared folder and let every OS/program use it...
So for me this would be a real big deal in usability, or can this be automated anyhow?
Regards, Marcus

Martux wrote:Well, it is very uneasy to export my playlist every time I have to boot to windows
So for me this would be a real big deal in usability, or can this be automated anyhow?
Regards, Marcus

The saved playlists using files (i.e. not database) is sort of a dangling feature: it's not really supposed to be used to save to, just a way to show the playlists found in collection folders, and even that is a bit iffy. At best it's used by people who don't trust the database remains intact over long periods, such as developers and testers that tend to lose the database sometimes.

Your use case working depends on a lot of factors. Here is what can go wrong: Amarok saves the files in $KDEHOME/share/apps/amarok/playlists meaning the relative paths would be from that folder. If this is not on the same partition it won't work on windows.
The separator issue ( \ vs. / ) will also break things.

But even tough your use case is not very common and might not work because of other, non-amarok, factors and option to always use relative paths should be possible providing I make the playlist storage folder configurable.

Stecchino:
You are right, I absolutely mistrust the build in database. One of many reasons was, that when the switch from Amarok-1.4 to 2.x happened, it was totally borked for me. I have a rather huge collection and by using playlists, I can use categories as "Techno", Metal... An easy and clean way to keep track of my favorite songs. I am doing this for a very long time and it works pretty good. I linked the $KDEHOME/share/apps/amarok/playlists folder to a subdirectory of my music, eg: Music/playlists. All other music is in another subfolder of "music". So I really didn't thought I could get any problems with this.
Interesting is that you mentioned the "/-es " in the playlists. I also thought windows would hate them, but it doesn't. I tried it with Clementine 0.6 and when I changed the users path in the playlist (/home/bla to c:\users\bla)... it worked to my surprise
Well, if I could be helpful with testing anything related to playlist stuff, just give me a hint. I would really love to see an oprtion to make the paths relative or more customizable. Regards, Marcus

Well, with the playlists again. Amarok has one most annoying behavior:
Everytime it "thinks" the collection has changed (for example some folders were moved to another location and then back), IT DELETES MY PLAYLISTS
Man, I was moving them away from $KDEHOME/share/apps/amarok/playlists to exactly prevent that and it still happens. Without warning. Could you please at least implement a backup of the deleted file (like kate does)?.
And since 2.4.0 another disturbance added: When I click on "save on local disk" nothing even happens, there is no playlist generated at all.
I mean it is all about choice, right? And when I "save" a playlist, I am not expecting any program to delete it for me again and again...

Martux wrote:Well, with the playlists again. Amarok has one most annoying behavior:
Everytime it "thinks" the collection has changed (for example some folders were moved to another location and then back), IT DELETES MY PLAYLISTS
Man, I was moving them away from $KDEHOME/share/apps/amarok/playlists to exactly prevent that and it still happens. Without warning. Could you please at least implement a backup of the deleted file (like kate does)?.

Please elaborate. Are any files deleted or did you just move them out of the folder and they did not show up in amarok an longer?

Martux wrote:And since 2.4.0 another disturbance added: When I click on "save on local disk" nothing even happens, there is no playlist generated at all.
I mean it is all about choice, right? And when I "save" a playlist, I am not expecting any program to delete it for me again and again...

That is a bug that is only visual. The playlist is really saved, but for some reason not added to the view. Toggle the merged view twice and you should see the new playlist.
Sorry for the oversight, I'll fix it by 4.4.1.

Hi!
Well, I moved a lot of folders out of the monitored directory. Then I moved them back in. I guess because of timestamp change, Amarok "cleaned out" one of my playlists too It would be great to do a versioning and copy that list to a backup file eg "playlist.xspf~".
For the visual bug you are right, it works
Well, am I right that amarok is altering user saved playlists on its own?
Thanks for the hassle!

Martux wrote:Hi!
Well, I moved a lot of folders out of the monitored directory. Then I moved them back in. I guess because of timestamp change, Amarok "cleaned out" one of my playlists too It would be great to do a versioning and copy that list to a backup file eg "playlist.xspf~".
For the visual bug you are right, it works
Well, am I right that amarok is altering user saved playlists on its own?
Thanks for the hassle!

My guess is you ended up with empty playlists in Amarok (usually happens because they were not in the collection at the time of loading) and when closing Amarok the empty playlist was written to disk. So the file ended up empty.
This should not happen obviously and possible points to problems with the collection or collectionscanner. This is also not specific to playlist-files either, the ones in the database have the same problem.

A fix for the empty playlist problems is in the works. Rather then not showing any track it will display them, but marked as unplayable. It's a rather invasive change to all of amarok's parts so it will be a while before that is done.

Yes, that is exactly what happened. Good to hear that you are already working on that... It can make using playlist a bit tricky sometimes. Good to have a backup then