Traktor Pro 3 (Plus / 3.11.1 17) - Playlists (partially) empty - cause and fix (windows | mac??)

Ralf_muc

A wonderful good morning everybody out there! :-)

Yesterday I was hitting this awful problem with my beloved Traktor which dosen't want to save some tracks in playlists but saves some ... huh?!

Clicking "Save Collection" didn't change a thing :-(

I investigated that problem and found that all tracks from Beatport streaming were in the playlist, but my local files were missing .... I would have expected it the other way round .... strange.

For testing purposes, I copied a file directly on c: - and it was saved in the playlist! :-)

My music is stored on a local drive named "d:" - and all those file are not "stored" in the playlist - or are they???

When I exported a playlist with the same file in c: and d:, both files were in the exported file.

But a closer look revealed some differences in the data:

The (good) entry with the file on c: looks like this:

[...] <LOCATION DIR="/:Users/:someusername/:" FILE="somefilename.mp3" VOLUME="C:" VOLUMEID="xxxxxxxx"></LOCATION>

The (bad) entry with the file on d: looks like this:

<LOCATION DIR="/:d:/:Users/:someusername/:" FILE="somefilename.mp3" VOLUME="" VOLUMEID=""></LOCATION>

.... well .... :-)

And at the end of the file we find a list with the tracks in <PRIMARYKE>-Tags

Those also seem to be a bit different:

File from c: (good)

<PRIMARYKEY TYPE="TRACK" KEY="C:/:Users/:someusername/:somefilename.mp3"></PRIMARYKEY>

File from d: (bad)

PRIMARYKEY TYPE="TRACK" KEY="/:d:/:Users/:someusername/:somefilename.mp3"></PRIMARYKEY>

After correcting those parts, the Tracks were shown in the playlists again! YEAH! :-)

So, finally, here is how to fix THIS issue (you might have a different one) until NI implements a fix:

- export your playlist

- open the exported playlist with an (advanced) editor (e.g. notepad++)

- delete that "/:d:"-part (your drive-letter may differ) in the LOCATION-Tag as shown above example

- put your drive letter with colon between the double quotes after the VOLUME-parameter as shown above in the good-entry example

- add the Volume-ID between the double quotes after the VOLUMEID-parameter as shown above in the good-entry example - to get the volume-id open cmd and type (without quotes) "vol id d:" (your drive-letter may differ) NOTE: remove the dash :-)

- at the end of the file you might have to correct the drive-letter-value within each/some PRIMARYKEY-tag(s) as shown above (remove the "/:" before the drive-letter)

- import the corrected playlist

This fix only seems to work with new Playlists that were created and exported before Traktor was closed.

After closing, re-opening Traktor and only then exporting the playlist, the exported playlist was missing all the entries of the files that weren't on Beatport or c: :-(

So, this fix only seems to apply to "new" playlists which were exported before Traktor was closed.

Maybe you're lucky with older playlists.

Also that corrected path-information seems to be stored in Traktor per file. Once I corrected that wrong entries, that files could be stored in the playlists again without exporting, correcting and re-importing the playlists again.

So there seems to be a problem when Traktor imports new files into it's database that are stored on a local drive which isn't c: ?!

After importing that corrected playlist, Traktor was writing a lot of Tags.

After that, I could put all the tracks which are stored on d-drive to any playlist and they were saved! YEAH! :-)

I think that manual correction has to be done for each newly imported track (until NI fixes this issue) :-)

I fixed that issue by putting all files from D:-drive into a playlist, exported it, corrected it manually and imported the playlist.

For the correction I used the find & replace function of the editor (notepad++, but it also should work with windows-editor):

- find and replace: <LOCATION DIR="/:d: by <LOCATION DIR=" (your drive-letter may differ)

- find and replace: VOLUME="" by VOLUME="d:" (your drive-letter may differ)

- find and replace: VOLUMEID="" by VOLUMEID="xxxxxxxx" (your volume-id may differ :-)

- find and replace: <PRIMARYKEY TYPE="TRACK" KEY="/: by <PRIMARYKEY TYPE="TRACK" KEY="

Hope I could help you - please let me know if it fixed your problem :-)

Best,

Ralf

Ralf_muc

Just noticed: All corrected Tracks have now the import date of today .... for me a minor thing compared to the playlist-issue - but it might help tracing the issue :-)