Traktor Pro 3 (Plus / 3.11.1 17) - Playlists (partially) empty (correct category?)

Ralf_muc

Hello everybody :-)

Last night I investigated that problem and found a trace to the root of the problem and how to fix that.

But I'm not sure if it's in the right category nor if anyone else experiences that problem?

https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/28833/traktor-pro-3-plus-3-11-1-17-playlists-partially-empty-cause-and-fix-windows-mac

Does anyone expirence the same issue? :-)

Best,

Ralf

wayfinder

I have not experienced that problem myself so far.

It sounds like there is perhaps a reference to a removed and unavailable disk there? Was your D: drive connected when you exported the playlists? Does the drive use a compatible file system?

Or perhaps the entry of the location in your preferences is written in a way that windows can follow it but some functions of traktor cannot (for example, I noticed that C is a capital letter, and d is lower case - could it be that Traktor always wants an upper case drive letter?). Can you show us a screenshot of your settings in Preferences File Management Music Folders?

Ralf_muc

Hi Wayfinder :-)

Thanks for your replay :-)

To answer your questions first:

• The disk is a M2-SSD securely screwed into the slot (and properly cooled) :-)
• The D:-drive-letter was assigned shortly after Windows installation. It wasn't alterd ever since (like 9-12 months) and Traktor was only installed a few days later
• The drive is formatted in NTFS and was formatted by Windows
• The upper- and lower-case differences are caused by me typing the protocol while investigating and testing. In my summary I did not write every step I made because it would be much too long and confusing
• Screenshot: there's not much to see. I maintin the collection manually to avoid changes that I'm not aware of. I don't use search-folders that could alter my collection automatically. I REALLY import each single file by hand (by dragging the files into the collection) and check if the analysis was done correcty and the meta-information is correct and so on.

One thing I didn't mention yet: The path-variables in the collection are shown correctly.

.... and of course: the tracks can be played without any issue. So the location must be stored correctly somewhere :-)

Let's have another look on the bad strings:

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

My first attempt was to alter the letter-case of d: (d: -> D:) - it didn't change a thing.

The next thing I noticed was that the VOLUMEID was missing. That applied to all entries in that list for tracks that are not on the C-drive. So I pasted the volume-id of the D-drive there in the correct format. That also didn't help.

Next step was to correct the LOCATION DIR-string to match the format for the files on the C-drive. That also didn't help.

As I walked further through the file I noticed the table at the end of the file with the <PRIMARYKEY>-tags:

<PRIMARYKEY TYPE="TRACK" KEY="c:/: ... (working)

PRIMARYKEY TYPE="TRACK" KEY="/:d:/: ... (not working)

That applied to all working/not working files consistently.

After I corrected those strings for the tracks on the D-drive and while re-importing that playlist, Traktor wrote the tags for the corrected files again. Only after that process Traktor was able to store the tracks in the playlists again. And after that Tag-writing process, the import-date of the affected files were set to the curent date. So it looks like that traktor was "in-place" replacing the files with keeping all infos like comments, analysis information, etc.

I now tested again with two new files that weren't imported into Traktor yet: one on the C-drive and one on the D-drive. I drag'n'dropped both from the Windows Explorer into the collection. Then I put both files on a playlist and exported it. The result was that all information is now correct and complete.

I'll keep an eye on that and check newly imported files for a while to avoid issues with missing tracks in playlists. It costs a lot of time picking titles again for a specific playlist, very annoying. So better exporting playlists before closing Traktor - can save a lot of time! :-)

So, my conclusion is, that when importing files not on C-drive (or Beatport), or when adding files to playlists, Traktor writes the drive-letter in the LOCATION DIR-tag instead into the VOLUME-tag and subsequently copying that mistake to the PRIMARY KEY-tag. I tend to guess it's when Traktor puts files in playlists, because the affected files can be played.

It looks like a bug in the software, beacuse the correct drive-letter is there, but in the wrong place. It looks like the code that parses the path-string, while importing files or writing playlists, dosen't recognize the drive-letter all the times correctly.

Also the missing volume-id for the D-drive is noticeable. For alle tracks on the C-drive the correct volume-id was there and in the correct place. For all tracks on the D-drive the volume-id was missing completely.

I hope I could clear things up a bit more :-)

Best,

Ralf

wayfinder

How interesting! So you have no music folders set up at all?

In any event, I think you're spot on with the mechanic of how the bug started - a full path in the DIR instead of a split into VOLUME for the drive letter and DIR for the rest of the path.

But the circumstances under which this happens would be interesting to pin down, because I don't think it's as straightforward as "any time Traktor looks at a file outside its root dir's volume", or else the problem would be much more widespread among the user base ...

Ralf_muc

I'll keep you updated as soon as something will happen again :-)

How it started ... very good question! :-)

But first how it is organized now: The music-files are organized in a main "Traktor" folder and split up into several sub-folders. I also thought about that the complete path-lengh including file-names with extensions could be too long, but the longest path-length (including slashes) is 154 characters long. Also special-characers (like brackets) dosen't seem to make a difference since most of the file-names only containing a dash. And as far as I know, that souldn't be a problem.

My history is, that I was organizing my music with iTunes. iTunes messed up my colletion three times. So I dropped iTunes and started over with a clean Traktor-installation. That was also the point in time when I stopped working with Traktor on my laptop and started working with Traktor on my PC. There wasn't anything related to my Laptop. I started with a fresh Traktor-installation on my PC (including vanilla-settings) and began to build up my collection (again! .... iTunes .... :-( ).

It took me a few months to build up my collection again. And just recently I was ready to build my playlists again. It was a few hours before a show when I created the first playlist. After creating and finishing the first playlist for that show, I closed Traktor.

About two hours before the show started, I opened up Traktor and the playlist was almost empty! :-( At that point in time I didn't recognize yet that only files from Beatport were still in the playlist. I had to hurry to search the Tracks again. Because I thought that was a one-time-problem, I closed Traktor again and opened it up again. And, again, the playlist was almost empty again :-(

Then I really had to hurry to put the Tracks into the playlist again. This time I didn't close Traktor. I also checked if all the files could be played and they could.

After the show I began to investigate the problem and posted the precess and my results: https://community.native-instruments.com/discussion/28833/traktor-pro-3-plus-3-11-1-17-playlists-partially-empty-cause-and-fix-windows-mac

.... that's the history :-)