how many songs will a playlist hold?

[question mark]

I seem to have a cut off of 1000.

[Mark Fishman]

Other discussions of playlist size suggest that 1000 entries is about the upper limit, whether those entries are songs, albums, or artists.

But, for a different perspective, let's do some rough arithmetic:

 - assume a song is about 3 minutes long.

 - assume you listen straight through the playlist.

 - 1000 3-minute songs is 3000 minutes, or 50 hours -- a little over two days without sleep, meals, or bathroom breaks.

Really? You want LONGER playlists?

[question mark]

I have a large collection of Blues and Oldies and keeping them as few lists as possible works best.

[BoarGules]

Yes, I *do* want longer. I play my B2 with random set on, not end-to-end. Like that, your 2-day argument falls down. And I'm not convinced that there is even a good reason for it. The documentation doesn't mention it and can even be taken to mean that there is no such limit. Looks to me like a temporary limit that was put in to speed up testing and never taken back out again.

[PMB]

Hi All,

Martin tells me there is no set limit of 1,000 and that it may be other factors that are causing the issue.

Any additional information you can provide may help us pin point the problem.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[Daniel Taylor]

Every time an item is added to a playlist, additional memory is used to store it.  Hopefully, the software is using a pointer to the track (or album, or artist) and not copying the entire track name.  But even a pointer takes memory.  At some point, the memory allocated for playlist data can fill up.  So the question is:  how good is the B2's memory management?  Any software engineer is familiar with the term "memory leaks."  Let's hope we don't have any.

[question mark]

I copy all my songs from Youtube onto my PC and then use a USB to add them to my B2. When a playlist gets to 1000 songs, it stops adding anymore to the list.

[Daniel Taylor]

 That sounds like a limit to me.  ;o)

[question mark]

To me too. Is there a way to create a new playlist, other than the ones included?

[Leslie Brownlee]

Click 3 dots to the side of playlists. Opens a drop-down options list of which one is create new playlist

[Leslie Brownlee]

Meant to add screenshot.

[BoarGules]

Paul,

I followed this procedure to establish that the B2 software (version 29 Jan 2020 11:24:54) does in fact have what looks very like a hard limit of 1000 entries per playlist, where each entry is an album.

1. Create a playlist of more than 1000 albums. Call it Test1. Mine looks like this:
   #name=Test1
   /Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), composer/0001 Mozart . String Quartets [PCME 12-1]
   /Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), composer/0002 Mozart . String Quartets [PCME 12-3]
   /Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), composer/0003 Mozart . String Quartets [PCME 12-4]
   ...
   /Joseph Joachim (1831-1907), composer/1078 Joachim . Violin Concerto No. 2 'In the Hungarian Style' - Rachel Barton, Kalmar, Chicago SO
   /Johannes Brahms (1833-1897), composer/1079 Brahms . Violin Concertos - Rachel Barton, Kalmar, Chicago SO
   /Claude Monteux (1920-2013), performer/1080 Claude Monteux, Pierre Monteux, LSO 
   I created this file using a program that scans the /music folder, so it is established that all of the named folders actually exist and that none of them is empty. I haven't unloaded this file because it will be useless without the corresponding entries in the /music folder.
2. Ensure that you know exactly how many entries are in the playlist. That will be the linecount of the file, minus 1. There are 1081 lines in the file and the number of albums is 1080. In my case this can be confirmed by looking at the album names, which begin with a monotonically increasing 4-digit number. 
3. The B2's expected line-ending convention is LF and encoding is UTF-8. This can be established by looking at the playlist files the B2 creates itself. Verify that the line-ending convention and the encoding of the created playlist is in line with what the B2 expects. 
4. Make a second playlist of the same items but in a different order. Call it Test2. Mine looks like this:
   #name=Test2
   /Downloads/1061 Qobuz
   /Tina Guo/1068 Game On
   /Dragon Age/1065 Origins
   ...
   /W.S. Gilbert (1836-1911) & Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900), composer/1071 Gilbert & Sullivan . The Gondoliers . Sargent, Pro Arte O, Glyndebourne Ch (LP)
   /George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), arranger/0560 Handel-Mozart . Messiah - ORF Orch, Mackerras, Mathis [CD 1]
   /George Frideric Handel (1685-1759), composer, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791), arranger/0561 Handel-Mozart . Messiah - ORF Orch, Mackerras, Mathis [CD 1]
   The reason for having a second playlist is to exclude the possibility that the B2 has difficulty reading to the end of the playlist file because of something in the data. Reordering the data would move any such problem to a different point in the file. It doesn't move.
5. Verify that the files are identical apart from the order by checking the file length in bytes: in this case 95,656 bytes.
6. Reboot the B2 (Settings | Maintenance | Reboot) so that it will read the playlists folder afresh.
7. Display the playlists (Playlist Menu | OK | Play Playlist | OK) then scroll to Test1. The B2 will show 1000 entries in parens after the name.
8. Attempt to add album 1001 back. (Browse albums | scroll to 1001 | Add to Playlist | OK | scroll to Test1 | OK). B2 reports Album added.
9. Display the playlists (Playlist Menu | OK | Play Playlist | OK) then scroll to Test1. The B2 will show 1001 entries.
10. Do a long press on the front panel button to write the changed playlist back to disk. Now look at the playlist file. It will stop at entry 1000, the filesize will be smaller (in my case it went from 95,656 to 89,430 bytes) and the timestamp will have changed to reflect the time the file was rewritten.

I will leave verifying that the behaviour is the same with playlist Test2 as an exercise for the reader. 

And as I pointed out in another post, the web app will not display even the 1000 files in a playlist that the B2 permits. It stops at about 850. The exact number depends in a complicated way on the length of the playlist entries. It will display more entries if they are short. That is the motivation for the ordering of playlist Test2 as described above.

Now, it may be that the limit is not actually on the number of entries, but only appears that way and is in fact the result of some other constraint. But that is hard to maintain when different users come up the same number. 

I have screenshots of the B2 front panel to back up this description but the process of performing the test is so straightforward that that should not be necessary. 

[Daniel Taylor]

BoarGules,

Great testing you've done.  You've certainly done a big favor for the Brennan folks.  I'm disappointed that they didn't see fit to do such testing themselves.

[David Tellett]

FYI, this is what the Brennan website states on the playlists page:
“ Playlist Limits
There is an overall limit of 100,000 items in all the playlists. But an item can be an artist, album or track so that could easily be more than 1 million tracks. There is a limit of 60 playlists.”

[Daniel Taylor]

Case closed.

[BoarGules]

I have read that several times to make sure I wasn't missing something. The limit of 60 playlists with 1000 items each means that limit of 100,000 can never be reached. To reach it, every playlist would have to accommodate at least 1,666 items, and as I have demonstrated, that does not seem possible.

The ability to include millions of tracks requires that the playlist be at artist level. But it is normal to want to exclude one or two tracks in one album from the playlist. To achieve that, the playlist must list individually the tracks you do want. Do that with more than about 40 albums and you begin to run out of playlist.

[BoarGules]

Don't agree. The documentation is wrong.

[MJB]

Hello BoarGules

Thank you for the earlier feedback - Paul forwarded it a few days ago.

The limit you are experiencing is a limitation of the web UI - and it is on my combined bug/wishlist.

The machinery used by the web UI has a 65k packet limit - and if a playlist has more content anything beyond that is discarded. The B2 can hold bigger playlists but the web UI cannot show it. The actual limit is a character limit not a playlist item count so the number of items will vary.

It would not be difficult in theory to send multiple packets but I consider the cost / benefit when prioritising work and because so few owners have playlists of more than 1000 items the benefit is low compared to other tasks.

It might be useful to know what you have in mind. Do you have in mind a playlist just a bit bigger or would you like a playlist with say 10,000 items?

Did you know that you can export and import playlists? And did you know that some owners construct playlists using text editors on computers? You can also combine playlists - so say you constructed two sub 1000 item playlists - you could combine them (add them together) even if the web UI will not display them.

The B2 is largely programmed in C (no Python). The web UI is Javascript, HTML and CSS.

Hope that helps

Martin

[BoarGules]

Martin

Thank you for taking the trouble to reply. I must say that the limitation of the web interface is of minor importance from my point of view. It was obvious from the variability of the limit that it was memory-related in some way, and anyway it is not very interesting to flip through dozens of screens to display such a long list.

What I do care about is the apparent limit of 1000 items per playlist in the B2 itself, using only front-panel operations. My lists were both of 1080 items. I did not use a text editor for this, because that would be flaky and error-prone for such a large file. I wrote a program to scan the /music folder and construct the playlist from the subfolders that it discovered there. According to my tests, the B2 will read only the first 1000 items from the resulting file, and if I use front-panel operations to increase the number beyond 1000, the B2 truncates the playlist back to 1000 items on output. I accept that the procedure I presented to demonstrate this limit may contain oversights or unwarranted assumptions, but if so I would like them explained, because the limit is undocumented, and there are authoritative assurances on this forum that no such limit exists. If it is possible to have a playlist with more items, then how do I achieve that?

I do understand that, documented or not, there might very well be good reasons for the limit of 1000. But, in that case, can we have playlists that include other playlists?

Regards

[MJB]

Hello BoarGules

Thanks for the clarification. I created a test playlist and it appears I was mistaken - sorry. There is indeed a limit of 1000 playlist items per playlist.

There is a limit called WEBMAXPLAYLIST defined to be 1000. I believe this was put in place to "protect" the web UI from huge playlists.

But there is already a 65k character limit I mentioned before - so there does not appear to be any nead to apply this limit elsewhere.

I have increased it to 5000 items and this will go out in the next software release - probably early next week - I hope that will satisfy your immediate needs.

I dont want to remove the limit completely - I dont have time to think through all the possible side effects and testing behaviour of large playlists is time consuming.

Nested playlists - interesting - I'll add it to the wishlist. I'd probably limit the depth so it didnt get in a loop but otherwise not that complicated.

Martin

[Jasper Warwick]

Could I take this opportunity to add my nested playlist request again... 

I think the B2 playlist system (especially the album and artist lists) works really well, the only real issue is the list (of playlists) is not sorted so if you have a large number then finding the playlist can be a pain..

What would make the system perfect for me (and I fully accept that I am not a typical user!) would be to be able to nest playlists. I think the easiest way would be to allow sub folders within the playlist directory which could then be expanded in the UI. I even mocked up how it might look.

having a structured set of playlists wold enable me to segment my music and make access a large library much easier.

Jasper,

[MJB]

Hello Jasper

I know you have been waiting a long time for alpha sorting playlists - I've been meaning to do it but workload didn't permit.

Anyhow I saw your post yesterdayand have added alpha sorted playlists - it will be in the next release - early next week.

The nested playlist thing could be quite simple to build in the B2 - but the presentation side of things - as shown on your nice sketch would be more complicated and I've got to make that cost benefit tradeoff. 

My thinking was to simply allow inserting the current playlist in another - like it was a track or album. I wouldnt attempt any nested / hierarchical display display though.

The current limit on playlists is 60 - is there any demand to increase this - now its alpha sorted?

Martin

[Jasper Warwick]

Hi Martin

Thanks, having a sort would be helpful. The 60 limit is fine for me, I think any more that that would be difficult to browse on a non nested list.

The reason I want nested playlists is so that I can better segment my library. The problem I had when I first got my B2 was that with a 1000 CDs, browsing my collection was actually quite difficult, if I know the artist or album then it works really well but if I want to just look at my blues (or some other genre) collection then that is a bit of a problem. I know some people have libraries many times the size of mine which would make the task even more difficult.

Of course I could create a blues album playlist manually but creating playlists by genre is a time consuming  process and one would need to be very disciplined about maintaining it if it was not to get out of date very quickly.

My solution (which I think you know about) was to add genre information to all my tracks then write an Excel spreadsheet that scans the library and auto builds playlists at artist, album and track level based on genre.

I really can't stress enough what a difference it has made to how I access my music. Because it is so easy to find the type of music I want to listen to I now listen to a much wider range and selection from my library than I did before setting up  this system. With this system in place I am now completely happy with the B2, Nested playlists would be a nice addition but not essential to me and I quite understand about needing to focus on upgrades that will give the greatest cost benefit.

What I think you should consider is putting something like the functionality contained in my spreadsheet system into the B2 and start using ID3 tags more. A failing of very music system I have ever used is that segmentation of the library is very simplistic (only at track level) and does not give me what I am looking for e.g.

Give me a list of blues (or any other genre) artists

give me a list of opera CDs

what are the 20 most recent CDs loaded on the system

Give me a list of Baroque composers

Give me a list of albums produced in the 70s

etc.

With my spreadsheet based system I can now load playlists that answers all of these requests. The problem is that my system needs a fair degree of technical knowledge to operate and would not work for the majority of B2 users. It has, however, really transformed my enjoyment of the B2 it is a shame that more people can't benefit from it.

I am sure I am not the only one who would want get this sort of information out of the B2, if the B2 could start to make use of genre tags and then use the tags to auto build playlists I think you would be giving your users an incredibly powerful tool to manage their library.

Just a thought.

 

Copy of the tool attached.

Jasper.

 

[MJB]

Hi Jasper

This is just to let you know that Paul forwarded your post and the spreadsheet tool.

Its useful to me to see how you use genres and to actually see how you classified a real music collection.

I need to think about how I could integrate this notion into a the system and into the UI.

I did create a different kind of playlist about three years ago - it was more like sets or classes - you could add multiple tags to music and create virtual playlists like a Venn diagram.

Problem was it was so powerful - it could be a bit baffling. (It could do logical combinations like tag1 AND tag2 OR tag3 but NOT tag4) so I think the key is the UI - so if anybody sees a website that allows you filter results based on tags/properties in an understandable way - let me know.

Martin

[Mark Fishman]

One thing that would be useful within the current UI, at least for classical music collections, would be the ability vto search by album name but display the results by artist. We tend to have more than one performance of the same composition, and the interpretation can make a difference. The same would be true for folks who like the so-called Great American Songbook, as another example.

Let's say I want to find a Beethoven symphony, but can't immediately recall all the recordings I might have. I search for "Beethoven Symphony", and three or four recordings show up. But which one is which? There's no easy way to find out who is the artist without losing the search results.

Or is there? Have I missed something?

Thanks -- m.

[Jasper Warwick]

Hi Martin,

 

Having used my auto playlist generator for a couple of years now I have a few observations;

 

1. The B2s ability to have playlists at artist, album, and track level is powerful and is a brilliant way to segment music. I think could be used as the basis for a much more sophisticated system. For a lot people I am sure the existing system is fine and library management tools should not

 

2. The only real shortcoming is that for track and album level playlists it is not possible to see the artist (or album if at track level). I have a Jazz album playlist; I seen the album names but have no idea who the artists is. I see two solutions to this problem. Either have an option in the header of the playlist (or search pane) that if selected shows “Artist, Album, Track” for track level items and “Artist, Album” for album level items. It would use a lot more screen space so I think it is something that would need to be optional. Another solution would be to allow playlists to have the option of having display text for each item e.g.

 

#name=Album-2019

/Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds/Ghosteen // Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds - Ghosteen

/The Divine Comedy/Office Politics // The Divine Comedy - Office Politics

/Cate le Bon/Reward // Cate le Bon - Reward

 

I am suggesting “//” as a field separator but you could use other methods. I think the important thing is to keep it backwardly compatible with existing playlists. Obviously, this does not address how the display field would be generated (although it would be easy for my spreadsheet system to build it.).

3. As discussed in other posts having a hierarchical system of playlists would make managing larger numbers of playlists much easier for the user.

4. Most of the time I do not look at my spreadsheet system, I am only really interested in its output which are the playlists which I can access easily via the standard interface. If you were to add a segmentation/library management system you could create an entirely separate UI for it accessed via “settings” or similar in the web UI.

5. What really works well for me is being able to group genres together to create a single playlist. The problem I have with genres on my phone “Black Player” and Dennon Hifi is that there so many different genres that it is difficult to locate what I want.

6. The biggest issue for me is that genre information is only stored at track level but if you are managing a library you need to find a way of holding it at album and artist level as well. I used the spreadsheet but a database would work as well. What it needs to do is to be able to cope with the underlying folder structure changing so if someone merges two artists into a single artist it will be able to spot the change and alert the user.

7 When I was setting up my system I spent a lot of time re categorising my music. I used MP3Tag a shareware program but it would be great if you could manage the tags within the B2 system.

Hope this helps

[BJ]

Hello

I don't know if it's the 'done thing' to pose my playlist questions inside a dormant discussion but this thread seems the most relevant I can find on the forum to the problem I have, without necessarily answering it.

Background:  I have 2 500GB B2s (one with external SD card and a newer model with internal SD), each about half full, both running 9 March 2020 software.  They both have the same content.  And both now exhibit the same playlist behaviour;  so it isn't machine-specific.  They each hold 2050 or so albums (17000+ tracks, 350+ artists).  About two thirds of these are classical music, the rest mostly "popular" (for want of a better word) and jazz.  Much of the time the B2 is playing Random tracks.  And a lot of the time it plays only classical music.  To avoid the potential Mahler/Cheeky Girls clash that Martin foresaw long ago, I maintain a playlist that contains only the classical albums, plus a small number of other playlists which contain sub-groupings of the classical collection.  There are a handful of individual tracks in some of the sub-group playlists but mostly they, and certainly the main 'all non-popular' one, are made up of whole albums.

I'm not sure what the counts shown in the playlist listing in the WebUI are actually counting, but as the playlists consist almost entirely of albums I assume the counts are more or less equivalent to the number of albums in each list.  At the moment the numbers for these are 747 for the main classical list, then 265, 152, 245, 104, 76, and 111 for the others, plus an empty one used for exporting albums or tracks to copy to the other B2.

The big list no longer accepts additions — or at least the WebUI does not show them:  when added, the album does not appear at the end of the (unalphabetised) playlist listing but the count does increase.  I do not think I am anywhere near the 100,000 item limit for all playlists, nor the 5000 item limit for each list (if I have understood these right).  Presumably then, this list has hit the WebUI display limitation, although when Saved the list shows as 52KB.  The Saved list does show more albums than the WebUI version so the B2 would seem to be accepting additions OK.  But it is inconvenient not to be able to see in the WebUI (which is where I mostly do this kind of thing) that I have inadvertently added the wrong album or added a right one twice.

Is this what the problem is?

If so, any thoughts as to how to get round it?  Or a different way to approach things (my brain has melted)?

If I have to prune the main list so that I can see it all, can I edit a Saved version (in Notepad or whatever) then re-import it?

Thank you & best wishes,

BJ

[Jasper Warwick]

Instead of having playlists of albums you could have playlists of artists/composer (which is what I do most of the time). The lists would be much smaller both in memory usage and number of items and you can still randomly play within them.

[David Richards]

I'm sure your software is out of date. Do a web upgrade and see if this makes a difference.

DR.

[PMB]

Hi BJ,

I'll have to ask about Albums vs Tracks as items in Playlists.

You can 'Save Playlists' to a USB stick, transfer these to your computer and edit them with Notepad++ - don't use Word as it adds pagination that the B2 doesn't like.

You can then use 'Load Playlists'.

Paul

Brennan Support.

[BJ]

Thanks, Jasper.

However, I do not use playlists as a way of playing a curated group of tracks, albums or artists, but as a way to segment the whole music database.  When I am not playing specific albums selected by Search or Browse, I want the B2 to play randomly from either the whole music collection or from a segment containing all the non-popular albums.  I like the randomness and find I keep rediscovering things I haven't listened to for ages or had forgotten I even had.  So I have no wish to reduce the number of items that could be played within a playlist.  Investigation suggests the B2 is continuing to add new albums to my bumper all-classical-albums 'playlist' when asked to, it just isn't showing new additions in the WebUI display of the playlist any more, presumably because of the known WebUI display limitation.  I suppose this is an irritation more than a total obstruction but it would be helpful if there were a way round the limitation.  I do not pretend to understand how playlists do what they do since they appear to be just a straight text listing.  I just assume it's Martin magic.  For my classical albums I use the Artist level for composer name, except for a number of "Various" pseudo-Artists for albums containing recitals or compilations of pieces by several composers.  So I could create a relatively small playlist comprising all the classical Artists.  But presumably then I couldn't see what albums it included except by downloading the playlist and viewing it separately.  And would new albums added to an Artist automatically be included in the playlist which includes that Artist...?     BJ

[BJ]

Thanks, Paul.

I've downloaded Notepad++ ;  so I can at least check the mega playlist for duplications and potential exclusions more easily than in the WebUI.

All the best,  BJ

[Daniel Taylor]

When you have an Artist as an item in a playlist, if you click on the artist's name, the list of albums for that artist appears in the upper right corner of the WebUI.

[BJ]

Thanks.  Indeed so but only one Artist at a time.  I wonder too if the Artist panel of the WebUI has the same display limitation as the Playlists one?