Notices

I've been having a problem with playlists. Not sure if it's related to 0.96.5 or the fact that I recently got a new 32gb SD card to replace a failed 4gb.

Here are the symptoms:
When I initially start MB, I can add to a playlist using genre, artist, etc., and it seems to work fine. Additionally, I can add using the browser by adding the whole memory card--however, when I do this it seems that not all of the files from the card are added to the playlist. If I then try to add more files to the playlist, nothing is added. If I create a new playlist, I am still unable to add files. It requires a shutdown/restart of MB to be able to add more files to the playlist, and I am still limited to one "add" operation before the playlist fails to update. there is no other indication of a failure; it says "adding x files to playlist y", as it should. The playlist just doesn't get any bigger.

This is interesting. Thanks for your report.
There is a limit to what can be added at once to avoid hanging on adding thousands of files on a big memory card, which could easily happen if you add a folder with lots of subfolders.
But the fact that you need to restart MediaBox to add further files looks like a bug.

like i said, i've tried it a couple of different ways, and there are 2 separate issues:
1. needing a restart to add to/create a playlist after the initial add.
2. not adding all files from a given directory/genre/artist/etc

#1 does seem like a bug.
#2--are you saying that this is a "feature" of the program, to prevent slowdowns? is there a workaround? i'm able to add the files that were missed afterwards, but i have too many to try that with all of them, so i'm not sure if this is a bug (ie, the program is hanging on one unidentified file name/format or something) or intentional.

ok, a little more investigating:
looks like both problems are related to the number of added tracks in a playlist. if you try to add more than 450-500 tracks to a playlist, you encounter this problem. no error message is reported, so you may not know you didn't add everything that was attempted. after this, it is no longer possible to add anything to any playlist, or add to a new playlist without a restart. tracks are added fine to playlists if you keep it under 450. my work around was to break my collection down into smaller chunks, add these chunks to my library, then add these chunks to the playlist, then remove the chunk from the library and move on to the next. needless to say, this is tedious, but works. i eventually lost patience and just created a couple of lists on amarok, and copied the m3u to the .mediabox directory, which works fine. anyways, a couple of suggestions/requests:
1. is this limit built into mb, or is it a bug? if the former, is there a workaround to remove it? i think that most people have more than 500 tracks in their collection if they use the nokia for music.
2. in future versions, is there a way to speed up loading of the lists? maybe make it selectable whether to create a preview/load thumbnails or not, or just be able to play the playlist directly without first loading it?

Just to add to the discussion, when you do small edits to a playlist inside of mediabox (remove one song or add one song) it takes about 3 minutes for the playlist to reset itself and setup all the thumbnail previews again. I think an option to turn off thumbnail previews would be extraordinarily helpful, especially when dealing with larger playlists.