Allow whitelisting paths to load playlist files from

[mkataja]

Nice work with the m3u playlists loading!

My issue now is that LMS loads too many playlist files, since a lot my album directories contain playlists for those albums. I would not like to delete those playlists, but I would also not like to see them in LMS.

My proposed solution is to add a config option containing a list of paths eligible to load playlists from. Any playlist file not matching a path in this list would simply be ignored. Leaving the list empty would keep current behavior of loading all playlists.

[epoupon]

Hello! Thanks for your feedback.
To better understand, do you actually use all these playlists? What are they for?

[AverageHoarder]

While I don't know what people use them for (maybe open an entire album in vlc with a double click, who knows?), I've encountered hundreds of albums that contained an .m3u or .m3u8 file with paths to the tracks of the album.
Luckily I opted to always remove these as I don't use them (and rename the tracks so they'd be broken anyhow) but if you keep them you can easily end up with hundreds of playlists, each named like the album it belongs to.

Limiting the possible paths to import playlists from would be useful for users who opted to keep these files.

[epoupon]

Ok I see. Maybe an option to skip playlists that are just indexing a whole album would be easier to use?

[mkataja]

Sorry about not getting back to this despite your prompt response! Christmas holidays and stuff.

And yes, it's exactly as @AverageHoarder said.

Ok I see. Maybe an option to skip playlists that are just indexing a whole album would be easier to use?

Hmm, not entirely sure how this would work? I've got some playlists indexing entire directories (but not albums), and I would like to keep those playlists.

[epoupon]

I meant this: if the tracks of the playlist all belong to the same album (not the same directory), then it is omitted. Could be even omitted only if it contains exactly all the tracks of the album

[mkataja]

That sounds good to me!

[AverageHoarder]

Depending on how you plan to implement this check I see a possible problem.
Some people leave the .m3u(8) file in the folder (same goes for .cue files), but retag and then rename the tracks and album folder, essentially breaking the links in the m3u(8) file. So the album part in the .m3u(8) might not match the actual folder name or the content of the album tag.

[epoupon]

Orphan tracks inside playlists are already ignored. Maybe we also need to ignore playlists that are empty.