All songs disappeared from playlist

[AK-47]

I'm running Jellyfin 10.10.0 on Windows 11.

I only have one music playlist in Jellyfin. I went to play it today, for the first time in just under a year (it is a Christmas music playlist), but when I tried to play it, I realised none of the songs appear in the playlist - but the duration of the playlist still shows in Jellyfin, and the tracks can be played individually from Jellyfin, so I know they haven't been deleted.

I have attached what I see when I view the playlist in the web interface. You will see it still lists the duration of the playlist (6h 4m), so the playlist *should* still be intact somewhere.

I have no idea at what point or with which update of Jellyfin the songs disappeared from the playlist, but it would be somewhere between December 2023 and now.

How do I troubleshoot this? As there are no songs appearing, I can't attempt to play one, so I don't think the log will show anything.

Thanks in advance.

[TheDreadPirate]

Can you restart Jellyfin and then after it finishes restarting share your jellyfin log via pastebin?

Also, how is your media stored? On a local hard drive or on a NAS?

[AK-47]

Thanks for the response.

The Pastebin of the log is here: https://pastebin.com/C7VbHsyt

The media is all stored on a local hard drive.

EDIT: I just updated to 10.10.1. It made no difference except the duration (6h 4m in the previous screenshot) has now disappeared. Attached is how it looks now.

[TheDreadPirate]

The log is pending moderation. Can you zip the log and attach it to a forum post?

[AK-47]

Sorry, updated log attached

[TheDreadPirate]

There is nothing in the log.

What probably happened is that at some point in the last year the files for your Christmas Music were unavailable during Jellyfin startup. There is a job, that only triggers on startup, that will examine your playlists and collections and remove items that are no longer present. If your D drive was unavailable it would have cleared out that entire playlist.

[AK-47]

Thanks. Yes there was at least one occasion Jellyfin started up when the D drive wasn't connected.

I understand the Playlist disappearing whilst the drive isn't connected, but why wouldn't it just re-appear when Jellyfin is next started with D drive connected, like it does the media itself?

Is there any way to avoid this behaviour? Or at least mitigate the impact, e.g. is there a playlist file I can back up somewhere and just paste it back to the original location if this happens again? Jellyfin loading up without at least one of the drives present is likely to happen again at some point in the future,

[TheDreadPirate]

Once it clears the playlist/collection, its gone. You can disable the scheduled tasks. Dashboard > Scheduled > Cleanup collections and playlists. Open that up and delete the startup trigger.

[Ryan W. West]

I have to agree with AK-47 that this isn't desirable behavior. I've had the same thing happen various times as some of my Jellyfin library resides on a network drive, and whenever I update Jellyfin the permissions are temporarily broken and I have to fix the network drive access and restar the Windows service to gain access. I had thought Jellyfin playlists were just buggy and unreliable for years and didn't trust them, but this must be the cause. It would be great to avoid this. Are there any other negative effects that would happen from permanently disaling "Cleanup collections and playlists"?

[ryogamasaki]

Sorry to bump, but I found this thread after experiencing the same issue. I have dozens of playlists curated over several years, ported over from previous tools I've used like Ampache. So I was... disappointed when everything was empty after restarting my machines and Jellyfin came up before the NAS was mounted. This setting should not be on by default, imho. In any software, any option that deletes should always be opt-in...

But I am happy to find that the logs dutifully recorded each item that was removed, so to anyone who also experienced this, you can grep the logs for "cannot be found at" which includes the name of the playlist and the path to the file, e.g.:

jellyfin20250213.log:[2025-02-13 14:40:21.103 +09:00] [INF] Item in "♾️BGM・ノリノリ" cannot be found at "/mnt/nas/Music/K/Kadomatsu Toshiki - Parasail [FLAC]/01 PARASAIL〜シュールホワイトのテマ.flac"

It should be not overly difficult to write a script to use that information to recreate the xml file for each playlist stored at /var/lib/jellyfin/data/playlists

Hope this helps.