Playcounts/Lasted played not showing up for tracks opened via playlist

[torgo]

I used to store my music collection at
/media/WD1TB/music/collection
I bought a new hard drive to store my music on, so that now my music exists at
/media/WD2TB/music/collection
Based on my past experience with Clementine/Strawberry, I did not change my music library path because I didn't want my playcount/etc statistics to be lost. (I just tried and confirmed this does happen still, even though the subdirectory collection contains exactly the same files.)

So instead, I created a symlink
/media/WD1TB/music => /media/WD2TB/music

Now I've started noticing some unexpected behavior. When I load some tracks from the "Collection" menu, the old playcounts/etc are correctly shown, and get correctly updated. However, when I load a playlist that contains the same tracks, I do not see playcount/etc. information, nor does it get updated after playing the track.

Any idea what's going on here, and how to fix it (or debug further)?

[torgo]

Anyone have any advice on what to look at here?
Is there some place I can read about how the database is organized/works and how it interacts with playlists? That might give me some clues I can look at.

[torgo]

@jonas could you suggest some things to look into here? I'm happy to investigate further on my own, but I'm stuck, could use a pointer.

[jonaski]

@torgo
Integrity check the db

https://github.com/strawberrymusicplayer/strawberry/wiki/Database-integrity-check

[torgo]

Sorry for the late reply @jonas .
I tried the integrity check and it came back ok.

I did a bit more thinking about this, and I think I pinned down the problem.

Suppose I open a file from the "Collection" menu and right click --> "Edit Track Info." Then Path shows up as /media/WD1TB/music/collection/whatever.mp3, even though this is just a symlink to /media/WD2TB/music/collection/whatever.mp3.

However, now suppose I open a playlist that has /media/WD2TB/music/collection/whatever.mp3 as one of the entries. Then "Edit Track Info" shows the Path as /media/WD2TB/music/collection/whatever.mp3. Presumably that file is not found in the collection/library, so it has empty playcounts and lastplayed information.

Now here's the part that doesn't make sense to me, and which I think might be undesirable behavior in Strawberry. Suppose I go into that playlist and manually edit the filename so that it is /media/WD1TB/music/collection/whatever.mp3, which again is just a symlink to /media/WD2TB/music/collection/whatever.mp3. When I open the playlist, "Edit Track Info" follows the symlink and still says the Path is /media/WD2TB/music/collection/whatever.mp3, so that the file is again not found in the collection/library.

So it seems like Strawberry's behavior with respect to symlinks is different when opening something through collection than it is through a playlist.

---

A related question on how the database is organized. Is it really the case that files are indexed and searched for by their absolute paths, as suggested by the behaviour above? If so, what is the recommended procedure for changing where the collection is mounted?

[OriNOVet]

@torgo i have not tested this, but maybe you can use a 'bind mount', instead of a symlink.

[torgo]

@orinovet Thanks for the suggestion. A bind mount does seem to be a good simple workaround for the problem!