Phantom Tracks in Library History

[inl_inc]

Started using Library History to augment the Global History. Oddly, the Library History seems to occasionally retain songs that were never played by a script. This doesn't happen often: out of a total 50 track history, only 4 were "phantom".

In the screenshot below - top left is the Library History, top right is the last time track played (spliced in from Find Track window). Below that is the playlist section.

library_history_example.jpg (156.65 KiB) Viewed 5423 times

Library History is showing Florence And The Machine - Mother in 3rd position. This track appears to have been played between 2 (Lloyd Cole And ...) and 4 (Wall Of Voodoo). According to Last Played At times: 2 went at 8:38:05PM and 4 went at 7:49:27PM. So Florence And The Machine should have played somewhere in between ...

I've highlighted tracks 2 and 4 in the Playlist section. Florence And The Machine does not appear between those tracks.

What's causing this? Is it an incorrect setting on my end or possibly a bug? Thanks for looking into it ...

[radio42]

This is actually not a bug, but by design (even it looks strange and oddly)!
It's a 'chicken and the egg' problem...

I'll try to explain:
Tracks are of course not added to a history once they are played, but once they are scheduled!
The reason is fairly simple: tracks are scheduled ahead of time, before they are effectively played. Thus we need to add tracks to a history ahead as well, as otherwise they might be scheduled twice up until they are finally played (if we would add them only once they are played).
In addition the media history check/add operation is independent from other checks, e.g. form the global history, from script-rules etc.
Thus there might be certain situations, where the media library has already added a track to its history (which was supposed to be scheduled), but a later operation (independently) finally suppresses or removes that track, meaning doesn't effectively schedules it to the playlist.
In these (rare) situations, the tracks might stay in the media library history, even if never played effectively.

However (even if it might look odd), this is NOT a real disadvantage or issue, as there was a good reason to not schedule them at that time (e.g. a global history or script-rule check). As such if they stay in the media library history (as phantom tracks as you call them) it simply reflects this. As each history has a certain size, also those 'phantom tracks' would be removed at a later time and thus can be scheduled again...

[inl_inc]

Thanks for the detailed explanation.

While I understand the functional necessity of adding a track to library history at the time it is queued (instead of waiting until it is played) - i fail to see any benefit in maintaining tracks as part of library history that ultimately never played at their designated time. (or am i being unreasonable in my expectation that library history only include tracks which were actually aired, while all other tracks are irrelevant.

Thanks for providing a way to delete individual records from the library history - been using this workaround.

[inl_inc]

Totally agree with your assessment. Thanks.

[radio42]

I'll see, if I can optimize it here and there, but I can not eliminate all scenarios, as at some point, I (resp. the software) simply doesn't know anymore from which media lib a track was initially picked and thus, the software wouldn't know anymore from which history to remove it, in case its later on suppressed or not played...
So the effort in implementing this simply isn't worth doing so, as (as explained) there was an initial reason to suppress it, so that reason is pretty much still valid. And keeping a track a bit longer isn't doing anything bad to it. It just schedules it a bit later, that is all.