Playlists not showing up in device

Hello, all. New OSMC user here. I’ve searched around but didn’t see this issue.
I am running OSMC 2020.10-1 on a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
I have it connected to the network, it sees my music on my NAS, I’ve set up the sound card, and I can play music. Works great!

the Pi has a 7" LCD screen attached and a bluetooth keyboard/mouse combo. So I can work directly on the unit; or I can navigate to the Pi’s IP address from a browser on my PC and get in that way.

I worked on OSMC on my PC using the IP address. I got in and created several playlists.
But when I look at the screen attached to the Pi, and use that keyboard / mouse to navigate to “Playlists” there are none there.

Likewise, if I navigate to the IP using my iPhone connected to my WiFi), there are no playlists shown there either.

I have powered off / on (using the proper Shutdown menu option). Again, I see the playlists when I navigate to the IP using my PC, but not if I navigate to the very same IP using my iPhone, or if I work directly on the Pi using my screen and keyboard/mouse.

I’mm really confused how this is possible. Especially the fact that I can navigate to exactly the same IP using my PC or iPhone and I see different things!

All help is very much appreciated. What am I missing?

If you tell Kodi to play something it is put into a temporary live playlist. If you are in the music section of Kodi you can open the slideout menu and select the ‘playlist’ option and it will show you this list. When you use the context menu to cue items this is the playlist they are getting added to. When you make a playlist in the web interface you are only making it in the web interface afaict. When you tell it to play a playlist from the web interface it transfers this to the temporary live playlist. If you want to save this to Kodi you have two options. The first option is to start playing the playlist from the web interface and then in Kodi open the live playlist, go to the slide menu and select the save option. The other option is to save the playlist to a m3u. With the Chorus 2 web interface (I didn’t check any others) the playlist has a menu you can click on with an “export list” option. The m3u will need to be put in ~/.kodi/userdata/playlists/music. If you are doing this on a PC you can install Samba Server in the OSMC add-on and once you have done that you can easily access this folder to transfer the playlists.

BINGO! Thank you, darwindesign!
I pulled up the playlist in my browser and told it to “Play in Kodi”
Oncee if (finally) came up and started play8ng on the Pi I was able to save it in the Pi

Thank you!

Your welcome. Not sure what the “Oncee if (finally) came up” is coming from. When I tested it (right before posting here) the playlist started in a fraction of a second.

There was quite a delay for me, depending upon the length of the playlist. Some were up in 20 seconds wwhile some took 40 seconds or so. In fact, I have one large playlist that has not been successful in loading.

I ended up exporting the playlist m3u file, installing Samba, and copying the file into the file system directly.

I then rebooted and navigated to the playlist on my Pi. When I selected it, I saw “Scanning Media Information” at the top of the screen. And it just sat there.

It has now been sitting for about 15 minutes with no change, and no music playing.

Is there a real or practical limit to the size of a playlist? Looking in Windows Explorer, the file size of this exported m3u file is 188 kb. Most of the rest of the playlist files are 30 to 70 kb.

I think you are probably running into both limits of what the web interface can handle and hardware limits which would be particularly stark on a single core 512MB RAM device. Out of curiosity I played around a bit and what I found was with around 600 songs there was a bit of a delay but everything seemed to be working as it should. I then made a playlist in the web interface with 7,500 songs and then things kind of fell apart. I could not get that playlist to transfer directly to Kodi and there was a significant delay in just getting it to load in my web browser with quite a few warning from Chrome saying it thought the page had locked up. Once the playlist finally loaded in the web browser I was able to get it to export a m3u which ended up just over a megabyte. I transfered this to Kodi on my RPi 3B+ (no need to reboot BTW, just exit playlist and go back in and it should be there) and it took two minutes and thirteen seconds to load. I SSH’d in and checked htop and saw one of the cores was maxed out and RAM usage was over 500MB. It would seem that Kodi is not particularly well suited to extremely large playlists on lightweight hardware.

I have a number of Kodi boxes around my house all being fed from a Win10 box which contains both the media and a MySQL database that contains a shared library. Out of curiosity I loaded up this same m3u file on my laptop (6 core i7, 32GB RAM, NVME) and the playlist took under two seconds to load. As both machines were using the same Kodi version, connected to the same database, using the same network source and paths, I would say that any delay is most likely is tied directly to the hardware it is running on. If such large playlists are necessary then you might want to start looking for options other than Kodi for music playback. Otherwise I would suggest looking into smart playlists as a better option if you can make those work as they allow you to limit how large they get.

Thank you again for the help! I really appreciate it!

By the way – is there a screen in OSMC where it just shows the current song (even if it’s running a playlist)?
I know the current song shows up at the top right. I just wondered if there’s a screen that would show a llittle more info about the current song; or maybe display the album cover.