Hello. I’ve been encountering the same issues as the OP, even despite having a slightly different setup, and it doesn’t seem to me like a user error, because of the various (and reproductible) bugs that come up, that go beyond the slowness.
For instance, I have a debloated Pixel 8 that is exceptionally fast and responsive with all my apps, including Poweramp Pro, GoneMAD Music Player, Musicolet, and USB Audio Player PRO with my current library.
I’ve been trying out Symfonium these last couple of days because in my opinion, except these issues I’ve been running into with playlists, it is an overall better app that all the alternatives.
Specifically to my usecase:
- Pixel 8, always on latest build.
- 12’500 .opus music files are accessed locally on device (and no other music source)
- Symfonium > Manage media providers > Local device > Automatic playlist import > is checked.
- Auto sync is off because I only update my library once every six months, and want to set and forget.
- Android Settings > Symfonium > App battery usage > Unrestricted
- Proceded with cleared tag cache, forced stopped > clear cache > open app > sync
- All the music gets added ridiculously quickly (4 minutes), which is insanely good.
- Everything plays fine, which is awesome.
- I’ve got 32 playlists, ranging from 400 to 9000 songs. Playlists get added slowly (takes around 15 hours), which really isn’t ideal but isn’t a dealbreaker for me, as it’s a compromise I’m ready to do for the ability to use Synfonium, and I can set it overnight.
With this context, here are the exact issues I run into (will copy paste some of what OP wrote because their description of the issues perfectly describes what I’ve encountered):
- Each time the app syncs for new stuff, it tends to remove playlist contents. It still shows it contains files, but when I open the playlist it’s empty. It usually takes several hours (around 15 hours on my end) before the contents are back and usable.
- During those 15 hours, when I click on a playlist, I also get one of those messages: “Nothing to display” or “Your data is being synced with your media provider”
- As the playlists are getting synced (during the 15 hours process), sometimes they show 2x the amount of files in that playlists, and every entry is duplicated. I did not give much thought to that because I was considering that to be just a glimpse of what was happening under the hood, and in any case, once the sync was complete (fifteen hours later), that specific issue about the duplicated entry for every song was always gone.
- Once synced successfully, there are always a couple duplicated playlists.
- And when I delete one of those duplicate playlists, after half an hour or something, it removes the content of the remaining playlist.
- After deleting a playlist that was duplicated, the remaining playlist runs fine for a while, but often, after a few hours, that playlist is deleted and nowhere to be found.
I initially thought it was a user problem, so I tried exporting playlists from MusicBee in .m3u, .m3u8, and .pla format, and that did not change the behavior at all.
I also tried without the automatic sync with the Synfonium > Playlists > Import > Local device, in both Offline first, and Read-only (in different runs), as well as through Files > Media providers > Local device > [playlists in question] > Import but all these different ways also resulted in the same results as described above.
I’ve been searching the forums here for leads, but haven’t found any (outside this post), and tried all the troubleshooting I could on my end, and yet wasn’t able to find a way to have useable playlists, and have reluctantly moved back to Poweramp, until these issues are resolved (or a way around them is found).
Thanks for the great app, btw. Outside those issues, I am thoroughly impressed by what is packed in it, and it really punches above every other app I’ve tried.
[edited for clarity]