Playback interruption and "No playable items found" when playing public large Spotify playlists

[outofsight]

The issue began with several playing interruptions (about one every 15 minutes) when trying to play a Music Assistant playlist containing several hundred tracks from Spotify. This playlist was a local copy of a public Spotify playlist with just a few tracks removed. After extensive troubleshooting and log analysis to rule out network issues, a first breakthrough was made by observing that the interruptions did not occur when using the original Spotify playlist started directly via its public URL.

However, a similar issue occurred with a second similar playlist, but in this case, invoking the public URL was not enough to solve it. Instead, a "No playable items found" error was raised almost immediately. Further troubleshooting revealed an interaction between the local library and remote sources.

The local copy of the playlist in Music Assistant, in this case, had the exact same name as the public Spotify playlist. This local version was clearly struggling; it was extremely slow to load in the browser and often failed to display album artwork. When sending a command to play the Spotify URL, Music Assistant appeared to prioritize this local, "broken" entry. Instead of fetching the remote URL, it apparently attempted to still use the local playlist and maybe read local metadata and failed to do so quickly enough.

As soon as the local playlist was deleted from Music Assistant, the same URL-based command started working perfectly and successfully started playback. It seems the system's internal name-matching logic is intercepting the URL command and redirecting it to a local slow or corrupted entry.

Not sure if this is by design or if the fallback logic could be improved.

[OzGav]

So I can try and reproduce this. How did you create this copy and what exact Spotify playlist are you using?

[outofsight]

First Playlist: Baroque Soprano Vocals
Selected all tracks, select add to playlist, new playlist in MA provider named "Auto Start Morning", removed few tracks.
Automation was starting the playback at 7AM on about 10 sonos one sl with content "Auto Start Morning" and was good for about 1h30m and after was having a lot o playing->idle transition every 15minute with manual restart.
Solved starting the playback by media https://open.spotify.com/playlist/32RFqy911rDDH0WamwZuCZ.

Second Playlist: Violoncello barroco y clásico / Baroque & classical cello
As before, playlist named "Auto Start Lunch"
Don't remebember for this second one I also created a copy named "Violoncello barroco y clásico / Baroque & classical cello" os simply checked the whole playlist and "added to my library", likely the second.
Automation starting the playback at 12:30PM on the same sonos with "Auto Start Lunch" players with almost immediate issues.

Starting the playback by https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2aYMho1R79c4nfgxhyQymd was impossible with "No playable items found" until I removed the playlist "Violoncello barroco y clásico / Baroque & classical cello" from MA.

[OzGav]

Please supply some full logs as well

[gitviola]

I'm facing the same issue with all the Daily Mix playlists (include 50 tracks each). The Discovery Weekly and Release Radar playlists work fine (include 30 tracks each). They used to work before and stopped working some weeks ago. I noticed as some days no music plays and on some others it does (Friday, Saturday and Monday I play from Release Radar or Discovery Weekly)

[gitviola]

I've just raised a PR that fixes this issue. I verified it using my Music Assistant instance by copying the file into the container and restarting it. Works without issues now: music-assistant/server#3818