Ability to delete playlists

Community Ideas for Ardour
#1

I accidentally created a bunch of extra playlists today while playing around with something and was looking for a way to delete them. I couldn’t find anything in the manual and only found this thread on here which was unanswered. I ended up being able to recover with the .bak Ardour file, but I was wondering if there is a good reason to not allow playlist deletion (even if they’re relatively trivial resource-wise, being able to delete extraneous ones can be helpful in the case of mistakes or large projects).

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Audio Regions Disappearing from Edit Window
#2

You can’t delete them? O___o
I never really use playlists, so I wouldn’t know…

But that does seem like a real annoyance if true.

#3

There is a kind of feature request in Mantis for this (albeit a rather crude one).

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#4

Playlists which are both empty and unused are not saved when saving a session. Only playlists which contain at least one region or are active on a track are saved. If you save & close the session, the next time you open it, the empty playlists will have disappeared.

So, to completely delete a playlist that contains some regions, choose ‘Clear Current’ from the 'P’laylist button in the track header, and then save, close, & re-open the session. There probably ought to be a single action for this, but at least the work-around is simple.

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#5

Ah, that is helpful to know! At minimum, this should be added to the manual, I think. It explains why a bunch of playlists I thought I had created actually didn’t show up in the XML file (they were empty and therefore weren’t saved).

#6

Hi chiraag-nataraj,

Ardour Menu > Session > Clean-up > Clean-up Unused Sources > clean-up > from popup > Delete Playlist

Note : make sure the empty playlist is not selected in the track ( otherwise you don’t get the question to delete this specific playlist ).
This is how I do it, to remove an empty playlist.
But like Colin Fletcher said, empty ( unactive ) playlists aren’t saved with the session, so no worries :slight_smile:
Good luck, Regards Luc.

1 Like
#7

Thanks! Yeah, at a minimum I feel like these should be mentioned in the manual within the Playlist section, since it’s definitely not obvious (the main place you interact with playlists doesn’t give you an easy way to delete them!).