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Kodi

Kodi isn't a library provider for Trobar. It's a place to send playlists. Trobar's filesystem mirror writes .m3u files, one folder per user, and each Kodi profile can read its playlists from a folder of your choosing. Point each profile at its user's folder and that person's mirrored playlists show up under Music → Playlists in their profile, and nobody else's. No add-on, no remote access to Kodi, no credentials: it works whether or not Kodi is running.

Verified against Kodi 21.2 (Omega), with the music on an SMB share.

How Trobar lays out the mirror folder

Every mirrored playlist goes into its owner's folder under the mirror folder:

<mirror folder>/
  alice/
    music/Road_Trip_Trobar_.m3u
    mixed/
  bob/
    music/...
    mixed/
  _shared/
    music/...
    mixed/
  • The folder name comes from the username, made safe for a file system; a name with nothing usable left becomes user-<id>. It is fixed the first time Trobar writes for that user.
  • _shared/ holds the playlists nobody owns (provider-wide, shared ones). Any profile can be pointed at it instead.
  • music/ and mixed/ are the two subfolders Kodi reads. Trobar writes into music/ and creates an empty mixed/, because Kodi refuses the folder ("Error 2: share not available") if either is missing.
  • File names end in _Trobar_, and Kodi shows playlists by file name, so the suffix is visible in Kodi. It is how Trobar recognises its own files.

Setting Kodi's Playlists folder

Each Kodi profile has a Playlists folder setting (system.playlistspath), where it reads and saves playlists. It isn't in Kodi's settings screens, not even at the Expert level: Kodi files it as an internal setting (Kodi 21, 22 and its development branch alike). Set it per profile, one of two ways:

  • Edit the profile's guisettings.xml while Kodi is stopped. The master profile's is userdata/guisettings.xml; another profile's is under userdata/profiles/<name>/. Set the line <setting id="system.playlistspath">smb://nas/Music/UserPlaylists/alice/</setting> (your own path, ending in /). Kodi rewrites this file when it exits, so an edit made while it runs is lost.
  • Or over JSON-RPC, while that profile is loaded, if that profile has Kodi's web interface on (Settings → Services → Control): call Settings.SetSettingValue with {"setting": "system.playlistspath", "value": "smb://nas/Music/UserPlaylists/alice/"}. The value is kept when Kodi exits cleanly.

An smb:// path is what was verified. Kodi takes nfs:// and local paths in the same setting, but they haven't been tested here.

Paths Kodi can open

A mirror lists each track, and Kodi has to be able to open those paths. There are two ways.

Put the mirror folder inside the share that holds your music, e.g. Music/UserPlaylists/, and tell Trobar where it sits. The playlists then list tracks relative to their own folder (../../../Artist/Album/track.flac), which Kodi resolves against the playlist file, on any machine and at any mount point.

  1. Mount the same share twice. Trobar never writes to your library, so the music stays read-only and the mirror folder gets a writable mount of its own. With the standard docker-compose.yaml, in .env:

    MUSIC_VOLUME=/mnt/nas/Music
MIRROR_VOLUME=/mnt/nas/Music/UserPlaylists

    The music is mounted read-only at /music, the mirror folder writable at /mirrors. 2. In Trobar, under Administration → Configuration → Playlist mirroring, set Location inside the music share to UserPlaylists. Trobar checks it by writing a test file through /mirrors and looking for it under /music/UserPlaylists; if the two mounts aren't the same folder, it says so and saves nothing. 3. In Kodi, point each profile's Playlists folder at its user's folder, e.g. smb://nas/Music/UserPlaylists/alice/.

Trobar's playlist discovery skips the files it wrote itself, so a mirror inside the music share never comes back as a source playlist. A playlist someone saves from Kodi into the same folder is an ordinary .m3u, and Trobar picks it up like any other.

Without a location: absolute paths

With the location left empty, mirrors list each track by its path as Trobar sees it (/music/Artist/Album/track.flac in the standard Docker setup). Kodi can't open that as such, but its userdata/advancedsettings.xml can rewrite the prefix to the share:

<advancedsettings version="1.0">
  <pathsubstitution>
    <substitute>
      <from>/music/</from>
      <to>smb://nas/Music/</to>
    </substitute>
  </pathsubstitution>
</advancedsettings>

Restart Kodi after creating or editing that file. Then point each profile's Playlists folder at its user's folder as above.

Upgrading from the flat mirror folder

Before the per-user layout, Trobar wrote every mirror straight into the mirror folder. On the first sync after upgrading, each mirror is rewritten into its owner's folder and the old file is removed (only if it carries Trobar's marker; any other file is left alone). A player or Kodi profile that read the flat folder has to be pointed at a user's folder, or at _shared/.