natebeaty

Thanks for the quick reply. I sent a few diagnostics (one from a month ago).

I'll try removing the drives and see if that eliminates the periodic pause.

I often have a 1+ second delay in opening Alfred, which I've never seen before in several years of Alfred use. I use clipboard manager extensively, and that's where I see it most, but I also see normal Alfred requests with the pause. I'll hit the keyboard shortcut, and wait......then up pops Alfred.

I've put off posting this for ages because it's inconsistent, and I'll see the delay a several times in a row, then suddenly go back to being instant, and then I can't reproduce the issue. I'm not sure what's causing it to trigger having the 1+ second delay again, but it happens enough that it really drives me nuts.

I've tried Clear Application Cache and Rebuild macOS Metadata. I don't have any slow hard drives connected, just a few external 1TB SSDs (Samsung T5 and T7). This is on a 2020 MBA M1 w/ 16gb, 1TB with latest Alfred + macOS.

Does anyone else have this issue? Anything I should look for to narrow down what could be causing this? It's surprisingly frustrating, enough to tap out this blathering post. Makes you realize how deluxe the typical instant response time is.

Sorry to bring the bad news, but it's back to the same ol' behavior. See attached.

I imagine it's a royal pain to integrate with iTunes, and personally I'm willing to just ignore this bug and delete extraneous playlists every so often.

So far so good! Thanks again for the fix.

Very cool, thanks Andrew! I've still been having issues so I appreciate you addressing this issue.

It worked for me creating a local Playlist on my work computer. I'll do the same at home later today and keep an eye out for duplicate playlists.

For those coming here and seeing a broken Dropbox image, you need to check "Share iTunes Library XML with other applications" in iTunes > Prefs > Advanced. I had to quit iTunes and reopen it to get that XML file to generate. Then Alfred didn't give that error. (This was on a fresh wipe + reinstall of macOS High Sierra.)

2 minutes ago, deanishe said:

Might be best for Alfred to create machine-specific playlists, e.g. Alfred (Earl) and Alfred (McLovin) for my machines.

This would work for me.

Doing a bit more testing, it certainly looks like an iTunes Match issue. Unfortunately I don't currently have access to my work computer to test this with Alfred directly, but adding a playlist manually on another iTunes Match device seems like it might offer clues. 

After adding the new "Alfred Playlist" on my iPhone, I now have three Alfred Playlists showing on both devices, yet two out of the three are not in sync. The most recent playlist that Alfred interacts with does sync up changes—though the console error shows up intermittently if I keep hitting Random album, and when it does it's not able to build the playlist from Mini Player, it just silently fails. It must be some sort of conflict mid-sync.

I built a "testfoo" playlist on my computer and "testbar" on my iPhone, and they both stayed in sync as I added and deleted items on each devices. It took about 10 seconds for them to sync up as changes propagated, but all the while two of the Alfred Playlist entries still remained out of sync on both devices, where they are empty on the computer, and showing old items on the iPhone.

Hopefully this gives a clue as to how to diagnose on your end. I have to imagine someone in the office has iTunes Match? One of my fav Apple services tbh: an Apple cloud service that actually works really well!

I manually added a playlist on my iPhone "Alfred Playlist" and managed to get console to spit out some AppleScript errors when selecting an album from Mini Player:

[ERROR] AppleScript Error: {
    NSAppleScriptErrorBriefMessage = "Can\U2019t get item 1 of {}.";
    NSAppleScriptErrorMessage = "Can\U2019t get item 1 of {}.";
    NSAppleScriptErrorNumber = "-1728";
    NSAppleScriptErrorRange = "NSRange: {0, 0}";
}

and immediately after:

[ERROR] AppleScript Error: {
    NSAppleScriptErrorAppName = iTunes;
    NSAppleScriptErrorBriefMessage = "Parameter error.";
    NSAppleScriptErrorMessage = "iTunes got an error: Parameter error.";
    NSAppleScriptErrorNumber = "-50";
    NSAppleScriptErrorRange = "NSRange: {0, 0}";
}

Holler if there's more digging I can do. It's a small issue, but it's the only quirk I've seen in what's otherwise a rock-solid, indispensable tool.

I've also had this issue for several years. Also an iTunes Match customer, and not running any iTunes plugins.

My most common use of the Mini Player is "Random album", either by a workflow via Hotkey that triggers iTunes Command -> Random album, or opening Mini Player and hitting cmd-ctrl-up to pick a random album. I do this many times a day, and on both work and home computers sharing the same iTunes library + Alfred settings—though not at the same time of course.

I've never been able to tell when it starts duplicating "Alfred playlist" in iTunes, but I frequently have to clear out 10+ dupes manually.

I will say that's the only irritation though, having to clear out several playlists: I don't have the issue of it not playing the right tracks.