When a playlist's provider is removed.... the playlists act weird.

[hutchwilco]

I used to subscribe to Spotify. I chose to switch to Apple Music
My family had spotify playlists they felt were pretty important. I'm aware there are standalone tools to transfer playlists between services. However I realised Music Assistant could potentially be this bridge while bringing the family on board moving to MA as a in home solution.
For each imported Spotify playlist I went through the process of copying the playlist to a "Music Assistant Library Playlist" (please excuse if the terminology is not accurate).
When I then removed Spotify as a provider, I learned that the tracks in each playlist copied from Spotify kind of "grey out". They won't play. But if I right click on each track in playlist and select "Refresh Item" it would update that track and realise it could source it from Apple Music. Great. They even play!
I thought the refresh icon ("Refresh the items listing") on a playlist would do this to all the tracks but no.
Now I have returned to those "copied from Spotify" playlists are refreshing them and they're all empty which is a bit deflating.

Can anyone point to where I've gone wrong and how I might restore these?
I'm definitely not a noob, and know my way around terminal-level admin on most OS's etc, but new to MA.

[OzGav]

I would say the problem is that the tracks werent linked to Apple before you removed Spotify. If they still exist in your Spotify account you can re-sync them, link the tracks and then it should work. (But I havent tried it myself)

[hutchwilco]

ok - this 'linking' of a track is what I thought I was doing - but instead it just emptied out the playlists.
Is this linking a specific process I need to follow - linking a track to a second provider while still having the original provider?
To clarify my steps were:

1. Add Spotify and Apple music as a provider
2. copy each Spotify playlist to a "Music Assistant Playlist" (so there are two versions eg "Chill Music" and "Chill Music Copy")
3. remove Spotify as a provider. (here I expected music assistant to just look at Apple Music instead - but no)
4. Refreshed each item in the playlists that had gone "grey".

The result was empty playlists.

What is the specific "link the track to Apple" process that you reference?

[OzGav]

https://www.music-assistant.io/ui/#provider-details