The problem is that if you do a refs=0 search, the results are confusing. I found that some things that looked normal to me on the player, and in the playlists, show up in the search. Puzzling.

If you had an unattached items playlist again I suspect it would show you the same tunes that a refs=0 search. After all, the definition of what should appear in it is the same.

Quite. Things that have 'refs=0' are the only things that will appear in the "Unattached Items" playlist.

If you've got items appearing in other playlists, and also in a 'refs=0' search, then you've got duplicate tunes on your player.

After seeing this thread I went and did a refs=0 search myself. It turned up about a dozen playlists that it said were orphaned. They were all duplicates of playlists that were visible in the playlists view so I have to admit I didn't trust it at first. So I then carefully went through and checked the FIDS of these orphans against the duplicates in the playlists view. Sure enough they were different, the were duplicated playlists.

I deleted the offending duplicates and did a refs=0 search again. It now showed up all the tunes that had been in the orphaned playlists. I checked the FIDS again to make sure it was safe to delete them, it was so I deleted them, freeing up a couple of hundred megs in the process.

So I learned something new today, you can have tracks that are effectively orphaned (because the playlists they are in are orphaned), that don't show up in the refs=0 search because they are still attached to their orphaned (and therefore invisible) parent playlists.

Orphaned playlists should never happen. However, since I had some myself recently -- which I put down to an internal build -- I added some code to the integrity checking that attaches them to the root. It doesn't do anything with tunes, since they no longer need to be attached to anything.