tl;dr – Find playlist titles that have a question mark, and rename them without the question mark.
Yet another esoteric problem from the world of Garmin Express troubleshooting. I'm posting this in hopes that it may save someone else some trouble.
I’ve been using my iTunes library with Garmin Express for over three years. About two months ago, Garmin Express suddenly lost its ability to “see” my iTunes library. When I selected the Music button in Gamin Express, there was simply nothing there: no artists, albums, playlists, songs, genres, podcasts, or audiobooks.
After increasingly frustrating communication with Garmin support, I finally received a reply that said, “. . . possibly one of the playlists have a special character in it that is causing the library to error and not load. Please go through the playlist names and remove any special characters and see if that will get it to load in Garmin Express.”
The obvious question then becomes, “What does Gamin Express consider as special characters?” When I asked this of Gamin Support, the rep could not give me a list and suggested removing all special characters. Since the rep didn’t actually know what the special characters are, it was suggested that I remove everything in the titles except letters and numbers. I was not looking forward to this task. Almost all my playlists have spaces in the titles. I have many with hyphens, one with a slash, some with an apostrophe, and one with a question mark. Most of my playlists have been on my system for years and had not previously caused any problems loading my iTunes library in Garmin Express.
I don’t create a lot of iTunes playlists, because I mostly listen to podcasts on my device. However, I created a few new playlists a couple of months ago, and one of them had a question mark in the title. Since I know some systems use a question mark as a wildcard symbol, I started with this one and changed the name of the playlist. When I regenerated the “iTunes Music Library.xml” file and launched Garmin Express, the problem was resolved, and my full iTunes library was once again available.
I still don’t have a full list of special characters that will cause Garmin Express to throw an error, but I now know that it doesn’t like question marks!