Help / Your library
Favourites: the heart button
The heart marks a track you love. It takes one click, it carries no allowance, and what it records goes into your library rather than into the audio file.
Where the heart appears
There are three hearts, and they do not all point at the same track. Two follow whatever is playing. The third belongs to the album on show.
- In the player bar along the bottom of the window, after the track title, artist and format badge. This heart is for the track that is playing. With nothing playing it falls back to the track you have selected, and with neither it gives way to "Nothing playing".
- In the Now Playing panel on Home, beside the title and artist. Same track as the player bar, so these two always agree: click one and the other fills or empties with it.
- In Featured for you on Home, in the row with Play Now. This one is different. It hearts the first track of the featured album in album order, the same track the quality badge beside it is describing. It is not the album, and it is not usually the track you are listening to, so it will often sit hollow while the other two are filled.
A hollow heart means the track is not a favourite, a filled one means it is. Hovering tells you which click you are about to make: Add to favourites or Remove from favourites.
To heart more of an album than that one representative track, play the album and use the heart in the player bar as each track comes round.
It marks the track, not the file
Nothing is written into your audio file. The heart is stored in your library, alongside things like play counts and ratings, in the folder Vesari Stylus keeps for itself. See Where Vesari Stylus keeps your files and settings.
Two things follow from that. Another music player will not see your hearts, and copying a file to a phone or another machine does not take the heart along. On the other hand, hearting a track never touches the file or its timestamp, so it cannot disturb a tag or set off a re-scan.
The heart is pinned to the track's place in the library rather than to its filename, so retagging a file or rescanning the folder does not shake it loose.
The click is instant, and it says so when it fails
The heart fills the moment you press it, before the save has finished, so it never feels sluggish. If the save does not go through, the heart flips back to how it was and the tooltip changes to say the last change did not save, with the reason in brackets. The notice is shared, so all the hearts carry it until your next successful click clears it. See Reading the logs.
What favourites feed today
Worth being straight about: there is no Favourites page in the desktop app at the moment. The heart is a signal rather than a folder.
- Rediscovery. The Forgotten favourites shelf on Home gathers tracks you used to play often and have not heard in a long while. The shelf is built from play history, and a heart adds a small bonus to where a track lands in it. That is a nudge, not a filter, so a hearted track you have never played will not appear there. See Rediscovery.
- Remote clients. With remote streaming switched on, your hearted tracks are offered to a phone or tablet app as its starred or favourites list, and starring something in that app writes to the same place as hearting it on the desktop. The desktop reads that list once at startup, so a star made on the phone shows in its hearts the next time you open the app. Those apps can usually star whole albums and artists as well, which the desktop heart does not do. See Stream your library to your phone and Choosing a remote client.
If what you want is a list you can press play on, build a playlist instead. See Playlists.
What happens when files move
- A file moved inside a folder you already watch. The next scan recognises it as the same recording and carries the heart, and the play history, across to the new path. See Play history.
- Duplicate cleanup. When Library Health moves extra copies aside, the surviving copy keeps the heart if any of the copies had one. See Library Health and finding duplicates.
- A track that leaves your library. Its heart stops showing anywhere, because only tracks still in the library are listed.
- A new machine. Hearts live in the library, so they travel the way the rest of the library does, and a library you never copy across is a library of hearts you lose. See Moving your library to a new PC.
When a heart will not stick
If a heart keeps reverting after a click, hover it: the tooltip carries the reason the last attempt failed, and the same failure is written to the log. Include that line when you report it, using the Report a Bug section in Settings. See Is this a bug? How to report it.