I need help from playlist experts. I have several large playlists with 300-500 songs each. I recently added 40 new tracks to one of these playlists. I use the sorting method: ‘Artist → Album by Release Year per Artist → Song Title in Ascending Order per Album’ for all my playlists.
The 40 new tracks are from an artist whose name starts with the letter “B”. How can I efficiently move these songs to the correct position in the playlist? If I move each song individually from the bottom of the playlist up to the “B” section, it takes about 40 seconds per song, which means around 27 minutes for all 40 songs. There must be a better solution in Roon, but I can’t see it. Thank you for your help.
Many thanks for your feedback. For inexplicable reasons, it has unfortunately not been possible for years to move multiple songs at once. Therefore, I am looking for an alternative so that I don’t have to manually move song by song for half an hour.
Regarding your second question - I manage many playlists for specific genres, and thus I cannot avoid using different artists.
Phew, thanks a lot. Using an external management system via M3U files from Roon is certainly an option. However, the initial effort to set this up would definitely exceed the 30 minutes it would take to manually move the 40 songs to their correct positions.
Given that there seem to be unresolved technical barriers preventing the batch movement of songs, I will seriously consider this workaround. Although it’s hard to accept with a premium tool like Roon. But hey, even after my Nucleus Plus had its M.2 drive died for the second time due to heat issues, I still went ahead and bought one of the new Nucleus models
For all those who might want or need to take the route via M3U files at some point, here are a few potentially helpful tips:
In Roon, it’s not possible to export just the M3U file of a playlist. An export is only possible WITH the audio files. Moreover, the generated M3U file is not usable anyway, but more on that later.
The best approach is to use the Excel export. Then, cut off the front part of the “Path” column (e.g., “/roon/sys/storage/mounts/InternalStorage/”) and replace it with a relative path “…/”. IMPORTANT, use only two dots. Even when I type 2 dots here in the text edit field it becomes automatically 3 dots in the final post. USE ONLY TWO DOTS!
Now save everything in a text file with the .m3u format. The name of the file becomes the name of the playlist.
Fun Fact: Only in the Excel export are the correct folder names exported, as you have saved them. In the M3U export, Roon uses a strange modified version of the folder names, which is probably used internally by the database. For example:
Original Folder Name: Motörhead - Ace of Spades [16-44] - 1980 (Sanctuary Records-Digital)
Roon Version: Motörhead/Ace of Spades (Sanctuary Records-Digital, 16-44)
All of this is correct. (Except the ordering of your letters…it’s m3u, rather than mu3.) Roon’s .m3u exports are not universally usable. Another reason I don’t rely on them.
I actually initiate the creation of a my larger playlists using my NAS’ built-in music management software (Synology Audio Station). But I use a text editor to modify them from there.
