Exported Roon m3u Playlists Include Wrong Filenames/Paths

[rcrawley]

Roon Core Machine

LinuxMint
Linux roonmint 5.15.0-69-generic #76-Ubuntu SMP Fri Mar 17 17:19:29 UTC 2023 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
3.5 GHz Dual-Core i7
16 GB RAM

RoonCore 2.0 (build 1259)

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Ethernet between RoonCore and endpoints

Connected Audio Devices

Streaming via Pi and Cambridge Audio 851N, connected to Core via ethernet

Number of Tracks in Library

~60k

Description of Issue

I’m in the process of reimporting a large batch of Roon playlists from one Roon server to another, and I’ve noticed something odd in how Roon creates exported m3u files: The album names don’t match the actual folder names and Roon is adding a disc number when they don’t exist on the actual file. This is causing a huge mass of playlists that were exported from one Roon 2.0 server to be ignored when re-imported into another Roon 2.0 server. Here are some examples:

I’ve created a Temp playlist in Roon with the following three songs (these are the file paths from the library):

../7 Seconds/Soulforce Revolution [FLAC]/10. Soul To Keep (For Phyllis).flac
../The National/Trouble Will Find me (Japanese Edition)/02 Demons.m4a
../Radiohead/MINIDISCS [HACKED] [FLAC]/3-03 [tape blip - I Promise (San Francisco)] [duplicate].flac

And when I export that playlist as an m3u in Roon, here’s the result:

../7 Seconds/Soulforce Revolution/1-10 Soul to Keep (For Phyllis).flac
../The National/Trouble Will Find me (Japanese Edition) (Japanese Edition)/1-02 Demons.m4a
../Radiohead/MINIDISCS [HACKED] (HACKED)/3-03 [tape blip _ I Promise (San Francisco, duplicate)].flac

All three of these paths are incorrect:

• Soul To Keep filename is 10. Soul To Keep (For Phyllis).flac, not 1-10 Soul to Keep (For Phyllis).flac which is what Roon exported (note the extra disc number, the missing period, the lower to). The album name is missing [FLAC].
• The National album/dir name and directory is Trouble Will Find me (Japanese Edition), not Trouble Will Find me (Japanese Edition) (Japanese Edition), why the extra (Japanese Edition)?
• The Radiohead album/dir name is MINIDISCS [HACKED] [FLAC], not MINIDISCS [HACKED] (HACKED). Why the extra (HACKED) and the missing `[FLAC]?

So it makes sense that importing those playlists always fail b/c the Roon exported playlist is completely incorrect when matched to the storage location. When I go to each of these songs directly in Roon and copy the file location from View file info, the paths are correct:

../7 Seconds/Soulforce Revolution [FLAC]/10. Soul To Keep (For Phyllis).flac

Is the export playlist feature pulling names from the DB rather than the filenames? Is this a known issue with exporting playlists? Are others seeing this break their imports into other systems?

[rcrawley]

More digging an I’m almost positive that Roon is using the DB name rather than the actual file name (or some mashup of the two). I confirmed this with Various Artists CDs I have in my collection. On my NAS, these are all ripped into a Compilations directory, but in the M3U exports they’ve all been replaced with Various Artists:

/Compilations/Eyes Wide Shut/07 The Dream.m4a

On my NAS becomes this::

../Various Artists/Eyes Wide Shut/1-07 The Dream.m4a

In the M3U. That’s an odd one b/c I can’t think of any use case that would use the transitioned location → Roon artist. Importing back into Roon fails b/c there is no Various Artists directory; Roon doesn’t understand importing M3U’s with this DB matching (ie Roon doesn’t know that it’s the one that exported the M3U to read it back in as a DB entry vs a location); no external tool that support M3U’s would find this file for the same location vs DB issue.