Yeah, so I’ve been trying out Roon. Honestly, it’s kind of shocking the basic features it doesn’t have that all Media Organizers should. How can a $600 mediaplayer that imports M3U and M3U8 have no ability to export to M3U8? I know that you can export to XLS and edit it, but that’s like 2-3 additional steps that are just 1 step in way cheaper media players like JRiver and MediaMonkey.
I’ve been trying out the free trial. I really like the interface of Roon, but as I’ve been getting used to the software, it seems like I’m constantly coming across basic features like this that are either missing entirely or incredibly convoluted to figure out.
I agree that the lack of the ability to export M3U file is a BIG disappointment. And considering this this request was made years ago compounds the issue.
Moreover, the excel file that is created does NOT even lists the tracks from music services (like Qobuz). I will stop creating playlist within Roon which quite frankly limits Roon’s usability.
well, this one has been going on for years, as @nicoff and others observe. @mike asked somewhere in the thread what use cases look like. I’ll add mine. I have music on a linux fileserver, and I have a whole set of scripts - check integrity of playlists, find duplicates, export playlists to other systems, check for higher quality versions of tracks on playlists, etc. Some of my playlists are a few thousand tracks. they import fine into roon, but export is heavyweight because of the bundling with the actual tracks.The export can be 10**6 times the size of the playlist!. exporting playlists without files should be a very small change for roon, and it would be a big benefit to me and others it appears. I could export, use scripts, re-import into roon, or export roon playlists for use in other systems. @mike points out that paths might change, but thats a trivial search and replace operation on linux in most cases. Please, easy for roon to do, repeated requests from users…
I am French and as we say at home “the better is the enemy of the good”.
It is also true for the features supposed to be either saying adapted to all uses.
Exporting playlists into M3U files with mandatory copy of audio files is an example.
To want too clean the possible settings of a software, we always end up removes functions that were already perfectly clear in other software of the same “kind” even for the most neophyte user.
Typically my old use is as follows:
Music Folder => Artist Folders => Album Folders => Music Files
I always keep a perfect copy of my library on my smartphone and my laptop in addition to my fixed PC (simple and effective I do copy / paste from my library).
What I would like is just being able to export my playlists to the M3U file format in relative directory mode.
Like that when I copy my library of my fixed PC to my smartphone or my laptop.
I can find all my playlists from one hardware and software to another.
Knowing that the Android USB Audio Player Pro application is renowned for around the Android audio limitations by creating a “bitperfect” path.
But in addition, it is possible to create an M3U playlist without duplicating with all the tracks of the playlist!
“Export playlist without files” functionality provided in 831!
In version 1.8, build 831, roon fixed the “export playlists without files” issue that many users have requested, tho a trifle indirectly. The new “export to excel” option produces a .csv file where one field has the roon path to the items on the playlist. The last portion of these paths is the actual filesystem location, so by extracting this portion, you can recreate a normal m3u playlist outside roon. not real pretty, but sure nice to have this feature (and one that is a longstanding request from members of the community)
In the example field below, taken from one line of a excel csv exported playlist created in the new roon build, the path beginning after the roon identifier (/music/jazz/WillBernard/2020-FreelanceSubversives-HDR24-48-7CC/02 - Back Channel.flac) is my filesystem path. These paths can be easily automatically extracted, chop off the roon preamble, and transformed into a standard m3u playlist. Thanks to roon for making this functionality possible.
example field for one line of a csv file created using the new ability to export to excel:
/roon/sys/storage/smbmounts/RoonStorage_a11e35d07478eb587f892a75e09667c8661a3ec6/music/jazz/WillBernard/2020-FreelanceSubversives-HDR24-48-7CC/02 - Back Channel.flac
in this example, /music/jazz/WillBernard/2020-FreelanceSubversives-HDR24-48-7CC/02 - Back Channel.flac is my filesystem path to this track.
The functionality you are describing is not really new. I used the export to excel very often in the past. Ok, now you can select the playlist directly and you don‘t have to open the playlist and select the files and export. Sadly the order of the tracks in the exported excel file is not the same as in the playlist. At least on my system (Windows). Btw. my export results in xls file, not csv.
I also would like to have real importing and exporting of M3U files. An M3U file is what most people mean when they refer to a “playlist”.
M3U (or M3U8) is an industry standard with very specific stanza formatting that includes a line that provides the “Artist - TrackName”. For example (from previous post by Konstantin Merikis): #EXTINF:323,Bad English - 03 - The Restless Ones
…/Melodic Rock/Bad English/1989 - Bad English/03–The Restless Ones–Bad English.mp3
ROON seems to define an external “playlist” as simple a file with a list of music file path descriptions. That is not M3U and they should not require customers to transform an M3U into this ROON defined creature before import. The import should be improved to recognize and parse a real M3U file, in addition to its current design.
And, exporting this ROON type of playlist file (missing the #EXTINF lines) to a spreadsheet is not the same as exporting to create a M3U file. Once again, why should they make their customers manipulate the spreadsheet to generate a real M3U?
Not all customers are hobbyists with extensive programming skills (heaven forbid I would manually manipulate these files).
For ROON staff with programming skills, parsing an M3U file is non-trivial, but also not that difficult. The web has many examples of such code. Or there are likely some ROON customer who could contribute coding snippets.
For myself, I want the M3U import/export in order to manipulate the playlists with my own scripts They are already written for the M3U format and require the information on the first line of the #EXTINF stanza).
In particular, I have my own “playlist shuffle” script.
The normal “shuffle” function, as provide by every player I have seen, simply sucks. The resulting shuffle has clusters where you will hear many selections from the same album close to one another. Or with my Christmas playlist, I can get the exact same song (by different artists) over & over again.
That is just the nature of pure “randomization”, but it is not what most people want in a shuffle.
My Perl script does a random shuffle while having an adjustable parameter that sets a minimal spacing between songs from the same artist or with the same song name.
I take the M3U file that was created by a player system (such as iTunes), apply my own shuffle and then tell the player to use that playlist as ordered (avoid asking it to shuffle).
It is about setting requirements, which if met, will ensure that it works.(Please correct me if I am missing something)
Obviously the player needs access to the Music folder (perhaps over SMB share)
The M3U files must be in a playlist folder that is directly under the folder that has the music files being referenced - typically “Music”
The M3U can only reference music files under that related music folder and always uses relative path instead of absolute path.
The relative paths in the M3U file must start with a “…/” relative path, thus positioning the rest of the relative path as starting with the music folder. (apologies - when I type two dots to reference the parent directory, the forum software oddly adds an extra dot).
If Roon generates an M3U, it should be easy to generate the relative paths that follow this standard; when the music folder is local to the Core, the M3U file should be placed in a playlist folder under the referenced music folder. When it imports an M3U that was generated at a non-Roon smb server, as long as that M3U follows this standard, Roon should be able to resolve all relative path references (assuming the Core is already accessing those music files over the share).
If the player can access the SMB playlist, then it knows that position in the folder hierarchy and should be able to resolve the relative path specifications. If not, that is an issue to be addressed with support for that player. This relative path relationship is pretty standard.
If the music is on a drive at the Core, then the player’s SMB share will be from that Core.
If the Core accesses the music through an SMB share, then the player’s SMB share will be from the SMB server.
May 28. Still no m3u-only export. Plenty of examples of how it should work. Easy to implement, because Roon already has the paths to the files.
Is this going to happen?
Yes this is quite annoying tbh. I’d like to export all the Roon playlists I spent countless hours to build as m3u files, and import them into rekordbox for my DJ gigs: kinda frustrating to say that after all those years that simple task is still overly complicated.
They need to restrict the scope to only stored music files that are under a common music director of a single file server platform (could be on a Roon Nucleus, a NAS, etc).
Roon playlists are able to include selections from on-line Hi-Rez server, but including that or multiple file server locations in the scope would be a problem.
The paths would need to be relative path from that single music directory. The player would have to provide the path to that as the current working directory.
This task in not totally trivial. Roon does not keep the metadata and the music file path in the same file (unlike an m3u file).
They would need to pull the artist and track names from the Roon database and combine that with the path. If an M3U files had been used to originally import a playlist, there is no guarantee that the metadata information will match what was in that original m3u.
other than that, the standard m3u format is not too difficult to construct.
The community has been asking for this for a long time. They should bump up the priority for this enhancement. It is not like users are asking for this to migrate off of Roon; they just want Roon to be even better. Playlist management is at the very core of music server/player functionality. Ability to import/export is part of that. It is not some esoteric bell & whistle.
I voted for this long ago.
As far as voting for features goes, wouldn’t it be more useful to have a negative voting system? “I don’t want this” makes more sense in an environment where there are a lot of “hearts”, but each person only gets 5 total votes that never seem to reset.
So you did, the one and only vote thus far. My apologies for not checking.
Users can unvote when something else is more important to them or the feature is implemented. From what I understand the voting system is to help steer the priority of Roon Roadmap rather than the breath of it.
Not at all. I think people have just run out of votes trying to get Roon to do things most other music players can already do, or that it should already be able to do, which is more “feature complete” rather than “Feature Suggestion”, if you see what I mean.
Pretty much… I recall asking about something similar on another thread. Similar with box set handling. Similar with focus enhancements. I’ve given up on using Roon as my music manager, I’ve stopped organizing things with tags, et al. Roon is a streaming/local files aggregator/player, and the best there is for that purpose. But, I’ve gone back to Aurdivana + XLD + Metadatics for physical library management.
