This may not be possible or feasible, but it seems to me that identifying tracks and albums from their various database ID’s makes more sense than doing it based on where the files reside. It would mean that playlists were never broken and live playlists could be shared across systems and platforms. AcoustID, Musicbrainz, Discogs. Especially with AcoustID, there would very rarely be any confusion about say, which version of the song you meant.
I’ve lost a lot of great playlists by moving to different players, or consolidating drives full of music.
I’m not sure if I do understand the idea correctly: you want some kind of matching between an external ID embedded in a file tag to album tracks in the Roon library?
Something along the line of what recordings in musicbrainz do to provide “identification” for an album track?
Yes, that’s right.
Gracenote and other databases use various methods to match songs to albums and verify albums as being what they say (in metadata) they are. This information would be useful instead of disk location when building playlists. Most commercially-released cd’s/records have catalog numbers, too. Roon already reads the Catalog Number for albums—For instance, Dotty West, Here Comes My Baby is Catalog LPM-3368, which is a Sony Music release.
Thanks for explaining. I’m not so sure if this is really in the realm of Roon or if some kind of a playlist manager app would be a better choice to tackle the problem. I’m not really a playlist user…
But it seems like Roon would have the technical means to keep track of playlist contents by using IDs and hash values and such and it may already do this internally. How this could be used for stuff outside of the Roon watched folders and subscribed services I’ve no idea.
I don’t think it could be used outside of Roon unless other applications read the ID “field”, or whatever place it got stored. You could, however, send an “ID-enabled” Roon playlist to another Roony, which would be pretty neat.
That might be an interesting “social” feature for Roon. 