Tracks in Playlists Not Sorted by File Name in Roon (ref#6O0ETL)

[rooner]

What’s happening?

· Other

How can we help?

· None of the above

Other options

· Other

Describe the issue

Sorting tracks in a playlist

I have a lot of music albums and collections saved in my computer as file folders. Each file in a folder is an audio track. Each track starts with a two digits number. These numbers put my tracks in their correct order in each album.

I create playlists in roon and I ask roon to put all the tracks of a folder in a specific playlist.

At this point the problem comes up: roon sorts my tracks in the playlist in a nonsense order, it doesn’t consider the names of the files.

I can sort tracks according to their path, which includes file names: this sorts my tracks in the correct order, but the problem is that this sorting is not saved. If I go to another playlist and then I go back to the previous one, the path sorting is lost.

I can play my folders just going to the folders section and making roon play a folder. However, I need playlists, because some collections of mine are a mix of tracks that I have in my computer and tracks that I have in qobuz. In playlists I can put all mixed tracks in a correct order.

At this point the only solution left is, whenever I create a playlist that is made entirely by files in my computer, to manually reorder the tracks in the playlist one by one. This sounds nonsense to me: why do I have to reorder manually my thousands of tracks contained in hundreds of playlist, since I have already a simple and clear order set my the names of my files?

The problems is that there isn't in roon an option to set as default the tracks order in playlists according to file names.

Are there any solutions?

Describe your network setup

Windows PC used as a server

[DDPS]

Sure. Make an .m3u playlist using a text editor (if using paths and filenames, this should be relatively easy), put it in a directory different from the files it references (but within the hierarchy of your Roon library), and then Roon will consider an “imported” playlist and show it to you in your custom order.

For reference, I only use imported .m3u playlists, because there is another benefit - they work in software outside of Roon, should you have a parallel system or move to something else in the future.

[benjamin]

Hey @rooner,

Thanks for sharing your report! @DDPS makes an excellent point above, you should be able to get what you’re after by importing an .m3u playlist, here’s more information on this:

Importing Playlists

Since .m3u playlists follow file order, unlike Roon’s internal playlists, which rely on metadata, .m3u playlists are simple text files that list file paths in a specific order. Roon generally respects this order when importing them. Just be sure the .m3u file is formatted correctly with absolute or relative file paths.

Let us know how it goes!