Transferring playlists from Roon to NW-WM1A is unnecessarily complicated

Hi,

I have a Sony NW-WM1A player, with my music copied on a big SD card. The folders are copied straight from my computer’s Roon folder, so the file structures match. Sometimes I listen to my music on Roon, sometimes on my Walkman. One thing I can’t get to work is having the same playlists on both, unless I just create them from scratch and start adding songs one by one (and my road trip playlists can have up to 200 tracks, so I don’t want to do that).

One of the issues is that Roon uses relative paths and the Walkman absolute ones. So I have to edit the m3u by hand, searching and replacing in the file to get the locations to match. It’s not too hard, but it’s annoying.

But still, that won’t do the trick. Roon playlists include album names taken from the file, not from the Roon database. Because I systematically import - identify - export and reimport, my folders always match the database name. I have no idea how Roon figures out how to locate the right files, but my Walkman certainly can’t do that. So now I have to manually search for names in the m3u file that don’t match the actual pathnames.

If I add to this the fact that Roon always want to export all the files when exporting a playlist - as far as I’m concerned, that’s a terrible design choice - managing the very simple task of synchronising the playlists on 2 devices that actually have the same file structure is insanely difficult.

So my first question would be: is there a better way to do this that I simply haven’t found? And if not, then secondly, could we at least get options in how the playlists are exported, so we don’t have to do all the manipulations by hand?

Cheers,

Alfy

Walkman can use relative paths in playlists… I am listening to one, right now, on my NW-A55.

Here is what I do to share the same library between Roon and my Walkman:

  1. I use iTunes on macOS for library and playlist management.

  2. I make sure the XML for iTunes is exported/updated. Then, when I copy to my NAS drive for Roon access, Roon picks up all of my music and playlists.

  3. For the Walkman, I use an app from Doug’s Scripts called: M3Unify. This app reads your iTunes library and can export a playlist to another location. Lots of options for exporting art work and transcoding the audio.

Me personally, I transcode to AAC with the iTunes encoder for max bitrate VBR. Sounds really nice. M3Unify will export a playlist, as well. Rinse and repeat for all of the playlists you want on your Walkman.

Sync the folder you exported to (from iTunes) onto your Walkman storage, under the MUSIC folder.

That’s it… no hand editing of anything.

Thanks for the reply. A couple of remarks if I may:

  • Your method uses 3 different pieces of software to manage playlists. I’ll admit it’s better than editing m3u’s by hand, but having to plug in iTunes in the mix? That feels like a big step backwards.
  • Maybe I did not get this right, but I understand your loading your Walkman with AACs? The whole point of getting mine and the massive SD card was really for me to be able to play my FLACs on the go. Also, your method would mean I’d need a full copy of my library in an iTunes-compatible format, which seems to me to be overkill.

Still, thanks for taking the time to post here, it’s appreciated!

Well, some additional info:

  • As Krutsch said, the issue is not about relative/absolute paths. The issue is that Roon insists on putting the playlist in its own folder, something the Walkman does not like much. The solution is to search/replace in an editor and remove the initial “…/“ from every line.

  • The next issue is with special characters. Some of this was sorted out when I made the playlist an extended m3u, by adding #EXTM3U. For some reason, it worked with some files but not others, despite the fact the special character was exactly the same (an “é”). Adding an empty #EXTINF: , in front of the offending line sorted a couple more, but still one file would not appear on the Walkman. It might be he Walkman’s fault rather than Roon, but it’s hard to tell.

  • As for the issue of Roon playlists referencing a false path, I have no idea where that comes from. “A horse with no name” became “Horse with no name”, and I cant tell why. For a box set with a file structure of Folder_name, Folder_name[1], Folder_name[3], etc., the Roon playlist would reference the first folder even though the file is in the 5th. Exporting and reimporting folders did the trick in some cases, but why would the Roon playlist reference a path that is incorrect in the first place?

I know the company mentioned some time ago that playlists were a weakness of Roon. Well, yeah. I’d love to see a lot more features for the playlists within Roon, but if at least I could output a well-formatted extend m3u8, I could manage with the few options currently available.

You can export the playlist to excel spreadsheet that might make this easier. Instructions here…