Thread: Beware of Roon's Limitations with Playlists

Beware of Roon's Limitations with Playlists

Roon has an issue handling Playlists: They cannot be properly exported outside of Roon for use with other programs.

For example, if a user is using Roon to create Playlists from local files (that is, his/her own files), when exporting that Playlist, the tracks appear in alphabetical order. They do NOT appear in the order that the user organized them. A user could have spent a lot of time organizing a Playlist in the proper order, yet Roon will not export the track names in the correct order.

It is even worse if a person exports a Playlist that includes BOTH local files and files from a music service like Qobuz or Tidal. In this case, Roon WILL NOT even export the names of the tracks from the music service!

Bottom line: Roon Playlists are really NOT transferrable. They only work within Roon. So, if you have NO local files, it is better to create the Playlist either in Tidal or Qobuz. That way the Playlists can be used by Roon but ALSO can be exported for use with other programs/services if you ever decide to switch music service provider.

NOTE: Roon has been aware of this problem for years. However, they still have have not addressed it. A simple solution is for Roon software to export a M3U file. These kind of files are commonly used to allow portability of Playlists.

I am transferring all the playlists that I have built over the years to Spotify.

That includes my iTunes, Tidal, Qobuz, and Roon playlists.

By making Spotify my main platform, I will be able to easily transfer them to whatever service I choose to use in the future. Spotify is here to stay. The rest, who knows!