How to organize music and manage playlists - the Hardlinks idea

[Stamimail]

The IDEA
Introduced by @NotNull

In trying to implement this idea, it raises some questions.
Let's say that for this purpose we will use 2 folders:
HardlinkPlaylists - a folder that contains Hardlinks organized in such a way that they build Playlists.
MyMusic - a folder that contains all my music - folders and files.

For the sake of re-organizing all my existing music, I would like to start with,
Making a copy of MyMusic folder with all its content, and paste it as hardlinks in HardlinkPlaylists folder.
In this way, I will be able to for example delete unwanted songs from albums in HardlinkPlaylists, and the original albums are kept untouched in MyMusic.

1. As I understand it, the folders in HardlinkPlaylists folder have to be real folders, and must not be "junction points". Only the files should be hardlinks. So the first question is - How to make this copy? I guess a script is needed.

2. What about if I want to rename some filenames in MyMusic. How to update the filenames of the corresponding hardlinks in HardlinkPlaylists?

3. I want to make a unique number for each song, to be able to search for all its copies and hardlinks. Where in the file is it advisable to put the unique number?

4. Advanced Playlist - combinations of folders in HardlinkPlaylists.
Each folder in HardlinkPlaylists is like a Label/Tag for all songs within that folder.
You can for exmple to create folders:

Violin - and drop there hardlinks of all your songs with Violin
Piano - and drop there hardlinks of all your songs with Piano
Saxophone - and drop there hardlinks of all your songs with Saxophone

So that, if you want to listen to songs that contain:
Violin OR Piano OR Saxophone
You can search simply in Everything for:
Violin|Piano|Saxophone
and drag those 3 folders and drop them into an audio player.

The question is, What about if you want to listen to songs that contain:
Violin AND Piano AND Saxophone
How to search in Everything files that you can find their filenames duplicated in another locations?
OR in other words,
How to search in Everything files in Violin folder that have the same filename of files in Piano and Saxophone folders?

5. What are the limitations of this hardlinks method?
What will happen if you try to copy those 2 folders (HardlinkPlaylists and MyMusic) to another portable media? Is there a way to do the trick?

[therube]

5. see (& I'm not exactly sure), Everything missing Link Shell Extension Folders' content?.

[Stamimail]

5. viewtopic.php?f=4&t=6284#p20316

[NotNull]

5. SmartCopy

1. XCOPY X:\Music X:\Playlists /T /E

[NotNull]

As I understood (through PM) that you have issues installing Link Shell Extension [1] and you want also the hardlinks to be created - and not just the folder structure (that is how I initially interpreted your question):

- Download the command-line version ln.exe from here
- Start CMD.exe and run

Code: Select all

ln.exe --mirror X:\music X:\Playlist

- Done

That will create regular folders and hardlinked files.



[1] Might be caused by missing runtimes; check the download section at the end of the webpage to download those.