Path independent playlist formats?

[nichobi]

Does beets support any smarter and more stable ways of storing playlists? I currently use simple and handmade m3u files but a minor change from running mbsync or a change in path formatting usually leaves me with dozens of broken tracks.

Anyone have any solutions for this, either via beets or other software?

[sampsyo]

This would indeed be super cool, and it's an old idea for the beets data model that has not been implemented. For a sort of history of the options considered, you might see #123. Basically, I think a really elegant way to do this would be to essentially let tags be associated with an order—so a playlist would basically be a tag with ordering superpowers. But the devil's in the details, of course.

[RollingStar]

I haven't used it but I think Calliope is relevant.

https://discourse.beets.io/t/calliope-antisocial-music-recommendations/1532/

[nichobi]

I've been thinking about this for a long time, and ended up developing a plugin called yapl (yaml playlist), which defines playlists as yaml files (essentially just consisting of beet queries) and compiles them to m3u files. Early days yet but it's solved my reliability concerns