playlink/README.md

playlink

Deduplicate music libraries with hardlinks. playlink finds songs that exist in both a master library (e.g. your full Albums) and a slave library (e.g. a curated Singles library) and replaces the slave copy with a hardlink to the master copy. Each song then takes up disk space only once, while both libraries keep looking exactly the same to Plex, Navidrome, Jellyfin and other media servers.

It ships as a single Go binary with an embedded React web UI and SQLite state, packaged as a small Docker image, in the style of qui.

What it does

Files are matched by their path relative to each library root. Any folder layout works (Artist/Album/Title.ext, Genre/Artist/Title.ext, flat, …) as long as both libraries use the same one, so that a song sits at the same relative path on both sides. The fallbacks below catch small differences, and a scan warns when the two layouts don't line up.

Situation	What playlink does
Same relative path, byte-identical	Status identical. Link with one click, in bulk, or automatically after each scan.
Same path, different bytes (re-encode, different tags)	Status different. Manual review with a codec/bitrate/bit-depth/duration comparison.
Same title, different format (Song.mp3 vs Song.flac)	Status similar (other format). Manual review.
Same title after ignoring track numbers/punctuation (01 - Song!.flac vs Song.mp3)	Status similar (similar title). Manual review.
Same top-level folder and title, but a different subfolder	Status similar (same top folder, other subfolder). Manual review.
(opt-in) Approximately the same song in another folder, e.g. a single vs. the album version or a disc folder	Status similar (approximate match), with the reason shown. Manual review.
Only exists in the slave library	Status unmatched. Never touched.
Already the same inode	Status linked.

Approximate matching is an opt-in setting on each pair. It finds songs whose file name or folder doesn't line up exactly with the master library and recommends linking them to the master's album version:

Case	Slave	Master
Single → album version	Avenged Sevenfold/Hail to the King - Single/Hail to the King.mp3	Avenged Sevenfold/Hail to the King/01 Hail to the King.flac
Disc folders ignored	Avenged Sevenfold/Nightmare/04 Buried Alive.mp3	Avenged Sevenfold/Nightmare/Disc 1/04 Buried Alive.flac
Small title differences	Avenged Sevenfold/City of Evil/Bat Country (Remastered).mp3	Avenged Sevenfold/City of Evil/03 Bat Country.flac

It searches the same album first (disc folders ignored), then the artist's other albums, then, as a last resort, the whole master library. Titles are compared by similarity against a threshold you choose (85% by default), and release labels such as Single Version, Remastered or Explicit are ignored. When a song exists on several releases, the studio album wins over singles, EPs and compilations, even if the master library also has the single. Linking such a match places the file at the master's path in the slave library (the emptied single folder is removed), or you can keep it in the slave's current folder.

Safeguards:

• Different recordings never match. Live, Remix, Acoustic, Instrumental and similar versions are kept apart, including whole live or acoustic albums.
• Matches found outside the artist's folder require both files' artist tags to agree.
• Ambiguous candidates are skipped rather than guessed.
• Approximate matches are never linked automatically.

Manual review shows both files side by side and ranks their quality: lossless beats lossy, then bit depth and sample rate, then codec-weighted bitrate (Opus and AAC count for more per kbps than MP3). You then have three choices:

• Upgrade / link to master copy. The default. When the master copy is better, the match is flagged as an upgrade and listed under the Upgrades filter. The master is kept because it belongs to a complete album. If the master is lower quality, playlink warns you and asks for explicit confirmation.
• Use slave copy as master. The override. The slave's better file replaces the master file, the old master file is quarantined, and both libraries share the better file.
• Ignore. The pair is hidden from review until you un-ignore it.

Rename folders to match (recommended first step). When a scan finds slave folders that are the same as a master folder with a different spelling (City Of Evil vs City of Evil, AC-DC vs AC_DC, look-alike hyphens), the warning offers to rename the slave folders to the master's spelling so their songs match by path. Do this right after a scan, before reviewing matches. A preview lists every rename with the differences highlighted; conflicts (the slave already has a folder with the master's name) are skipped with the reason. Only slave folders are renamed, nested folders revealed by a rename are handled in the same run, every rename appears in History and can be undone, and the library is rescanned afterwards.

Bulk review. Switch the Review list from Songs to Albums to see one row per album (disc folders are folded in), with counts of upgrades, identical files, songs where the master is lower quality and approximate matches. Tick whole albums, or expand an album and tick individual songs, then Link, Use slave copies as master, Ignore or Un-ignore them in one go. Before anything runs, a preview shows how many songs will be processed and which are skipped and why, with warnings and examples for downgrades, approximate matches, duration mismatches and files that move folders. Downgrades are skipped unless you tick a box, and replacing master files needs an explicit acknowledgement. Each song then goes through the same checks as a single action.

Tag editor. The Tags tab browses either library. Click a song to edit its tags (title, artist, album artist, album, track and disc numbers with totals, year, genre, composer, comment), or tick several, such as a whole album, to edit the tags they share. It works for MP3, FLAC, M4A, OGG and Opus; other tags and cover art are kept. Review's compare panel also has Slave tags / Master tags buttons. Edits are safe with hardlinks:

• A file used by only one library is rewritten to a new file that atomically replaces it; the old file goes to quarantine.
• A file hardlinked to the other library is updated in place, so both libraries see the new tags and stay linked; a verified backup copy goes to quarantine first. You can instead choose to change only one library's copy, which breaks the link.
• Every written file is verified: the new values must read back, and the decoded audio must be identical to the original.
• Each edit is listed in History (old → new values) and can be undone; an in-place edit interrupted by a crash is rolled back on startup. Dry run applies.

Album editor. Every folder in Tags has an Edit album button (like AudioShell's folder view). It shows the album fields once (album, album artist, year, genre, discs, composer, comment); a change there updates every song in the album, including songs in Disc 01/Disc 02 subfolders. Below is a track grid to edit each song's disc, track number, title and artist, with Number tracks in order (fills track and disc totals too) and Artist = album artist. All songs are saved as one job with the same safety checks as above.

Album art. The song and album editors can swap the cover. Search iTunes, Deezer, MusicBrainz (Cover Art Archive), DuckDuckGo or Google by artist and album or by free text; only square images are shown, and results under a minimum size are hidden. You can also paste an image address or upload a file. The chosen image is converted to JPEG at the saved size (1000 × 1000 by default) and can be embedded in the songs, saved as cover.jpg in the album folder, or both. OGG and Opus can't hold embedded art here, so they use the folder image. A replaced cover.jpg goes to quarantine, and every change can be undone from History.

• Auto-match art… walks the current folder, looks up each album on iTunes, Deezer and MusicBrainz, and applies a cover only when the artist and album clearly match (release suffixes like "Deluxe Edition" are ignored). Albums that already have art can be skipped; albums without a confident match are listed and left untouched.
• Sources are chosen in Settings → Album art. Google needs an API key with the Custom Search API and a Programmable Search Engine id (cx). DuckDuckGo has no official API and may stop working. Images are downloaded by playlink itself and never from addresses on your local network.

Organize (rename files from tags). The Organize tab sets how files are named, in the style of Lidarr: an artist folder, an album folder, a track format and a separate multi-disc track format, with presets. The default is {Artist Name}/{Album Title}/{track:00} {Track Title}, and multi-disc albums get {Medium Format} {medium:00}/… → Disc 01, Disc 02.

Tokens: {Artist Name}, {Artist NameThe} (The Beatles → Beatles, The), {Artist CleanName}, {Artist NameFirstCharacter}, {Album Title}, {Album TitleThe}, {Album CleanTitle}, {Release Year}, {track:0}/{track:00}, {medium:0}/{medium:00}, {Medium Format}, {Track Title}, {Track CleanTitle}, {Track ArtistName}, {Genre}. Like Lidarr, {Artist.Name} or {Artist_Name} puts dots or underscores between words and {ARTIST NAME} / {artist name} change the case. The artist is the album artist, falling back to the artist. Colons can be replaced smartly (A: B → A - B), with a dash, space dash, space dash space, or deleted; other characters Windows/SMB rejects are replaced (AC/DC → AC-DC) or removed. Brackets and separators left empty by a missing value are cleaned up (Album ({Release Year}) without a year → Album). Examples are rendered by the same code that renames files.

Rename now… checks the slave, the master or both, then shows every change grouped by destination folder (old → new, selectable per file or folder), plus skipped files with the reason and a Fix tags button. Files are only moved within their library, so contents and hardlinks never change; lyrics (.lrc) move with their song, cover art follows a whole folder, and emptied folders are removed. Each rename is in History and can be undone, and the library is rescanned afterwards. Organize automatically (off by default) applies the same renames during every scan. A slave file that is a hardlink of a master file at a different path is still recognised as linked.

Backups (Settings → Backups), similar to Sonarr. A backup is a zip of playlink's database (settings, library pairs, scan results and history, not music files) taken safely while the app runs. Choose a folder (default /config/backups), a schedule (off, every 1, 3, 7 or 14 days) and a retention period for scheduled backups; Back up now makes a manual one (kept until deleted). Backups can be downloaded, deleted, or restored, also from an uploaded zip. A restore is validated first (damaged backups and ones from a newer version are refused), then playlink restarts to swap the database in and keeps the replaced one as playlink.db.pre-restore-…; Docker's restart policy brings it back automatically. Optionally, back up before every action in live mode: one backup per action you start (and before scans change files), never one per file; if that backup fails the action does not run, and the newest 10 are kept.

Export. The Review tab's Export CSV button downloads either the current view (filter and search applied) or the entire scan. Each row has the match status and type, a recommendation, both paths, where linking would place the file, codec, bitrate, sample rate, bit depth and duration for both sides, the quality verdict and any notes. The file opens cleanly in Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice (UTF-8, and cells a spreadsheet would treat as formulas are escaped).

Build mode covers the "start fresh" workflow. Point the slave at an empty folder, browse the master library, tick the folders or songs you want, and playlink hardlinks them in at the same relative path. Remove deletes slave files, but only ones that are hardlinks of the master file.

Safety model

playlink is built so that no user data is ever lost, even if it crashes or loses power mid-operation:

• Dry run is on by default. Every action is recorded in Activity as planned until you switch to live mode.
• Files are re-verified before any change. Both files must still be plain regular files with the same inode, size and mtime that the scan recorded, or the action is refused ("changed since scan").
• Identical files are compared again right before linking. The check is a full byte-for-byte compare, like cmp, and it also detects files that change while being read.
• Replacements are atomic. The new link is staged next to the target (.playlink-tmp-*), checked by inode, and then rename(2)d over the target. The path always points at a complete file.
• Nothing non-identical is ever deleted directly. Before a non-identical file is replaced, a hardlink to it is created in the quarantine (<slave>/.playlink-trash/<op-id>/…). It can be restored with one click until the retention period (default 30 days) expires, or until you purge it.
• Every operation can be undone. An identical link is undone by writing an independent, verified copy back. A quarantined file is undone by restoring the original.
• Removal is limited to hardlinks. Build/Remove only deletes a slave file that shares an inode with the master file, so the last copy of any data is never deleted.
• Paths are confined. Libraries and the quarantine must be inside PLAYLINK_ALLOWED_ROOTS. Symlinks are never followed or replaced, .. is rejected, and master and slave may not overlap.
• Mutations are serialized. Only one filesystem mutation runs at a time, and only one job runs per pair.
• Auto-link is conservative. It only acts on files with the exact same path, and it skips files modified within the settle time (default 10 minutes) so it never touches a download in progress.
• Interrupted operations are cleaned up. Operations cut short by a crash are marked interrupted on startup, and their staging files are removed.
• The web UI requires login. Passwords are hashed with bcrypt, sessions use SameSite=Strict HttpOnly cookies, and state-changing requests need a custom request header and a same-origin check. Logins are rate-limited, and a strict CSP is sent.

Quick start (Docker / Unraid)

services:
  playlink:
    build: .            # or your published image
    container_name: playlink
    user: "99:100"      # owner of your music files (Unraid nobody:users)
    ports: ["7480:7480"]
    environment:
      - PLAYLINK_ALLOWED_ROOTS=/data
    volumes:
      - /mnt/user/appdata/playlink:/config
      - /mnt/user/Sapphire/Media/Music:/data/Music   # ONE mount containing both libraries
    restart: unless-stopped

Then open http://<server>:7480, create your account, and add a pair:

• Master: /data/Music/Albums
• Slave: /data/Music/Instances/cdnutter/Singles

Run a scan, check the Review tab, and turn off dry run once the planned actions in Activity look right.

Hardlink requirements

• Both libraries must be visible through one bind mount. Docker bind mounts are separate mount points, and link(2) fails across them (EXDEV) even when they are on the same disk. Mount a common parent folder, as shown above.
• Both libraries must be on the same filesystem. playlink checks this when you save a pair and before every operation.
• Unraid: hardlinks through /mnt/user require Settings → Global Share Settings → Tunable (support Hard Links) to be Yes (the default). If the share uses a cache pool, make sure your mover preserves hardlinks. Every link is verified by inode, and a failed link aborts safely with the original untouched.

Configuration

Variable	Default	Description
PLAYLINK_ADDR	:7480	Listen address.
PLAYLINK_DATA_DIR	/config (Docker) or ./config	Where the SQLite database lives.
PLAYLINK_ALLOWED_ROOTS	/data	Comma-separated folders that libraries and the quarantine must live in. / is refused.
PLAYLINK_SECURE_COOKIES	false	Set to true when served over HTTPS.
PLAYLINK_FFPROBE	ffprobe	Path to ffprobe. Without it, quality comparison and tag editing are disabled.
PLAYLINK_FFMPEG	ffmpeg	Path to ffmpeg, used by the tag editor.
PLAYLINK_LOG_LEVEL	info	debug for verbose logs.

Hide quarantine from Plex (Settings → Media servers) writes a .plexignore into each pair's quarantine folder so Plex does not pick up quarantined songs; new quarantine folders get it automatically. Turning it off removes the file again, but only if playlink created it.

Per-pair settings (in the UI) are file extensions, auto-link, approximate matching and its threshold, scan interval, quarantine folder, retention and settle time.

Development

Requires Go 1.27+ and Node 22+.

make test          # go vet, go test -race, tsc
make build         # builds web/dist and the ./playlink binary (UI embedded)
cd web && npm run dev   # Vite dev server on :5173, proxies /api to :7480

Layout:

cmd/playlink        entrypoint, config, scheduler
internal/fsops      safety-critical primitives (confined paths, cmp, atomic link/replace)
internal/engine     scanning, matching, link/promote/build/remove/undo, jobs
internal/probe      ffprobe wrapper and quality ranking
internal/store      SQLite schema and queries
internal/api        HTTP API, auth, embedded UI serving
web/                React + TypeScript + Tailwind UI