[IanMSpencer]

I'm trying to get my head around visualising this one and how it could be coded/debugged and maintained.

You say you may have several songs sharing a file so replacing the file could affect the other songs.
While MSP allows you to have multiple files in a song, you don't have to use that feature.
Personally, I wouldn't put that specific file into songs with other files, I would use a seperate set list for each of your "songs" that use it (you are effectively doing this manually adding it into a group of files). You can then use the edit tab to see which setlists a song belongs in and the best way to make your proposed change.

Using your current method, I believe that you could enter part of the filename into the main filter to see "songs" where it is used; you still need to know your library to determine how to update the file.

Geoff

As I play with 4 different groups as well as sourcing my own material, I am not really in control of all my source files, which are a mixture of individual songs and PDF booklets.

For example, at a rehearsal we might realise that we are getting in a pickle because the 15 year old chord sheet is just wrong and the band leader will write a whole new chord sheet with a different name (the original might have been a photocopy) and I'll still want to keep the majority of annotations - so things like pickup, tone controls, amp settings, rhythm pattern - they might need shifting around, but they are still relevant. Others might just be a re-release, but it is a song that I have in multiple versions, bass, guitar, band a, band b, band c, and the key changes. Some songs are shared across instruments and bands. So I need to look and ensure I am substituting the correct file which, as mentioned before, I cannot entirely depend on file names, especially as different versions from different bands already have been renamed as part of the duplicate file on import process.

Next scenario will be our band leader who likes issuing full PDFs of all our songs which has an index I have hacked into a CSV. There the corrections tend to be odds and ends and it doesn't really matter if sliding a new file in alters lots of songs as the page layout rarely changes.

So, for my purposes, being able to switch an individual song while retaining annotations, I don't want to depend on file naming, because that is too error prone.

It's not perfect, and each case needs a little care, but once a song is in my system across playlists and collections, I don't want new duplicate songs being generated by the import process due to the vagaries of file naming when I can see the song I want to update.

As Mike has pointed out there is an option that does more or less what I am looking for I think I'm OK. Just about to try it!... Success, though I am not sure it will work for replacing a revised PDF book file, but for 40 odd songs it probably is worth just fiddling with the file name to force the replacement.