What do you think?
Maintaining a "sidecar" to a file that doesn't exist doesn't make sense. And I'm not sure what purpose one about a link to a file serves. It's existence in the file system would be be rather confusing. So I don't think there's any need to represent pseudo files in the file system in any way.
As far as indicating what a pseudo file is linked to, this is consistent with what I've suggested—as far as it goes. What you're calling a "shortcut," however, is just a pseudo file that has been linked to an existing file. There would also be pseudo files not linked to anything. If a pseudo file is linked, there needs to be a way of indicating what it's linked to. Your suggestion is a sensible way to do that, although the file extension of the real file needs to be retained (e.g.,
Track2.flac.jrs). But it's not a real file anyway, so it could also be something like
Linked to (Path)\Track2.flac where the
Linked to is not part of the data—and therefore doesn't affect sorting, etc.
There would also need to be a way to distinguish
all pseudo files from real files. I'm not sure how important that is. It may be clear enough from [Filename] and unique icons. But in some situations, such as a pseudo album where some but not all tracks are linked to files, a bolder indication of the "file type" is probably warranted. Depending on how that is done, it may not be necessary to even use the JRS extension. The linked file would be displayed in [Filename], and it would be otherwise evident it was a link.
If 2 or more albums have the same track, most of the time I delete one of the repeated files and I end up with an incomplete album.
Just to be clear, I think we agree on what's important—the end result. In this situation, you would right click on the file you want to use (e.g., one identical to that of the subject album, but better quality) and select
Create shortcut. That would create a record that's an exact duplicate, but linked rather than directly associated with the file. You would then change [Album] to the value of the other album, and delete the real file in that other album. The task could be done in seconds. And by displaying only duplicate files, performing the task for multiple cases would be easy.