A way to correct file metadata PLEASE!

I’ve already raised this issue twice before, here and here. I’d love to get this resolved. I’m guessing that I might not have been specific enough in my previous posts to indicate what I want, so I’m going to spell it out more clearly here.

I have lots of albums that come from multiple sources. Much of the metadata on those files is in pretty bad shape. I’ve spent a lot of time in Roon correcting the data displayed in the program so that what I see in Roon is nearly perfect. What I want to be able to do is to write the metadata that is shown in Roon either back into the original file or into a copy of the file. I had been led to understand that the “export” feature of Roon did this, but at least on my system, it doesn’t do anything other than make a copy of the existing file with the existing metadata unchanged.

I am needing this because I have a several portable audio players that I would like to put my files on, but no way to get them with the correct metadata. I know that I could use a third party tagging program to fix the metadata, and I would do that if there is no other solution, but I’ve spent literally hundreds of hours working in Roon making sure that the metadata displayed there is correct and I really don’t want to have to duplicate that effort with another program if I don’t have to. Is there any way to do this? If not, please consider this as a feature request. I don’t think that this is something that only affects me. I imagine that lots of users would relish an export feature that would enable them to transfer their files to their other devices with correct metadata.

Oh, and just to make things perfectly clear, I’m NOT looking for format conversion, just metadata repair.

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Hi Robert,

I’ve unflagged Support as you’re not experiencing an operational failure.

At the moment Roon doesn’t change your files, with the exception of a local library delete which is hedged round with checkboxes. So there is no current capability as you describe.

The devs will see your post in Feature Request, along with feedback from other users.

Although it would undoubtedly be convenient to write to files in Roon, there are times when I’ve mucked things up in Roon and been pleased that the underlying files are unchanged.

I think the answer could be a “Write Data” function that enables the user to write selected albums with edited metadata to the file. But I would like to see it password protected and possibly even reversible.

Having said that, I can understand the “no changes to file” policy, b3vause from time to time users have complained that Roon alters their data. At the moment the Devs know that is not so, because Roon has no capacity to write to files. Once that capacity is introduced then Roon will be “in the arena” as regards data loss complaints.

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A post was split to a new topic: Export issues with multiple versions

I’m afraid I’m with Andrew on this one. I really don’t want Roon to start writing back to file metadata, and much prefer to use a third party file tag editor to do this. Part of the reason is that the Roon metadata model is far richer than the one-dimensional file metadata model, and mapping down to that is not (I think) going to be straightforward. I feel far more comfortable starting at the other end - using a file tag editor, when necessary, to get file metadata sorted, and then, again if absolutely necessary, adding final tweaks in Roon.

It’s unclear because of the way this thread got split up, but if you look here, you’ll see that this feature already exists. In the both of the posts that I linked in the top post, I acknowledged that it is important that Roon doesn’t touch the original file metadata but that it is important to be able to create a COPY of the files with Roon-corrected data for use with other devices. That’s what the export feature was supposed to do, and that this capability was broken (that’s what I was calling out in the earlier posts) but has now been fixed.

Actually, now that Roonlabs have repaired the export feature, this is a waste of effort. You can now rip your tracks with whatever tagging your ripping program imposes, and as long as you never use the tracks anywhere other than Roon, you don’t need to do anything more. If you need to use them elsewhere, export makes a copy with the Roon metadata incorporated. Perfect. This solves the problem where you have disks that aren’t discovered by your ripping program where you’d either have to manually type in track names or have tracks named “track 1”, “track 2”, etc. Now that export is fixed, I’m not sure that I’d ever really need a third-party file tag editor. Bravo Roon!

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