Access to the full Database

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to access the full Roon database, and not only to the albums I have in my library. When I want to discover new albums, I go to wikipedia/spotify to see what’s available but it would be easier if it was incorporated in Roon.

Does this make sence???

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Makes sense to me! I desperately want to “connect” my roon database to Discogs or MusicBrainz. As a music collector the intent would be to be able to see gaps in my Discogs collection.

Technically, it isn’t Roon’s database. They ‘rent’ the data from various data vendors, so I don’t know if there’s a ‘database’ to legally access.

I don’t think access to Roon’s db would get you very far. If I’m not mistaken it’s a leveldb database, which is a NOSql key-value database, not a tabular relational database.(although according to documentation there seem to be underlying tables)

Hi all. Coming back to this topic after a while. Hope it’s fresh…

So if I understand correctly we assume that the “data” pertaining to artists, albums, etc. is actually not stored anywhere but is read into memory on the fly or …?

Thanks. I’m a database guy for a living but not these kind of databases.

Adam

I would imagine it’s not a technical but commercial constraint in licensing. Roon has in effect a single user license to the providers, if they opened this up directly it becomes a different license and would either cost them much more or the users a load more.

From what I understand the entire metadata set of Roon is stored in the cloud. It’s a “custom” dataset built from multiple sources (we know of rovi/allmusic and musicbrainz, Roonlabs may use other sources as well). For all the albums in your Roon library you’ll have a copy of the respective metadata cached locally. You cannot directly access this stuff on a database level but of course you can

  • view it in Roon :slight_smile: ,
  • export some of the metadata to Excel or
  • access it via the Roon API.

I think for what you want - comparing your library to musicbrainz or discogs ALL - you could try an Excel export of your albums and artists and use this to somehow … … if the metadata was primarily sourced from musicbrainz you will even get a musicbrainz ID so you could match this directly against the musicbrainz dataset. I have no idea if that would be possible for allmusic as well, I believe they don’t have a public API but you get those IDs too.


On the other hand: Roon Radio is supposed to show you what you’re missing in your collection. If you have access to one - or both - of the streaming services supported by Roon it will be a window to the music world you might enjoy much more than comparing data sets.

Also Roonlabs mentioned plans to expand the Discover feature based on what was done for Roon Radio so in the future this could be another way to find out what your collection may lack.

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Thanks, @anon47919701! I’ve seen and used the Excel export but that’s so … 1999.

I’ve seen the API docs. What I haven’t determined is whether I can use the restful API to query my collection. Is there documentation for that somewhere that I haven’t come across?

Adam

No idea - that’s probably a question for the #tinkering:roonapi area.

Not going to be very helpful then, seeing how bad the search function is and how bad the Radio is for 70’s rock.