Adding music files to internal storage on NUC for Roon Core installation - what format should the files be in and how to organize them for Roon to recognize them? (ref#2JNQ9E)

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@BobB

Am I supposed to just Dump each album folder on the internal storage?

Essentially a folder per artist and a subfolder for each album. There is some good guidance here:

@connor

However, Roon is not designed as file management software; your subdirectory structure has to provide a scaffold, so to speak, for indexing to work properly. The schema generally resembles Directory Folder → Artist Folder → Album Folder → Track Files, but it’s highly flexible with other schema as long as they roughly match the ratios of folder-to-file therein.

Specifically, make sure that you’re avoiding the habit of dumping thousands or hundreds of tracks from a wide array of albums and artists into the same subfolders in your local storage folders. Looking at the breakdown of your library above, you seem to have a much larger volume of both albums and tracks by some artists than Roon’s analysis expects. It might be worth breaking these up into multiple Artist-level folders so neither folder has a wonky Folder : Object ratio.

Roon’s indexing is flexible, but designed to function within the time-tested music industry file storage directory schema of Artist → Album → Track. It’s best to make sure your subdirectories mirror this taxonomy where possible.

@BobB

Just a pile of wave files and let Roon Figure it out??? …

The files should at least have artist and album title file tags to help Roon understand what’s what.

File Tag Best Practice

Multi disc sets must follow this structure:

FAQ: How can I ensure multi disc sets and box sets are identified properly?

Generally, I‘d recommend starting with importing one album at a time and then check after each one that everything is in order. Later you may want to increase the batch size after you get more confident. Too many people dump 200K tracks into Roon at once and then are surprised that they can’t figure out any problem they run into.

Going album by album and ensuring that albums and their credits are correctly identified also helps to avoid creating lots of duplicated artists stubs, which otherwise can happen as described here:

Valence Confusion Abounds

The thing is this: If an artist exists properly as a known artist in Roon (e.g., may have a Valence picture, a biography, and/or is credited on other albums), but no album where they are credited is already in your library, then Roon often (or always?) creates a duplicate artist when you import the local files. I think this can occur even if the newly imported album is identified, but definitely if it is unidentified. This duplicate artist will show under the name as it appears in the file tags…