It has a comprehensive tag editing system as well as being a A1 reproduction system for Audio & Video , its just not as “pretty” as Roon
I;ve been running into this issue more and more as I play my old favorites. I use EZCD to convert my cds to whatever format I please. Since I came from an iTunes environment and converted to Roon, many of my ALAC’s are showing up as corrupt. These ALAC’s play fine on my other platforms on my Windows, Linux and MAC platforms except for Roon. Converting to FLAC or using another converter is going to be a major chore. This means that I need I have to maintain two systems for my music since I use iTunes on my ipad and iphone. When I started with Roon, I assumed that this was a compatible platform for the most popular non-compressed formats. It’s not the cost of dbpoweramp, its the effort slaving over a hot pc or mac re-converting my music…
There are others tools but batch transcoding (including ALAC to ALAC) is a breeze with dBpowerAmp.
(I had a few old FLAC files reporting as corrupt, after a FLAC to FLAC transcode to clean those files up … Roon was happy with them.)
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yep, even if you have 200,000 ALAC tracks, as long as they have metadata, just do a batch convert with dbpoweramp from ALAC to ALAC, set to use the same metadata and naming structure, and you can do it all with a few mouseclicks, then come back the next day or so and all the files have been converted to new ALAC files (which likely cleans up something odd about file headers, etc., which is most likely causing Roon to choke on these).
*and since ALAC is lossless, converting from ALAC to ALAC loses nothing…
Good advice. My library is on on the MacHD drive and I have no tools on the Mac Mini. I can install dbpoweramp in the mac and re do my ALAC’s. More expense and more work to fix something that should have not broke in the first place. Maybe Roon should be upfront on what rippers to use before people commit.
I suspect Roon is a bit more picky on some ripped songs that don’t meet standards. This is probably a good thing in the scheme of things. I had some issues with some old mp3 files that were listed as corrupted on Roon, but played everywhere else. But when I actually examined these files, they had very bizarre settings used when created. Fortunately, these were old 1950s/60s radio programs (spoken word) or some random live concert bootlegs that were low quality to begin with. These were fine to simply re-encode as high bitrate mp3. And afterwards were fine in Roon.
And what standards are those and why are they not published? Should Roon publish something that describes their format acceptance standards? I’m okay with standards, I just want to know where I land after I have taken the leap.
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All the codec standards are published and available and discussed in great detail. Just google and look at the wiki’s for things like ALAC, FLAC, mp3, etc. I don’t know anything about EZCD. The usual high quality, secure rippers that I notice people tend to use are dbpoweramp, EAC, XLD (for Mac), CueTools.
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I’ve successfully played these tracks on an iTunes mac and an ipad. If Apple plays them then I would say these files meet standards. All of my other non-Roon platforms play these ALAC files, (Windows and Linux) with no exception. So it meets their standards. Maybe we should blame gremlins.
Apple is bad about making up their own standards that don’t actually follow the official standards. Lots of examples of this when it comes to digital music (metadata tag fields, storage of album art, etc.).
So you are saying that everybody is wrong except Roon. I hope you have evidence to back this up. I like the gremilins argument better. Can’t prove or disprove gremlins.
huh? no, I’m not saying this. I’m just trying to explain why you may be having trouble with Roon playing your ALAC files. I don’t own Roon (although I do have a lifetime subscription) or Apple (well, sorta, I have owned Apple Stock for a long time).
edit: and I was a long time user of iTunes, but moved on about 10 or so years ago. Still like my iphone, ipad though…
For the record, I use dbpa, rip to FLAC, and play these on my Roon or LMS systems. I convert on the fly from FLAC to mp3 for use on my iPhone or iPad, using a dbpa product (TuneFusion) and the foobar2000 mobile app on my iThings (and foobar2000 mobile would play FLAC files on my iThings too, I just dont’ feel the need for lossless when listening to headphone music in trains, planes, and automobiles).
I appreciate your help and you may be right. My only questions if why? I need specific answers to my questions.
Why? is my eternal question about lots of things. Particularly these days. 
FLAC is an published open specification …
https://xiph.org/flac/format.html
ALAC been Apple less so, but I did find this …
My view, for what it is worth, is that it’s not Roon that “broken” … it’s more likely the CD ripping software has deviated from or interpreted incorrectly the above
Those files may still play in some or even most streamers … but those files are still corrupt in that they don’t comply to the relevantly standard.
Nope, that’s a false assumption … it just means that Apple’s player implementation has a higher tolerance to file errors.
No formal testing, but that has been my experience.
That is not a false assumption because you base your decision on testing your environment. My initial tests were successful with ALAC files with Roon and my other platforms…I found a few errors but I was new so I did not put 2 and 2 together until today. I’ve only heard opinions and few facts.The important fact is that I have to re-rip my ALAC’s. Have you discussed with Apple on their error of tolerance for music files?. If so, what did they say?
Roon Labs made a similar assumption in their NUC update last week when a bunch of NUCS did not reboot after an update. They have a higher bar for testing. This problem did not show up in their lab but a number of customers had problems. Roon did a good job addressing this issue.
So if you can provide documentation on Roon tolerances vs everybody else, I would like to hear it.
you don’t need to rerip your ALAC files. Just batch convert from ALAC to ALAC and they should be fine. Worth testing in any case before going to the trouble of re-ripping.
It is indeed a false assumption. Apple is very much a “do as we say not as we do” company. I know because I used to work there. I could tell you many stories of how Apple told developers to implement something one way and did something very different on their own.
Just because an Apple device can read an ALAC file that Roon can’t does not mean there is not some “problem” with the file. I would not be surprised to hear that iTunes created an ALAC file that did not meet Apple’s own ALAC standard.
Having said all of that, it would be smart for Roon to get one of these files and see what their software thinks is wrong with it and try and understand why other software does not see anything wrong with the files.
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