Alright. Now that I’ve played around with setting up my ideal Roon Core and connecting my external HD to it this is amazing. Love it. One question…
In trying out my hands in figuring out how to play a WAV album from my external HD I went through the process of going to “settings” then “storage” then “+add folder” then set it up so it’s now watching the folder for new files and it says under that “10 tracks imported” which is perfect, that’s how many I have on there currently to test this process out. So it says they are imported but I am not sure I understand where they are imported too and how to access them. Are they just integrated into my library? If so I cannot find where. Is looks to me like I’m just playing music like normal and not choosing to play these specific WAV files from my external HD. Meaning in my library I am not seeing a separate file or playlist or label that designates what is playing are the files playing from the external HD. The album is How Do You Live by Amon Tobin. When I go to that album to play it previously before the import I would see the Tidal T to the right designating that it is playing form Tidal. Even after going down the path of importing it from my external HD I only see the Tidal T next to the album. This tells me that I am playing it from Tidal and not my external HD. How can I make sure I am playing the files from my external HD and not just streaming from Tidal?
Imported means ita added to your Roon library the files remain on the original hdd they are not physically moved or copied it accesses them from the HDD you added as storage.
Roon has a concept of versions for albums. If you have multiple versions of the same album they are grouped together. Room will always set the.highest resolution available to be the primary format it plays. If Roons identified the album correctly then it will be available under the Versions tab on the album. Here you can set which version is the primary one you want Roon to play when you press play. If you have no versions tab then Roon has not identified the album. Wav files have poor metadata generally and Roon relies on metadata to match to the correct albums. It will attempt by folder and file names but often these are not enough.
As I said if it doesn’t appear then Roon has likely failed to identify it because your wavs dont have metadata.
Let’s see if it’s imported at all.
Go into settings in Roon. In Browsing Preferences turn on show hidden tracks and albums this will help see all versions of albums as separate entities.
Goto Album view and then do a filter for the album and see if more than one shows up. I
If not then clear the filter. We will use focus in the albums section to reveal any unidentified albums to see if it’s there .
In album click on focus to show the options. Scroll until you find the inspector section. You will see one called Identified. Select this, it will add it to your focused on section at top of focus. You will see a + next to Identified click this to turn it to a - . This will then show you albums Roon has failed to identified.
Go through these and see if it’s one of them you can then try and edit them and change Roons options for identifying them to get a match to it manually.
Wav is a poor container for music libraries as it doesn’t have the advanced metadata that’s used in flac files. What it does have isnt standardized and Roon wont see it. Some ripping systems such as Naim rely on a metadata sidecar file, but this is proprietary to them and isn’t read by other apps or devices. It’s best to rip in flac or AIFF which also keeps decent metadata. You may be able to use a metadata tagger to help but not sure they work well with wav. sonkKong is a good one.
I saw that you said that thank you. I’m a noob here so a little patience goes a long way.
All of those directions were prefect, thank you. I found it and rewrote some descriptions and created a specific playlist in which all my future music purchases will live. So moving forward I should not use WAV right? Are there any other file formats for downloaded music that Roon doesn’t work perfectly with that I should skip? I’m not married to WAV.
While Simon has a point in his reccys to use a format which support tagging, you can for sure use WAV’s for Roons part.
It’s just easier to maintain a library that has got some basic metadata, and you won’t be “married” to Roon either should prefs change…
I didn’t read the whole thread, but it should be a walk in the park to select Albums > Focus > Storage and select your external drive.
ut the whole point of Roon is that you don’t need to distinguish, polish and manicure your files, they will be imported if they are “reasonably identifiable”
For ease of us Flac files are the best, lossless quality, smaller size and generally has good metadata so apps can identify them. Even then though some rare or more obscure albums often don’t exist in Roons metadata services so some manual intervention may be needed.