My library of ripped CDs is slowly expanding, and I just love how Roon automatically identifies albums. To digitize my library, I connect a CD ripper to my Roon server and let it add it automatically for me. However, I don’t like how Roon names the folders CD-Ripped-YYYY-MM-DD–HH-MM-SS, so I constantly have to go rename the files so that I know which album is which if I ever want to export them. I was wondering if Roon has a feature that I missed that allows you to apply the metadata selected in the remote directly to the files.
In the drive chosen, a folder will be created at its root, called CD-Rips. Inside that directory, we will create a folder called CD-Ripped-YYYY-MM-DD--HH-MM-SS, using the time that you started the rip, in UTC timezone. Inside this directory will be your files named trackNN.flac.
There is no way to choose a different drive, directory, filenames, or format.
The built-in ripper is limited and useful only to people who do not care about human-readable file names or file tags (which are not created, either), and who never want to look at or use the rips outside of Roon.
If you want control over names and if you want file tags, you have to use an external ripper like dbPoweramp. Lots of discussions about this and alternative rippers on the forum.
One could do the round-trip over Roon’s Export function. It’s is manual labor though and requires a PC. If you have that, why not rip on that with a decent ripping software that solves the naming and metadata issue altogether before copying to the Roon Server. Roon OS’ built-in CD-ripping is really only for people who don’t care (about filenames and metadata in files).
I’m checking back on this topic. While I absolutely love the “plug and play” nature, the naming convention makes it difficult to export my library outside of Roon.
I’d love to see an option, just a simple toggle, that allows Roon to rename these folders and track files based on the metadata it already identifies. It would save me a lot of manual labor since I value a clean file structure for backups. Is this something the team could consider?
Er, have you not tried @BlackJack’s suggestion of using Roon’s Export function? That does exactly what you are asking for - it uses the basic metadata to rename the exported files and folders. Example:
I did not realize that the export function was for also for the actual music files. For some reason, I was persuaded that it was only to export an excel sheet .
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