On my NAS I have the following folder structure:
Music\Classical\Label\Album
And then I point the Roon storage at the Classical level. Is that the best way to do it or should I have a storage entry for each label. If so is there a limit to the number of entries that can be in the storage section? I have about 200 label folders in the Classical directory.
Thanks!
Personally, I just point to the top-level folder of my entire collection, so I have just one entry in 
> Storage. Let Roon do its thing - as the saying goes: if you have a dog, why bark yourself?
If I had a huge library, which Roon might struggle with, then I might split it into several chunks (e.g. Classical and non-Classical) and only enable single entries at a time so that Roon’s browsing performance could be improved.
I think your setup is fine, as long your music fits on 1 HDD (SSD).
In my case, I have 2 hard drives:
/media/linux1 with 1 top-level folder ModernAIFF
/media/linux2 with 3 top-level folders ClassicAIFF, ClassicDSD & HirezDSD
I would not go to wide at top-level, as @Geoff_Coupe said, let Roon do it’s thing.
Focus (eventually in combination with Bookmarks)is an excellent tool to deal with Labels.
(but even 200 bookmarks is (almost) impossible to deal with, as there is no real bookmark management)
You don’t say what the size of your library is. There are persistent reports of serious performance issues with large libraries. By this is meant both “depth”, (the absolute number of albums) and “breath” (the complexity of the folder structure).
If you are not experiencing performance issues and the folder structure you have come up with makes sense to you I would leave well alone.
If you are experiencing performance issues then a quite drastic simplification of the folder structure may be required. Roon was never designed with human navigable folder structures in mind. Quite the opposite. Until quite recently, folder navigation was a design principle red line. If you do have a large library beyond a certain threshold, then it is quite possible you may have to sacrifice your navigation label sub-directory structure and/or other navigation sub-directories to achieve a flatter simpler structure
What that threshold is, is difficult to say as it seems to depend on many factors but as a rule of thumb I have found that there should be no more than 2 subdirectories in front of a final “album” subdirectory. And that final album subdirectories should be no more than about 600-750 albums. Obviously, restructuring a large library like that would be a lot of error-prone manual work so I wouldn’t bother unless you are experiencing performance problems.
@tripleCrotchet makes some good points about folder structure. In my case, for my local content (1,445 albums stored locally out of a total library size of 3,361 albums), they follow a simple flat structure of \Music\Artist\Album, with 884 folder entries at the “Artist” level and “Music” being the top-level folder in Roon’s Storage screen.
My folder structure is based on source, ie CD Rip, Bandcamp, 7digital, HDTracks, Vinyl Rip, SACD Rip etc.
Mine is split Classical , Rock, Jazz
Then A-Z folders
Then Artist for Rock
Composer for Classical
I totally agree with Geoff , let the software do the work …
Very briefly written, what you should do is to simplify and reduce to a minimum the length of the text displayed by Roon for track path info.
This means having:
Here is an example of optimization, which gave very good results in my system:
My library is 6495 albums and 156797 tracks. My folder structure is Music[Genre]\Label\Album\tracks.flac. I try to name my tracks [discnumber]Track[tracknumber]. So for instance 01Track05.flac.
If you keep the name of the track in the name of the FLAC file, then it will not be useful (because the name of the track is the longest string).
Without the track name, the FLAC file name will be 2 characters (5, if the album is multi-disc).
i use the following folder structure:
for albums from artist \Music\Artists(A-Z)\ (artist name)\ (album)
for for compilation albums \Music\Compilation\ (Rock,Pop,Christmas,Top40, etc)\Album or if it’s a series like the dance classics then \Music\Compilation\ (Rock,Pop,Christmas, etc)\Series name\Album.
As many others have said, the folder structure doesn’t matter much so long as Roon can find and play the music. I have 8300 classical albums with 103,000 tracks on my server. I chose to structure it by music/ alphabet/ composer/ album, or, for albums with multiple composers, by music/ alphabet/ type/ album. “Type” includes groupings like symphony, trio, vocal, etc. I have never experienced any problems from Roon with locating and playing anything. The structure is for me, not Roon! It helps me find an album quickly, though I can, of course, use Roon to tell me where an album is located.
There is a wonderful phrase “Why have a dog and bark yourself”
Audio Library software is designed display your library , it doesn’t care about the folder structure it simply ignore it .
The only reason for a structure is for YOU to find your albums and to add new ones logically, Roon doesn’t care so why should you ?
The only reason to organize your folders is if you intend to use a USB drive attached to your streamer when the USB folder structure is your means of navigation , BUT who does that in these days of Roon?
I have 8k albums with 113k songs. These are split across an Intel I7 NUC & a PC NAS both of them running Ubuntu 24.04 LTS. Each computer has a single music directory with 17 genre folders with Artist / Album / Track files stored below that. This is my primary copy that I listen to.
I also have a copy on a portable USB drive & a remote backup copy of all my ripped music on a storage drive at the office. I wrote a computer program to check each file structure to make sure that all three copies stay in sync. This helps me make sure I didn’t forget to copy one of my new albums or if I decide to rename, recategorize or edit information that these changes are synchronized properly across the backup collections.
But like others have pointed out, I just point Roon to the top two directories on each box & I let the software handle everything else. I’ve been using Roon for several years & I’ve never had a significant problem.
