Best Processes, Learnings, Etc

hey everyone, posting this here in the hope that the community can help inform me a bit about learnings and best practices that some of you roon power users have found and love. if some of what i ask has been discussed (probable) please link me to things you think might be helpful. overall, just wanted to get some thoughts and questions out to you all, so thank you so much in advance.

first off, i work as a music professional. i bought a lifetime sub to roon 5-6 years ago - but after messing around with a NAS kicked that to the curb and opted for the nucleus from roon and have been extremely pleased with that. happy to detail my setup for anyone interested but the main purpose of this post is ask about workflows, best practices and other such items.

so at the moment, i have about 2.6TB of music on an external drive. that has not been put into roon, yet. this is mostly 320k mp3s. i have it all tagged and searchable on swinsian after iTunes went downhill. i have a large collection of vinyl that i attempted to sync via discogs api with my tidal & qobuz accounts - and that ended up putting about 25% of my collection i have on vinyl as favorites and that is the “base” right now for my library on roon. i’ve added some others but not significant amounts to this point. so that is where i’m at currently. now to the questions.

my first and biggest question is the best way to add AND remove albums. dragging folders into the watch folder on nucleus it shows up in roon. however, deleting it seems to leave the album in roon, but not on the drive. so would love insights on that and the best practices of adding and building your library.

has anyone experienced what happens if qobuz or tidal pull a record? does it stay in your library and when you go to play it it says not available? does the album disappear? curious about this as i weigh importing mp3 320k as backups to the flacs from the streamers.

has anyone found focus or other tagging to be a helpful resource in adding and building your library? curious what people have come up with - as i am basically at ground zero with my library and can really build it.

a few random questions - has anyone experienced volume changes? i was playing audio the other day thru a mac studio display - had to turn down to about 25-30 in terms of volume. the next day i had to turn up to 100 and it wasn’t as loud as the day before at 25-30? nothing changed in the audio settings. have noticed this type of behavior in the past, curious if anyone else has?

has anyone browsed via label? i tried this the other day and it didn’t work. for instance if you wanted to look up souljazz record or godwana records and see all the releases is that possible?

would love to hear what everyone has found on some of the questions above or any other tips or tricks, audio settings, etc etc. thanks so much!

For Qobuz it stays in your library and is flagged not available. This happens fairly often. It’s not always because the album is withdrawn, sometimes it’s just a new version and the old one is withdrawn. You still have to delete the old version and add the new to the library. Can’t speak for Tidal.

Label indexing only works on items in your library. Albums on streaming but not in your library won’t be browsable this way. This recent post has quite a lot more detail

Delete it from the album editor


Scroll down

Or after deleting the files on the disk, head to Roon Settings > Library > Clean up library

Yes many people, and there are as many ways to use them as there are people. E.g., I have a bookmark for a focus selection that shows me all library albums for artists who collaborated with one of my favorite artists. It is called “World of Giant Sand” and contains every album in my library

  • where a member of Giant Sand played
  • where people played who were guests on a Giant Sand album
  • that contain a composer credit by a Giant Sand member
  • that was engineered by one of the main engineers Giant Sand worked with

I have tags for albums covers I like, album covers that look similar (like the Pairs game), artists I saw play live, which friend had recommended an album to me, albums that need credit fixing, and so on. Whatever I want to remember about an artist or album

For the same album? I haven’t apart from those I can attribute to my preamp volume, sinuses, or whatever.

I use volume leveling (set to Auto) and DSP room correction, currently configured/measured with HouseCurve but there are other ways to create the filters like Home Audio Fidelity or other software/providers

Not tried for a while but I have a suspicion that Album> Delete leaves a folder plus artwork, ie deletes just music files, could be wrong.

My practice would be to

Use “file manager” in either Windows or Mac to delete the album folder. Ie your Drag n Drop
Roon will then catch up on the change
Then use Settings>Library> Clean up to purge the Roon Db

I think a much safer method. The reason that the album stays visible is that it’s still in the Roon db until you clean up. If you re-copied it would miraculously reappear

The missing album bit Tidal occasionally leaves an orphan when a specific recording is replaced. Roon unfortunately doesn’t “auto reattach” the link, so when you spot yo have to do it manually

I guess it does that, leaving the folder/artwork. Doesn’t bother me personally and one can delete them later on the disk of course. A matter of preference

The Settings>Library> Clean up also has a drawback: It removes Qobuz albums that have become unavailable and possibly replaced by a new Qobuz entry which Roon doesn’t recognize as the same album. And if there are both deleted local files and unavailable Qobuz albums in the cleanup list, there is no way to clean up only the deleted local files and leave the unavailable Qobuz albums alone. I prefer not doing that because I prefer still having the unavailable Qobuz album in the library, so that I can replace it manually when I come across it. If it gets removed by the library cleanup, I lose all reference to it

You can get around that , if you have an external USB for example you could move it to that drive Roon will autocorrect, then disable the drive and clean up using the third option on the clean up screen

Bit of a frab but works and wouldn’t touch your Qobuz favourites

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I so wish that the cleanup would show a list of what will be cleaned up before doing anything and giving me the option to jump to the library entries from the list; and a checkbox for each list entry with a clean up yes/no option :slight_smile:

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