Hi, I have a vast collection of MP3 DJ sets - mostly 1-2hrs long. I have hundreds of them. Also, I have hundreds of individual tracks that are not part of albums, compilations or DJ mixes. I’ve left them out of ROON as I’ve dearly wanted my library to be perfectly clean and tidy. I have multiple users at home and they’d go berserk if a hundred random DJ sets with no cover art and strange names appeared in the library.
How can I manage this cleanly in Roon?
I’d dearly like to have more than one library inside Roon - just like my Plex server does. It lets me have multiple audio libraries on my server and choose from that of friends so when I feel like dj mixes or random separate tracks I’ve collected over the decades, I can switch to the dirty library and not care that it isn’t beautiful with cover art, identified and tagged.
Now, on the road I can easily switch to my plexamp app and hit the same server as Plex and Roon both point at the same folder. But when I’m at home, and my end point is only configured to take Roon as the input, I really need a nice way to see all those messy random files.
For reference, I am running the core on Ubuntu. And Plex amp and Roon are both on that. At home I have a mac mini with an external digital output running into my Denon Amp. The pathway is optimised for the amp/speakers at home using convolution curves etc inside Roon. My amp is too old to do any of this itself so I rely on Roon heavily for room correction.
Not easily is the simple reply !! Roon is basically album based and ID is really centered around albums so singles etc just don’t fit and will probably remain unID’ed
One thing I do may be of interest , I have a NUC/ROCK with an internal 4Tb SSD and an external USB HDD. (this is my “Non Core Library”, duplicates , stuff I am unlikely to listen any time soon but don’t want to lose etc)
I have set Roon loose analyzing both , then I disable the USB drive. in Settings > Storage
The SSD now becomes the main library , and Enabling the USB Drive adds all the files within a few minutes , the analysis is already done so no whirring circle top right
When you have had your nostalgia , just disable it again.
This drops the size of my library by about a third and I think speeds things up and certainly declutters the views. Inevitably I am loathed to delete albums and tracks so this keeps the Core library looking neat
Check out the “Various Artist Thread” for a few pointers
Another option could be to flag the tracks as hidden. You can then use the “Show hidden tracks and albums” under Settings > General to show or hide them. Note that this works on a device level and not a profile level.
Don’t add a watch folder that’s looking at the top of your music directory tree. Separate your library into distinctive subfolder of the main music folder then you can add the into Roon as an individual watched folder. That you can focus on or not focus on.
Eg
/music is your top level directory
Then create sub directories under this to sub categorise such as
/music/djmixes
/music/singles
/music/albums
You add each one of these as a separate watched folder. In focus you can then focus by path and save bookmarks to easily be able to switch which to show. Or you can enable/disable the watched folder to exclude them.
I use a usb drive attached to my Rock not sure if you can do this with internal storage and point it the same.
That’s a real shortcoming then, but this way is a workaround for something Roon doesn’t offer so not surprising. Then op could add a USB drive and add sub directories and still use the local for the albums stuff. Not ideal but it would help.
They are essentially the same except for the thermal management and home automation stuff. I would imagine it would work the same for the storage as ROCK?
No real answer to your question, other than what’s been suggested above, but I feel your pain.
Of course you can try and add metadata to your mixes and try to enforce some level of tagging (no easy task, especially if you want to Respect des fonds to use archive theory parlance), but at the end of the day Roon really isn’t build to handle this kind of content well.
Which is a shame, as obscure singles and DJ mixes tend to be exactly the the kinds content that isn’t available from Qobuz/Tidal and hence why you might want to maintain those files locally and therefore want a product like Roon to manage such a library well.
I opened this ticket a few years back, but it’s had vey little traction. My guess is most Roon users, and possible the Roon product team themselves skew heavily, if not solely, towards album centric listening.
Yeah - you can do this, but it ain’t really recommended, and you must disable the default Roon Optimized Core Kit Internal Storage folder, otherwise all hell will break loose.
That’s interesting re focus on a path. I already have my music sorted into folders for types e.g. albums, singles, dj mixes, mix cds, film sound tracks, separates. I just hadn’t added DJ Mixes or separates to Roon library. This could work for me but it sounds like I’d have to jump into profiles for all other household users and hide these folders.
You can’t hide them under profiles. Profiles do buffer all except have a different listening history they see the same library. It’s not as flexible as Plex where you can deny them stuff.
Oh right, so hidden is hidden for all profiles. Well that will be just fine. I’ve added the folders, focused by path, selected all, edited and set as hidden. I didn’t realise how many I had - 988 DJ mixes, 2932 separate songs from various random things. Taking a while to have Roon hide them. But thankfully some of the DJ mixes have nice cover art so I’ll go back in and focus on hidden and multi select the favourites with cover art and let those go back in the library.
Should I add each of the 3 (or more) sub-folders first as separate watch folders, and then remove the main top folder from being watched after Roon does its thing? Just want to make sure I don’t screw anything up with my current setup. I appreciate any advice.
I simply use MP3Tag and group them as a compilation/album and add some album are and name the tracks, etc. At least this way I can play the whole lot or create separate albums to listen to.
