I think that a major problem facing the Roon team is that many, many users do not have a very well organized digital music collection. I say this because when I scan through the “new posts” of the Roon community (particularly after the recent 1.6 update) I see lots of problems/issues that appear to stem from disorganized music collections.
As a long time Squeezebox user (and recent Roon convert) I’ve been collecting digital music for well over 10 years. My collection is very well organized and I take great care in “cleaning up” my digital music files. I make sure that each “album” resides in its own folder along with a cover file and often a simple info text file. I also rename, retag (by tags I mean the flac tags) and renumber each album, removing many of the confusing tags (tags are like DLNA - too open a format with no reliable standardization) and editing the remaining tag fields so that they conform to my simple standards. I must be doing something right since Roon easily found all my music and “identified” almost 80% of my very large digital music collection.
Of the remaining 20% “unidentified”, these are split between bootleg/live recordings and obscure and newly released jazz recordings. Being able to view the “info.txt” file for these “unidentified” albums would be very useful since these info files often have recording information and even reviews.
By the way, I like your opt-in option. That could work.
Again I do understand what the Roon team is up against when comes to dealing with so many clueless users and their disorganized digital music collections. Perhaps adding a simple Primer about organizing a digital music collection to the Roon Knowledge Base might prove helpful.
See my last response - I completely agree. What I’m speaking about are all the “unidentified” albums, many of which are bootlegs with no metadata available.
An even bigger reason not to base it on files in folders is streaming. There is no folder, so this must be a database edit UI, like adding images.
And the other reason is artist bios, no artist folders.
We have to abandon folder location as a factor.
For some reason, I find that streamed albums are more poorly annotated than stuff I buy. Not obvious why. May be because I go further afield. But that doesn’t explain it: ACT albums on Tidal have lousy metadata but ACT’s website has great documentation, writeups on both albums and artists.
I add my own in id3 tags. These are mainly live recordings we have from gigs we host and so I have all the data, I just fill it in and they show like anything else in Roon. Then I use bookmarks for a quick find and group.
It’s a little too late for me to use that approach since the amount of id3 tag editing required would take me several months working around the clock. I will go the batch convert *.txt to *.pdf approach as suggested by @Derek_Wyman above.
@Jazzfan_NJ like me are you one of those that find tagging and organizing a relaxing activity? Speaking for myself it scratches a particularly peculiar itch and I find it crazy meditative.
I don’t find tagging and organizing to be relaxing per say but I don’t find it to be a particularly taxing task. I have a standard work flow that I follow so that everything gets done correctly. Right now I’m focused on manually identifying the over 9,000 albums in my collection that Roon has not identified. Many of these are bootlegs and will never be identified, hence my need to be able to “see” the info files. The remainder of my “unidentified” albums are split between obscure or European or Japanese jazz albums, mislabeled albums, incorrectly split multi-disc sets and odd ball versions of various albums. I have been getting pretty good at manually identifying albums and playing around with the track grouping.
I still don’t have a clear understanding of how Roon treats “identified” versus “unidentified” albums but there are few things that I’ve figured out:
Duplicates of unidentified albums are not treated as duplicates. For example if I have a CD quality version and a hi-rez of the same identified album then Roon lists them as one album with multiple versions. With unidentified albums each version is listed as a separate album.
Unidentified albums have no reviews and credits (when available for the identified album)
Are there other differences between identified and unidentified albums?
