Yes, a beautiful example for why folder browsing is the wrong solution.
In Roon, it is a matter of a minute and ten clicks to merge these representations into one artist, where you choose the representation you want to see. Not just existing albums, but newly ripped or downloaded albums, will be automatically folded in under the chosen representation regardless of how they came in.
There are lots of systems that allow you to find some music when you know what you want, but that requires that the database of artists and music and relationships is in your head. And thus quickly becomes unwieldy, which means that some music becomes forgotten.
In this case, if you want to listen to River of Sorrow, do you look under Hui-Fen Min (Tidal and Spotify) or Min Hui Fen (Amazon CD)? And which representation was used for The Great Wall Capriccio? Either you remember the representation used for each album (database in your head) or you try them all (unwieldy). Or you tell Roon about the problem once and for all, and let it deal with it.
Add the USB folder as a Roon folder and then filter by storage location (Focus/Inspector/Storage location). Copy the files to a Temp directory and add that if the USB stick is too slow. Remove the files/folder when/if desired.
I’ve done this with a ‘mix tape’ stick a friend brought over and he was impressed with how Roon/Tidal integrated his stick into the database with other tracks, albums and influences etc. “Nearly as good as Spotify” he said.
Like @miklats I’d prefer if storage location went one level deeper than the Roon folder itself, because it would enable people to more easily create bookmarks or tags based on their existing organisation.
I have a few root folders configured in Roon for my music locations depending on origin, resolution etc.
Is there a practical limit on how many storage locations you could add? (Which in turn allow filtering by storage location)
Tagging is a viable solution only if you have the time to go back through your library and add tags. I have over 4000 albums that are pre-Roon. A folder browser would save me that work.
Load your library in puddletag, sets its masstagger to use musicbrainz and unleash. You can preview changes and accept/reject/amend at file, tag or album level. No work in it for you.
I did not suggest exhaustive tagging. I suggested cleaning up some cases when things go wrong. My thinking is based on a reasonable success rate of automatic identification, so I need to fix only the rare cases; I don’t want to spend the huge effort of annotating all those cases that Roon could handle by itself.
So far, I have huge success and we are discussing, in these pages, how to address the failures modes.
But i am aware that some people have a lower success rate. Depends on the kind of music.
If all your 4,000 albums are unidentified, Roon is perhaps not for you.
4000 have basic tags, about 300 are unidentified. Finding albums is the issue not identifying them. I’ve been on Roon for almost two years and am quite happy expect for this one deficiency, folder browsing, for reason discussed earlier.
I am not aware of any hard limits, I think the practical limit is the number of folders you’re willing to deal with scrolling through in the storage settings screen. That said, I don’t think we’ve tested above perhaps 10 watched folders, so who knows.
