This is really a 2 part post: a request for advice on ratings import, and a suggestion for future ratings enhancement in roon. I separated these to reduce complexity.
Topic 1: Importing ratings
I have a very large music library, and I have rated thousands of album on a simple 1-10 scale. The ratings are simple text in the album title, and I have a suite of perl and shell scripts I have written to use the ratings (“show me all my jazz albums rated 8-10”, etc). I would like to import this information into roon. Apparently in 1.7 roon added ‘ROONALBUMTAG’ and ‘ROONTRACKTAG’, a nice general capability that could be used for this purpose. I’d merely use my scripts to create a directory of links to, say, albums rated 8 in my library, use a music file tagging system to bulk add the ROONALBUMTAG = 8 tag to these files, and wait for roon to import the modified information. something like this.
so, my request of the community: is there a better way to do this? only automated, maintainable suggestions that keep the rating maintenance in my library, please.
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well, this post generated pretty zero interest or assistance. 
but perhaps my experience on this topic will be useful to someone. I did as I outlined:
Roon in 1.7 introduced ROONALBUMTAG and ROONTRACKTAG filetags as supported file tags that roon would translate into roon tags during album/track import. Sort of a “swiss army knife” capability that could be used for multiple purposes. In particular, users with curated repositories that wanted to preserve and features of their repository that are not direcly transferrable into roon could use these tags. great idea.
well, I find roon’s rating system limited (I explained this in a post which is now in “feature requests”. As explained in my original post above, I wanted to get my ratings into roon and be able to use them with roon focus (which already supports tags). I did as I outlined:
- in my linux repository, I created a directory of symbolic links of albums rated 9.
- using mp3tag’s batch capability, I added a ROONALBUMTAG field to each album, with value “rating = 9”. This took a couple of hours for 1000 albums, but little of my time
- after another hour or so, since roon was watching my music directory, these changes had been imported into roon and roon automatically created the roon tag “rating = 9”.
- I repeated the above for other rating values.
my total time investment? a couple of hours. system time - a few hours (I let it run overnight).
tags created? about 3000, for my ratings of 8, 9, or 10.
new capability in roon? (for example) using roon focus from the album view, I can now ask to see all albums in jazz or blues genres, of DSD or flac 192 quality, which I have rated 9 or 10 (and if I want make this a queue to play).
I mean, I find this pretty sweet. There are other ways to get such capabilities, but this was fairly efficient. I’d still like to see roon’s rating system improved (see my feature request), but hats off to the originator of this feature and its user friendly implementation.
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