I have an extensive (5000 CD’s) collection of classical music which has been organized on my HDD into folders and subfolders. Now, I know over the years that Roon will never support a Folder structure so I accept that. However, for us classical listeners, albums are of the utmost importance because we do not listen to “songs”. If I listen to a Wagner opera, all the tracks must be listened to in sequence.
This is what I want to do:
Group all the tracks in the folder into an album. My FLAC files are already sequentially numbered as tracks in the folder. Is this possible in Roon, and will it respect the sequence of the tracks in the folder?
Categorize each album into Composer - Type. For example, I have > 800 Beethoven albums and I have them organized into “Beethoven - Piano Sonatas” or “Beethoven - Symphonies”. If I search for Beethoven, I do not want all 800 albums to show up at once.
I would prefer to be able to navigate without having to type. I bought a touchscreen monitor for this purpose. The top level interface should ideally show an icon of each composer, and clicking on the composer should open all the subcategories, from which I can enter and find the album I want to listen to. Is this possible?
Roon expects to see the contents of an album as tracks in a folder, and it will associate the folder with an album release, when it successfully identifies the tracks as belonging to that particular album.
If you have ripped your CDs such that the tracks of each CD reside in a named folder, then Roon is in a good position to identify the CD and the album release that it represents.
If you have mixed up the tracks from different CDs and put them into arbitrary folders, then Roon is not going to be able to identify the source CDs, and will mark the resulting “albums” as unidentified. Roon will then fall back and use any file metadata that is present in the tracks to display the content of the albums.
I strongly recommend ripping your CDs into individual album folders to give Roon the best chance of identifying the original CDs.
Once your CDs are imported into Roon, then you can use Roon to slice and dice your collection - the Focus and Bookmark tools are very powerful. For example, I can use the Composer browser to select Beethoven, select only his Compositions that exist in my library, and then use Focus to select the instrumentation and form that I am interested in. I can Bookmark these Focus criteria for future quick reference.
