I plan on doing a tidy up of my NAS and as part of that, my music will be located in new directories.
Will roon recognise the music files already exist in the database and connect the meta data or will they be treated as new files and lose play counts etc?
I think Roon will be able to deal with this. Probably best to test it out first with a few selected albums?
Oh - and stop your Roon Server while you are moving things around.
So, you have to be careful with the file path. I know this may sound dumb, but if there’s anything different in the relative file path it’ll think they are all different files.
So for instance let’s say you had been pointing to smb://192.168.1.100/media/ and the directories inside were ~/flacs and ~/dsd, and then instead you pointed it to smb://192.168.1.100/content/music/ and the directories inside were ~/flac and ~/dsd, then all the contents of ~/flac would be reanalyzed, you’d have to re-identify any albums you’d once previously identified, etc.
The main lesson is: this is not a time to reorganize files - keep everything exactly as it is when you move it, and pay close attention to the file path.
As long as you do that, and click on the three dots to the right of the storage location and click edit (instead of adding a new location with the files) then this is very smooth.
I recommend making a backup just before you edit the location in case you get anything wrong.
When this works it’s like butter. And if you change a single letter (and you have dozens of albums to manually identify as I do) this can be watt more work than you were counting on!
This is not correct. I’ve just moved an album from one location in my internal storage in a ROCK/NUC to another location in the storage to test and Roon instantly updated its database to the new location and is playing the album quite happily.
Did it keep play counts/edits?
Looks as though it has, but I should do some more tests to make sure.
Yup - moved another album, and play counts were preserved. So I assume that edits will be preserved also since Roon sees this as the same album it always was…
Note that I’m moving things around within the same Watched Folder - not moving things to a location that would require setting up a new Watched Folder…
@Geoff_Coupe Well, I’m not saying it won’t play. It’ll play fine. I’m saying it will add them again as new files (ie, that if you’ve done things like identifying albums, merging albums, manually edited meta data, etc) that that won’t show up. I’m pretty certain that if you go into Settings and look at “clean up library” you’ll see that you have a huge number of “deleted files” (which of course aren’t deleted, they are just moved). It’s been 3-4 years since this happened to me, but I remember learning this very painful lesson. So possibly under the covers Roon has made some changes here, but I still think it’s such being very careful - given I’ve done a non-trivial amount of cleaning up.
Good luck all!
And I’m saying that Roon has not added the albums as new files - it knows that they are the same objects, just that they are now in a different location…
Hmm. I’ll do a test. Thanks. It may have occurred to me because I moved them across storage devices/types at the time (could have been from one NAS volume to another, or from a USB drive to a NAS or vice versa). Like I said it’s been a while, but promise I’m not making this up - I recall the re-editing/re-identification like it was etched on my brain. For me, the ounce of prevention is worth it, even if what I ran into was an edge case. But good to know it’s smart enough in a lot of cases to make this automagic.
Wait, but this is exactly my point! If you’re moving to a different location, you need to edit the root directory of the watched folder, not add a new watched folder. I know this works fine within the same watched folder!
Just trying to save folks some pain here.
Agreed - and this is stated in the Migration help articles, but what @Paul_Whittaker said in his OP was that his music would be located in new directories - not in a new location of the Watched Folder…
And I got confused by the title of the thread. Clearly I got burned once and am in a better safe than sorry state still 
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