Classical and Singles Folder Structure

I’ve been reading about Roon for a few years now but am hesitant to take the plunge. I’ll explain.

I’ve been using the Squeezebox/LMS ecosystem with the iPeng app for years. I control the user experience to a large extent through a folder structure that’s intuitive for me to navigate. Specifically,

  1. A folder named Albums with subfolders by artist. Nested within each subfolder are at least one album by that artist.
  2. I also have a folder called Singles that contains hundreds of subfolders by artists. Within those artists folders are singles (not typically partial albums but an assortment of singles).
  3. Then there's another folder called Classical that contains subfolders by composer. Equally significant, each subfolder under a given composer is broken out by the individual works of the composer. In other words, I've often broken up an album and created individual subfolders for each work of a given composer.

I know Roon really shines with item #1, but how does it cope with #2 and #3? Will I end up having to do a lot of manual correction once Roon has built the library? If so, can you point me to a link that provides details of what the process entails?

Do the files themselves contain proper metadata tags? If so, the folder structure really doesn’t much matter. Roon can use the metadata to figure out how to manage everything.

Generally speaking without knowing the details of your file tagging, if the tracks are truly a single only release, for example, like B.T.O.'s non-album single “Down to the Line”, Roon will identify it as a single. If it is just an album cut that was released as a single, lets say you had Fleetwood Mac’s “Go Your Own Way” in that folder, it would identify and present it as the Rumors album with only 1 track underneath.

Imho, I would make the folders ( Albums, Singles and Classical) each a separate storage location; adding albums first before the other two so you can identify and resolve potentially different issues for each type.

For example, I have all Christmas music under a folder called Holiday which is not part of the other music storage location. I set it up as its own location, that way when it is not the Holiday season, I can disable it and not have all the holiday music clogging up Roon the rest of the year.

2 Likes

Great to hear. Yes, my library is mainly well tagged FLAC files with a small percentage of AAC and MP3s.

Thank you.

Thanks for your suggestion regarding different storage sources.

Just thinking ahead to accessing classical music by composer in light of Roon being album based… I suppose I can query Roon by composer and it will deliver all compositions associated with that composer. Pretty sure my metadata is clean based on what’s displayed via Squeezebox/LMS.

Again, thank you.