Clean up Library?

Just saw this in settings > setup

Under the “clean up deleted tracks”, Roon is showing I have 11441 deleted tracks. I don’t use tidal so it is not from that, I haven’t deleted any of my music from my drives or from within Roon, so why is it showing this? Is there anyway I can see the tracks and location it is referencing?

All this means is that at one time Roon saw files that it no longer has access to – this could be due to files being moved, or files being modified or renamed.

Right now, there’s no way to see the tracks being referenced.

This feature is really more of a diagnostic/troubleshooting tool – say you had a drive of 100k tracks, and then moved them to a new drive and renamed the files, or did some pretty serious bulk tag editing, and Roon considered the files to be “new”. You might end up in a situation where the database is tracking every single file more than once, and you’re starting up slowly or performing slowly due to a database of 300k tracks, instead the actual 100k. This feature helps you clean up the database, but references to “deleted” tracks isn’t a cause for alarm.

@mike - I wondered if there was an update on being able to see what tracks Roon will delete when you run clean-up library?

I have just moved RoonServer from Windows PC to a Synology NAS, the location of the files has not changed (approx 80,000 tracks), but I had to change the storage locations (just two) from Network to Local Folders. After completing the re-scan the Clean Up library reports it wants to delete 1135 tracks “not associated with a storage location”. I know that no files have been deleted recently, so I would love to know which tracks Roon now thinks are missing.

Hi @krjtx – sorry for the slow response here.

We’re going to try and make this less opaque but it’s not a simple process, as there’s no list of missing files – it more like a list of missing references, which are tied to the audio content of each file. The point is that there’s more to this change than just exposing the list in the interface.

Also keep in mind that there’s a lot of ways files can show up as “missing” that are totally benign – things like copying a file from one location to another, as opposed to moving it. Because the file is temporarily in two places at once, Roon will end up tracking two instances of that file until you clean up. Same deal if you “unfavorited” content on TIDAL.

Should you run “Clean Up Library” periodically? Under what circumstances should you consider running it?

No, unless you are periodically reorganizing your music library. This feature removes information about unavailable or deleted tracks from Roon’s Database.

Occasionally I will rename various directories in which my music files are located. Should I run “Clean Up Library” then?

I think of “Clean up Library” as a thing that should be used with a goal in mind. It’s not designed to be a form of periodic maintenance. I don’t think I’ve ever used it on my “real life” collection.

Sometimes it’s used to help Roon “forget” about bad edits you’ve made, especially if you’ve gotten some content into a hopeless state using “merge albums” or “identify album”. You can move the files outside of Roon’s view, use “clean up” to tell Roon forget about those edits, then move them back and start from a clean state with those files.

It’s also useful to clean things up after accidentally allowing Roon to see multiple copies of your library at the same time. This sometimes happens by accident when migrating from iTunes to directory storage, when migrating your install between machines, when installing a new NAS, etc.

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