CleanUp the music catalog

Roon Software Discussion
1

I’m a new user and I’m still working on importing my songs in my Roon server:

  • 600 artists
  • 1205 albums
  • 16274 songs
  • 75 composers

Most of it was ripped 10 years ago via Apple iTunes thus I have trim duplicates, add some metadata for box sets and moved some files to improve the structure.

I don’t have any playlists nor stats to preserve. I’m a Mac and Linux user. I can build a windows machine to use specific tools if needed.

I understand that I need to stop the roon server software before messing around although I don’t know if I should reset the database and reindex from scratch when most of the clean up is done.

What do you recommend to improve my current situation?

2

I’m also,wondering if I should have two folders:

  • music
  • classic

I would be able to have two different files structure, my classic will start with composer.

3

My library is a mess but Roon does a good job managing duplicates.

4

Tidy up the files before you add them. Use a program like Tagscanner. Keep your archive tidy, and Roon will love you.

It is worth a little work

My archive is meticulously organised and I had zero issues with Roon recognising anything.

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5

And what do you do when an album includes works by more than one composer?

6

You can do whatever you want

You can put all songs that start with a d in one directory and all the the songs that start with a d but end on a f in another.
Roon will melt it all together in a structured system.

So you can even put everything in one big folder.
The thing is, when you want to do something to your files outside Roon, it will be a bit difficult to find what you are looking for. A well based structure is handy.

What structure to obtain, that’s up to you.
I don’t have much classical music, most pop and rock. So everything is split to artist and then album.
Classical is “name of the album” only.

My files are then as follow track number - title.
Artist, album name, other metadata is embedded in the file.

I then upload to the Roon server. Keep the same map-structure there.
Roon imports the music automatically and makes some edits to its database (that’s the strength of Roon). For example, I upload a song from Bruce Springsteen in the folder “born in the USA” that’s in the “Bruce Springsteen” folder. It’s called “06 - I’m on fire”. It contains the album title and image in the file (I apply that info with a specific program) but Roon adds a lot of things to the file, all the other artists who worked on that song are mentioned, I have a cover of heather nova that’s brought to my attention, the Roon stuff you can say.

Roon is the program that melts everything together. It doesn’t really matter how you feed it, it will sort it out itself. You only keep structure for yourself

1 Like
7

The key point is that Roon expects an album to be represented by a folder containing the tracks of that album, and will try and identify albums on that basis.

If you have box sets, then please follow Roon Labs best practice for these:

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