Hi Marty,
I’ve extracted your post into a new thread. To add to Nick’s response I will try to clear up some nomenclature and assumptions to help you understand what Roon can and can’t do. Sorry in advance if some of this repeats stuff you know but I’m going to start from the start for other users who may search this thread.
Firstly, what format are your files in ? If they are FLAC, for example, then in addition to music the file structure will include metadata about the music. This metadata is called file tags because they are tags within the file (I expect you know this because you refer to tagging 50k + tracks).
There are a number of applications in Windows or Mac which enable users to write and edit file tags (I use mp3tag in Windows). In your case you have a file directory structure that can be used within such a file tag editor to create file tags for all music files within a given directory. This is done outside of Roon.
Your case, being a collection of concerts, is unusual because commonly tags are extracted on ripping an album. So, for example, there is an ORIGINALRELEASEDATE field which Roon can use to import data regarding an album, but it may be that some other field has been used for your collection, or it may be that there are no file tags with date data at the moment.
Roon can be configured to use the metadata within the music files (file tags), or to use its own database. You can do this on a file by file basis or as a general default setting. Obviously you would want to configure Roon to use file metadata for the folders containing live music recordings.
This KB article sets out how Roon extracts metadata from file tags and what tagging practices assist it to best do that. It isn’t directly aimed at live music recording, so I’m going to flag @joel and @mike to pop into this thread and let you know what file tags would be best to use in order for Roon to extract metadata into its own database.
By having each concert in its own directory and perhaps with Track numbers for the different songs within the concert, I would expect Roon to treat each concert as an Album. This will be convenient for using the Focus tools discussed below.
Turning away from how Roon uses file tags to extract metadata on importing files, let’s look at what can be done to view albums within Roon. There are a number of tools here. Firstly the Focus tools enable you to filter albums in many ways including release date. If your concerts had file tags which populated the date file tags used by Roon then you could immediately Focus filter by year and create a bookmark to retrieve that filter with a single click. That filter view is dynamic, meaning that as you added further “albums” for that year they would appear in the filter view, without further intervention on your part.
In addition to the Focus filter tools it is also possible to add tags within Roon (Roon tags). These are stored in the Roon database, not in the file, so they are not file tags. You can create a Roon tag with any name you choose. You can apply tags individually or to a group of albums (all albums within a filter view for example). Roon tags are not dynamic, meaning you would need to tag each “album” upon import. This KB article sets out more information about Roon tags.
I hope the above is of assistance. I think Roon will enable you to view your collection of live music with greater ease than you have in the past, but it may be significantly assisted by some initial batch file tagging outside of Roon.