I’ve been a long time user of Jriver and recently decided to give Roon a go because of all the great things I’ve heard, and just how great the interface looks. One thing I loved about JRiver is how quickly I could customize something based on metadata, and it doesn’t seem like I can do that in Roon. In fact it seems like Roon has a bit of a mind of it’s own, so I have a couple of questions I was hoping some people with more experience might be able to help with.
I’ve noticed in the Artist list it adds extra artists that I don’t have tags for in an album. For example, the recent Queen live album now has an artist listing for Adam Lambart and it’s also under Queen. I would like it to use only my tags so I don’t see a listing for Adam Lambart. I’ve also noticed Sammy Hagar and the Waboritas also now has another artist listing for Sammy and the Wabos. I guess this is kind of the design of Roon, but is there a way I can force it to only use the Album Artist tags and not create it’s own entries? I currently have my settings in Roon set to prefer the file information. The only sections let Roon have the preference is album art and I think lyrics, but it still seems to do what it does. I’d like to have full control of what I see in my artists list.
In JRiver I’m able to break it down to see Recently Added albums within the last two weeks, and break that down even further so I can look at Recently Added albums by release date. So for example I can look at all the recently added albums from the last two weeks that were released in 2022. So far in Roon it doesn’t seem like I can really do that. Ideally at minimum, I’d like to be able to have a way to search for albums by release year. Is there a way for me to see all the albums in my collection that were released in 2022? I use this pretty heavy in JRiver so I can find new releases and new albums I’ve gotten and get them spooled up to play.
So the focus feature is really helpful and you can filter for many critery. You can also chose if the criteria should be included (standard, a small plus on the left side of the filter criteria) or excluded (color turns red, small minus left of the filter criteria).
So this would be the Beatles albums in my library that where not released after 1989 and are not a soundtrack:
This is very true, Danny Dulai, the COO of Roon Labs, has said that “Roon is very opinionated software”.
In the Import settings of Roon (Settings > Library > Import settings) you can elect to prefer your file metadata tags over what Roon knows, but Roon does have the habit of filling in extra data that it knows about releases. The only way to stop this I think is to force Roon to forget about the album and make it unidentified, but then you will lose a lot of the richness of Roon’s knowledge.
I too am a 10+ year veteran of JRiver. I started running Roon in parallel 6 years ago. I still maintain my JRiver library but rarely use it, it’s there for video .
I still use it to maintain tags, Roon is NOT a Tag editor.
My advice is roll with the punches for a while using Roon’s data. Firstly you don’t have to do anything in terms of tag maintenance, and secondly the hyperlinking between artists, albums etc will work better if you do.
Also if you haven’t yet then get a Tidal or Qobuz subscription, that alone sets it apart from JRMC. The discography function is an absolute winner.
You will soon “fall under the spell” . Don’t get me wrong JRiver is an excellent piece of software and I still support it by buying upgrades annually but Roon is a whole different experience. I really could never go back unless something horrible was to happen to Roon
If I can help in any way on the transition then please PM me on the forum
I run Roon, JRiver and LMS. Kind of go back and forth depending on my mood at the time. Lately, I’ve been using JRiver the most. I’m big on playlists and ratings, both of which Roon is terrible at. My wife pretty much uses Roon exclusively.
And another reason I use JRiver more. The search. Roon’s search still often doesn’t find what I’m looking for and I can always find it instantly in JRiver.
Exporting playlists directly from JRiver to Roon’s music folder picks them up automatically under Playlists. I find PlayDoctor curates better correlations within my local library and Roon
playback brings the value add when playing them. Best of both worlds.
Yeah I import JRiver playlists into Roon. Which in general works ok. However, with smart playlists based on things like # of plays or ratings etc. don’t work in Roon since I can’t rate tracks or track the number of plays in Roon.
Appreciate all the responses, they’ve been very helpful. I plan to give Roon a good go for the rest of this year to see if I want to make the jump, but at least for now I’m not pulling my hair out on some of this stuff!
