Date-added data wrong after moving to ROCK

[Brock_Bair]

Roon Core Machine

Previously: Roon Server running on a 2017 MacBook Air, with a 1.8Ghz Dual-Core i5 with 8Gb RAM

Now: Roon ROCK running on Intel NUC11TNHi5 with 8Gb RAM

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Verizon Fios router, connected via ethernet, no VPN

Connected Audio Devices

Schiit Bifrost 2, connected via USB

Number of Tracks in Library

134,000 tracks

Description of Issue

Recently, I moved my core from an old MacBook to a Roon ROCK setup on an Intel NUC. After I got everything set up technically, I restored from a backup onto the ROCK, and reconfigured my storage settings appropriately. Everything has been working as it should, with one exception …

My “date added” data is now all wrong. A large number of my albums seem to have been assigned a “date added” of June 24, 2023, which is a date that has nothing to do with anything. It’s not the date the albums were created or modified, and it’s not the date the albums were imported to Roon.

Before I moved to ROCK, the dates added were all correct. Presumably, they were correct in the backup I restored as well.

I’ve tried changing the import date settings, but none of the three options results in correct date added dates. The one it’s set on now – file creation time – yields the best result, but still, there are hundreds and hundreds of albums that now have a date added of June 24, 2023.

Here are a couple screenshots:

Here are my current import date settings:

I’ve also tried this (toggling off the IMPORTDATE tage setting), but it made no difference:

Here’s an example of an album with the reported date added = June 24, 2023:

And here’s the same album in Mac OS’ finder:

As you can see, the created date is Jan 20, 2021, which is what should be listed in Roon as the date added, according to my import date settings. (What’s weird here is all the different “dates modified” for individual songs, including – probably not coincidentally – June 24, 2023. I have no idea what’s going on with that, but I assume it’s an OS thing, and Roon is reporting the wrong data, in any case.)

Can anyone help me figure out what’s going on and how to straighten it out? Date added is an important field in how I use Roon, and it would be a tremendous setback have the data be all wrong, with nothing that can be done about it.

Thanks!

[Brock_Bair]

One additional bit of data, to illustrate the magnitude of the problem … here are the albums that list June 24, 2023 (the mystery date) as the album’s date added. As you can see, the problem is affecting 24% of my library:

Spot-checking quickly on the page, this seems to be a completely random selection of albums. I can see no threads of commonality between them.

24% (at least) of the data being flat-wrong will fundamentally affect the way I use Roon, much for the worse. Any / all advice is very much appreciated.

[SvenM]

Although I don’t have an answer as to why you are encountering this issue, or how to fix it, I might have a workaround.

I’m a fairly new user myself. (Less than 3 months in.) During this time I’ve been experimenting with a number of things. As part of this process, I have sometimes removed albums and reimported them at a later stage. Over the past three months, I’ve also purchased new music. As a result of my experiments, the import dates also shifted and did not correspond to the actual date I (first) imported them into Roon.

Looking into the system settings, I noticed the “Use IMPORTDATE tag when present” settings. After some research I found an app called Yate, there may be others, which allowed me to set tags specifically known to be used by Roon. Enabled the IMPORTDATE setting and did a first test, which was successful. Using the app I was able to tag all my music owned prior to starting with Roon with the date I started using Roon. I also set the actual purchase date for music I purchased after starting to use Roon.
Working in different batches, the operation on my approximately 10000 tracks went fairly smooth. Every now and then, an update was not applied. Typically because I was also performing file renames at the same time. Setting it to a different date and back to what I wanted fixed the issue.

So far this may not yet sound like a solution for you, but the Yate app also allows you to set the IMPORTDATE tag based on other information. This could be the creation date of the file, or even the folder containing the file.
Based on your screenshot, it seems that (at least some of) your music is coming from iTunes. On the resources page of the app I also noticed a “sample action”, which is some sort of custom script that can set the IMPORTDATE tag based on the date a track was added to your iTunes library.

[Brock_Bair]

Thanks, @SvenM. I checked out Yate. Seems like a powerful tool, but I’m not sure it’s what I need right now.

I tried Yate’s iTunes-to-IMPORTDATE tool, but that doesn’t work for me, because most of my tracks have an iTunes import date of the same day last October, when another problem (of my own making) forced me to rebuild my iTunes library.

If there’s not a Roon fix waiting for me, what I’ll need then is something to update Roon’s IMPORTDATE tag for each track with the data from the track’s date created field, rather than from the iTunes import date. I couldn’t find anything in my quick survey of the app … do you know if Yate can do that?

Thanks,
Brock

[SvenM]

@Brock_Bair

If there’s not a Roon fix waiting for me, what I’ll need then is something to update Roon’s IMPORTDATE tag for each track with the data from the track’s date created field

If all else fails, that should also be possible with Yate. But I do understand that’s Roon solution is preferred.

It’s actually quite strange that the third option “Roon import timestamp” is not showing your original import date. That’s the option I would expect to work.

[Jim_F (Minimalist)]

I have almost 1600 linked Tidal albums and, for the most part, the same albums linked in Qobuz. I manually edited the import date of all the Qobuz albums to agree with the import date of the Tidal albums so they would appear side-by-side when sorting by Date added. It was a pain and took several days.

You have to highlight all the tracks in a given album, then click edit tracks and change the import date and save.

Now, I am very careful to add both Tidal and Qobuz links at the same time to keep them lined up side-by-side. I have three Roon cores, so I do the same for all three cores.

EDIT: Open the album and highlight all the tracks. Then click on edit and edit tracks.

[Brock_Bair]

Thanks, @Jim_F. I’m not following one (important) thing, though … where are you able to edit the IMPORTDATE tag? I can’t find that functionality in either Roon or Yate.

Thanks!

[SvenM]

AFAIK, Roon will never write anything back to your files. All metadata is stored in Roon’s internal database.

[Brock_Bair]

Is anybody @support going to help me with this? It’s been a week since I posted.

[Brock_Bair]

And now it’s been two weeks. Thanks for the help, @support.

[Geoff_Coupe]

The Support team is less than a handful of people, and they have a long queue of technical issues that they are dealing with. I suspect that they also triage the queue to give priority to high-impact issues.

Your issue is more of a “how do I do this” than reporting on a showstopper bug.

@Jim_F has shown you how to edit the Import date field in Roon. This is held in Roon’s database; as @SvenM says, Roon will only read metadata tags in the files - it will never write back to these tags.

So you have two options:

• Use @Jim_F’s method and use Roon to edit the Import Date of tracks held in the Roon Database; or
• Use a third-party metadata editor (e.g. Yate) to create and edit the IMPORTDATE metadata tag in your tracks. Turn on reading of the IMPORTDATE tag in Roon, and Roon will read in the values from these tags in your files.

More information on using metadata tags with Roon is here:

File Tag Best Practice

[Brock_Bair]

Thank you, @Geoff_Coupe. Actually I’ve already fixed the tags, using both of the methods suggested. The fact that about 10% the import dates created by Yate were not consistently read by Roon, and thus had to be manually (and slowly, laboriously) updated, just reinforces that something is wrong.

I disagree that this is simply a “how do I do this issue.” I know Roon very well, including how to update import dates manually. I’ve been spending multiple hours a day with Roon for six or seven years, tending metadata, fiddling with DSP etc. etc. My metadata didn’t suddenly change because I don’t know how to do something.

The fact is, Roon suddenly and without explanation changed the date-added for tens of thousands of random tracks in my library, disrupting a metadata setup that’s been stable for all the years I’ve been using Roon. The fact that it happened when moving to ROCK, – a move that seems strongly encouraged by Roon – would seem to make the issue of even greater interest to @support.

I get that Roon support is a small team. Still, as a customer of any business, I don’t think I’ve ever been told that a problem I was having wasn’t “big enough” for support to get involved.

I remember when @support was absolutely phenomenal. It’s really too bad that, due to staffing reasons or whatever else, Roon has allowed it to slip so badly.

[Geoff_Coupe]

@Brock_Bair

The fact is, Roon suddenly and without explanation changed the date-added for tens of thousands of random tracks in my library

The fact is that Roon did not change the date added for thousands of your files. Something else did.

Roon only reads files - it never writes to them.

When you migrated to ROCK - did you follow the migration guide precisely, and restore a backup without first logging into Roon?

Migrating To ROCK

[Brock_Bair]

Apologies for the imprecision. I should have said that the date added displayed in Roon changed. Where the new, erroneous data came from, I can’t say. That’s one of the things I was hoping @support could help with. I do understand that Roon doesn’t modify my files.

And yes to both of your migration questions. I followed Roon’s migration guide meticulously, and I restored from a just-completed backup before logging in.

[Geoff_Coupe]

It sounds to me as though Roon has reimported your files, rather than adhere to the original database settings. You could try and restore from a backup once more to see if that will get you your original dates…