How can I disable the box set feature and revert my collection?
With the box set feature Roon is playing havoc with my album cover art, especially classical albums.
I have 15k + albums carefully groomed over many years(back to Sooloos days) and since box set I’m seeing cover art that I have never seen!
Yes. This should have been configurable, at least for Classical.
It may suit some but its just not ready. One particularly annoying behaviour I find is that roon will now split larger, very famous compositions in half across disk boundaries. It didn’t do this before. Here, for example, Solti’s famous Mahler 8th from the Decca box:
It is especially annoying with common 2 or 3 disk multi-disk albums, where it is difficult to fathom what possible value is added. Here it is Mahler’s 4th that gets split:
as long as you can see the tracks it will play continuously. So goto the start of Disc 9 and let it run
If you select the start disc 9 ONLY it won’t it will stop or go onto Radio
I am actively moving my big boxes out of Roon , I will use JRiver for boxes as I always have
I am not defending …
have you set Settings > Library > Import settings to Prefer File
I assume a box has a “master folder” plus CD 1 .. CD xx subfolders
The artwork must be cover, front or folder (jpg or png) in the folder
The master folder provides the box art, each subfolder provides the disc art
I have no proof but I don’t think embedded artwork counts . I already obey this requirement in all my boxes.
If Roon can’t find it in the folder it goes looking !
Mike, I know you are trying to help, but for me as the OP, this release is more than hopeless, it is destructive.
I have no meaningful disk level metadata. I deleted it all long ago as that was a prerequisite for box sets before this release! That couldn’t have been said more clearly in the knowledgebase. If I have any disk level metadata left, it is an oversight, an accident.
I understand that multi-part compositions play normally. This has nothing to do with playing. It is navigation being made awkward and screen layouts looking like cr@p for absolutely no benefit in a library like mine that has no meaningful disk metadata. Just to put a number on it the redundant disk line means I loose between 12.5% and 25% of the available display space on the laptop i use most of the time as a remote. I am finding multiple issues everyday and there is no fixing it. The best option by far in a library like mine and the OP’s is just not to use it, so I also would like to disable it.
PS. One option I was looking at was deconstructing all boxes instead of just some. It probably means removing all disk and file numbers at a filesystem level. Its work, but that might solve the problem for larger boxes. But the problem is roon has decided to give 2CD and 3CD albums the same treatment. Is there a way of batch re-identifying all of those to download versions? That is the only way I can think of getting rid of the disk boundaries.
Sorry , I am trying to help, the setting comment was aimed at @G997 , not a user I know .
Roon seems be regarding a box as CD Count >=2 which is nonsense even >=4 is doubtful.
I have spent time this weekend calculating how to eliminate boxes completely from Roon Creating a Box only library to run through JRMC
Funny, I was thinking the exact same thing. I have now looked into the JRiver system in more detail, but I’m not a customer yet.
If no further improvements are made here, I could imagine organizing my (box set) collection outside of Roon…or at least to keep my options open by using both for a while.
If you need guidance pls shout
I have used JRMC for 15 yrs
Thère is a 30 day demo
Yes. This is mad. Starting box logic at a sensible level would help. My personal boundary is much higher at about >12 CDs. The reason for that is I personally find it difficult to navigate the disk drop-down with CDs more than that so its a personal threshold where I will consider splitting the box. Below that I rarely bother and find I have absolutely no use for additional box-level navigation. Its all too little, too late.
I have almost 5,000 2CD albums with absolutely no useable disk metadata but with this release a loss of 12.5% to 25% usable screen real-estate. Its like the purpose of the release was to make non-box navigation as difficult as conceivably possible. As you say, time to re-visit JRiver. I still have a licence but haven’t upgraded in a long while. It’s this relentless erosion in Classical usability that is driving me away.
I have just spent several hours splitting an 70 CD box (Amadeus DG) into a series of component boxes , Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn etc . I have now removed the BIG box only for Roon to put them all back together again. At least 42 of them
I was trying to put only small boxes in Roon and eliminate the Big Box , Roon wants BIG !!
So my plan of removing Big boxes from Roon and replacing where possible with single albums or small boxes will not work
I sent @connor a sample box where this was happening !!
This is a BUG and will report as such JRMC here we come
I don’t know the scale of the problem or even how to start systematically addressing it. Many, if not most, large boxes are organized in volumes that way. I have pretty much organised all of my large boxes that way. I can see roon is unexpectedly reidentifying. I hope that stripping out my volume metadata is not what it is trying to do,
Its not touching your files BUT.
Roon seems hell bent on creating big boxes when there is no reference to that box anywhere. The ID lookup seems biased to big boxes if it can be
I have logged support call and dropped Mike Fass a note
Appreciate the feedback here folks – we are listening, and can of course make additional changes to this functionality.
My request to everyone who’s engaged with this discussion is provide more specifics. I can think a few ways to interpret “disable box sets” so it would be helpful if you explain exactly what want disabled – for example, is it mostly about the appearance of the track list? Or about disabling the disc level metadata in your library completely?
Would that apply to local files, or also to streaming content outside your library? Would you want functionality disabled for every album in your library, or are there some where the disc-level metadata is useful?
Understanding these specifics help us design the right solution(s), so please elaborate, even if some of my questions above don’t apply to you. We are absolutely happy to give people more control over how this data is used and displayed in Roon, but I want to make sure we have a real understanding of the problems before we jump into solutions.
Would say this differs from boxset release to boxset release. There are some 3CD sets, even double discs, on the market, which I would clearly like to see represented in roon as a boxset with covers of the original releases, bonus discs or whatever.
A lot of double discs, and even some bigger ones, on the other hand, qualify rather as a very long playing album, hence a selection of tracks and compositions, with little chance for useful disc titles.
@mike i am maybe not the most representative classical music lover when it comes to boxsets, but I would love to see the disc no and disc cover ´stoppers´ within the tracklisting to disappear, particularly for compositions spanning over several discs, like operas and oratorios. Typical example of several operas:
Herbert von Karajan - Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen (CD version, that´s 4 operas on 14 discs)
4 acts of the first opera split into the first 2 discs but the “Disc 2” split is in the middle of act 3, apparently because there is a general tacet in the music. But that´s not useful information by any means when streaming or playing from local files.
That´s mainly an issue with CD boxsets containing one or more operas/oratorios, so I would welcome a feature deactivating boxset structure in the tracklisting only for those releases. If anything, an option to group several discs into one sub-release of the boxset (for those sets containing several operas, for example) might be helpful. In case of Karajan´s box, it is possible to retag it and use the 4disc digital download release which gets one the desired result in boxset view:
I don´t see the necessity to deactivate disc selector, even if it does not contain meaningful information on the specific disc.
For some pop/rock releases, particularly the ´Deluxe editions´ of a popular album, or some anthology boxes, I´d rather find it useful to split away specific tracks into one disc of their own. The latter might be useful for boxsets comprising of one or more albums plus one or more singles/EPs, i.e. releases which are not identical with discs, as several singles/EPs are oftentimes part of a general ´Bonus tracks´ disc. Examples:
Beatles - Rubber Soul (2026 blu-ray Deluxe)
The disc 2 contains not only sessions and demo tracks but also the single (2023 Atmos remix) which in my understanding should exist as a release in its own right. Interestingly, roon did not recognize the original album on disc 1 at all, but the wrong single on disc 2 if I leave out all the demo/session tracks in mono or stereo. If I add the complete disc 2, it gets messy, and the single disappears.
Again, I am in the camp of those appreciating new boxset features for quite a number of releases, so cannot really speak for those who have problems with wrongly re-identified sets.
Thanks very much for commenting. My suggestions regarding the new feature are in this thread:
The ability to “disable box sets” that I would like is either to identify specific groupings of albums that I want not to be treated as a group or simply to return to the earlier behavior. Collections of independently released albums are fundamentally different from sets that collect related works, and I would like to treat them differently in Roon.
I appreciate your willingness to consider improvements, and I’d be happy to provide more details about my use case.
Same. In fact, I only have two releases that fits the usual box set criteria, with 6 reissued albums each, but the box set feature has been particularly useful for lots of 2-CD reissues containing one reissued original album and a second CD with bonus material, a demo version of the album, or similar
How about a button / checkbox at Album level to “Show as Box Set”
That could “show / hide” the disc header or Box set functionality set as default to hide or as a Setting Prefer Box Format Yes/No That way you can turn ON at will.
Maybe even remembered by the album ? You get the option to choose by the album rather than to concoct an algorithm to do it or you . You can almost guarantee an algorithm won’t suit all occasions
You probably can’t create a definitive list of types in advance , I couldn’t
I think that something along those lines would work as long as there was some way of globalising or batching as it would be an extreme pain to have to set this at an album level only. So i would like to see an additional 4 switches (for a total of 5) , and many negative rather than positive so there was fine control:
Settings (Global)
1. Exclude Show As Box Set on/off
2. Exclude Show As Box Set Genres e.g. Classical, . . . other genres list
3. Minimum Box Set Disks XX, e.g. 12
ROONBOXTAG
A bit like ROONALBUMTAG this could be a switch you could set in your local files at an album level,
Checkbox at Album level to “Show Box set”
Thats along the lines I was thinking, I missed the genre exclusion
Doesn’t ROONALBUMTAG cover it what else would you use it for ?
That would be the ideal solution, and I would, aside from boxset discussion, welcome that particularly for opera and oratorio albums (i.e. one composition = one album) which span over several discs and are shown as separated in the tracklisting now. I don’t even want to know if they were on separated discs, and whenever possible, I force roon to identify such albums as digital download versions with disc count: 1.
Most certainly you’re right. Chosing manually per album is the way to go, and as @tripleCrotchet mentioned, batch editing this option would be ideal, for example by picking a number of albums focussing on operas, turning them into single albums without boxset features displayed.