I have many instances where there are two or more copies of the same album. Sometimes these are from different sources (e.g., iTunes and my digital downloads); often they have different play times (e.g., 52 minutes versus 3 hours!!!); sometimes the mystery is even deeper (e.g., an HDTracks 24/96 download in FLAC is listed twice - as a FLAC file with all the times “0.0” and also as an AIFF file). Don’t know where this is coming from (but my guess is iTunes) but I can’t figure out how to delete what is obviously wrong. The directions for deleting say to select the item and choose delete from the “selection menu.” What the hell is the selection menu? Where is it? How do you select an album? The lack of logical, procedural information is maddening… How do you make sure that the highest resolution file is the one played by default?
Anyway, the display of content is rife with errors and duplicates. I’d prefer to NOT clean this up one-by-one by hand - I had to do that to create my digital copies of CDs and it’s not fun as I am sure most of you know already…
Please advise.
Thanks,
Mike
Hi @mnilan – sorry for the confusion here. Let’s make sure I understand your issue before I recommend the best way forward.
So I’m clear, when you say there are “two or more copies” – you actually have multiple copies of these albums, correct? I’m guessing that stored on your hard drive, you have acquired copies of an album in different formats and versions, but I just want to be sure you’re not seeing multiple copies erroneously.
If you’re unsure where these different copies are from, you can check by looking at a track from the album. Right-click the track (or click and hold it) to select it. One you’ve selected it, click track info at the top of Roon, like this:
Then you’ll be able to see where the files are stored.
We’ve found over the years that many users have multiple copies of the same album, and want some “smart” handling of this in their collections. There’s no need to delete the files, unless you’re sure you never want to listen to that version of the album again. Keep in mind that deleting a file in Roon will permanently delete the file from your hard drive.
In some cases we will automatically detect and group duplicates. If you have multiple copies of the same album that we haven’t grouped, just select the album cover in the album browser (again with a right-click, or click and hold), then choose Group Duplicate Albums from the Edit dropdown, like this:
Once you’ve grouped the different versions into a set, they’ll show up as a single album in the browser, but will all be accessible from the “Other Versions Of This Album” popup, like this:
From that popup, you’ll be able to see where each version is stored, what format/quality the different versions are in, and which version is the “primary” version, meaning which gets played when you hit play album.
Thanks for the question. Let me know if that clears things up Mike!
Mike:
Hi, it’s me again. The duplicate album issue which I wrote about a month ago persists. Things are somewhat better because I got iTunes out of the picture - more trouble than it is worth in this case. It is more irritating when I have a LOCAL 44/16 version (and a LOCAL HiRes version) and Roon plays an MP3 version. Why would Roon not play the highest resolution version automatically? This is particularly aggravating when I don’t have an MP3 version locally yet Roon will go somewhere (probably Tidal) and ignore the local 44/16 AND HiRes versions to play the MP3 version.
Given that there is no documentation on anything about Roon makes this very frustrating.
Mike
Can you let me know an example of where you’re seeing this?
We should always be selecting the highest quality version, and this should also be configurable if you want to change the “Primary” version. For example, you might want to choose a lower quality version due to bonus tracks, better mastering, etc.
You can click “Make Primary” if you feel we’re defaulting to the wrong version, but I’d be interested to know the examples you’re seeing, so we can investigate.
Mike:
Almost every time I see a song that is a song that I have in HiRes, it is “Low Quality” in the bottom of the Roon window. Also it is almost always a song (now that I have cut out iTunes as a source) that I don’t even have in low quality - I only have 44/16 or better.
Mike
Can you click the little Signal Path light, and post a screenshot? I want to understand a little more about why you’re getting “low quality” playback before I hazard a guess here.
Let me know if you need any help posting the screenshot ok?
