As a new user to the community and relatively new Roon subscriber (although I love it enough to have purchased a Nucleus), I’m wondering if someone can provide perspective on what should be a relatively simple thing to do:
As I rip CD’s, I’ve always used FLAC lossless format, and as such, they are correctly tagged as CD’s within Roon. All of my vinyl was previously recorded as 320kbps MP3 files, and they all show up as MP3s. I’m currently in the process of re-ripping my vinyl collection as FLAC files as well (storage media has become cheap). I use Vinyl Studio to do that, which allows saving to several different formats. If I save as FLAC though, I’m concerned that the indicator on the album cover will report as “CD” when it’s really not. Any thoughts on the best (lossless) format to rip them in to distinguish between Vinyl and CD? I also have hundreds of cassettes to rip, but those aren’t a focus now.
Along those same lines, are there any other differentiating indicators that Roon uses to identify albums quickly (without having to go into the album to review the source file type or bit rate? So far, I’ve only seen CD and MP3. I suppose that I could manually tag each album as I import them, but that seems counter-intuitive when Roon has such incredible metadata capabilities.
I’d appreciate perspective from others who may be facing the same issue, and how they were able to get around it. Thanks!
Albums are indicated as CD when they have a bit depth of 16 and a sampling frequency of 44.1. This is CD quality, not necessarily a CD rip. So if you rip in CD quality, your albums will be presented as CD.
Maybe you could try another setting? Say, 24/48 or higher.
There is also the possibility of using the album version. This will be shown while browsing albums, but you cannot use this to focus on. If you would like to focus on all your LP rips, you would also have to tag these rips. This way, you can focus on LP rips, and bookmark this.
You could make use of the customise album display options under settings to remove album type or add version information. Version information is picked up from the album folder, e.g. “In My Tribe (Elektra 9 60738-2)”. You could use the ripper to add (Vinyl) to the folder name.
Also, if you store the vinyl rips in a different storage location you can use Focus to select all vinyl rips and tag in one go. From there it’s easy to bookmark too.
There are a few options, depending on what Vinylstudio is capable of, and if you are happy with the outcome ( will never be 100% as there is no ‘vinyl’ attribute.
So different options:
Rip to FLAC 44,1kHz/24 bit . The number of bits will make it different from CD.
Disadvantage, if you stream/digital download, a lot of modern albums are recorded in this format, soyou cannot distinguish betwwen those.
As storage is cheap, rip to FLAC 88,2 kHZ/24 bit. Very few albums are recorded/released in this format.
Now, if Viylstudio is not up to this, you can always use another program, such as dBPoweramp Batch convertor to resample your 44kHz/16 bit files to one of the above formats.
I used the 24/96 option with vinyl studio for both albums and cassettes. It just comes up with those settings and alac as that’s how I stored them for ease with iTunes library. You can tell the cassettes from the hiss! The vinyl tidied up really well though, even some pretty abused stuff.
Adding postfix “(Vinyl)” to album folder would give you a clear information in the album browser that it is a vinyl-rip. This way it is not relevant which quality you store the ripped vinyl albums in.
My vinyl rips (as I call them) have “Vinyl rip” in the version field.
Something else I do which could be adapted for your purposes is to use Tags (Roon tags, not metadata tags) to differentiate items. I’m using them to track download sources (Qobuz, HD Tracks, Bandcamp, Presto Classical etc.), whether something is in High Res (kind of pointless as Roon does this anyway) and also track certain series (Beatles in Mono, Maria Callas High Res edition). It’s manual of course, but easy enough to add albums to the Tag when you 8mport.
Wanted to thank all who provided ideas! Some very creative thoughts indeed! As I thought more about it, retagging my album names with either [CD] [Vinyl] or [Cassette] seems to be the best approach. Then, I can turn OFF Source label (which is frankly “guessing” based on source file type). As Dirk indicated, I could re-rip in a format today that streaming services begin using in the future. And, Martin’s idea of placing albums ripped from different sources within different folders was brilliant! I can temporarily disable all but the type that I’m working on, then flag all of them easily. Quick switch to a different folder, and I can do the same thing. I’m using brackets or braces to include the source type, and reserving parentheses for descriptions within the album title.
I really appreciate the community support. I haven’t seen folks this passionate on any other community forums (except perhaps Hubitat). Thanks again!
Don’t forget about bookmarks too. Once created, for example for vinyl, it will automatically include new folders/ files added. If you add Vinyl, Cassette etc. to the folder name make sure it’s using “()” not “[]”.
Not sure if it helps much, but I believe Vinyl Studio puts “vinyl copy” in the “group” tag by default, but roon doesn’t recognize this tag. You could use a 3rd party tool to identify them by this and then…?
I eventually gave up and created a roon tag called ‘vinyl’ and manually applied it after importing. You can then set up a bookmark for this tag to see your vinyl imports.
And, yes, they still all say ‘CD’, which is as amusing as it is annoying.
