Did exactly what you recommended for 2 parts of my library accounting for >10% of my tracks which appeared to be the most problematic: ´Classical compilations´ and the classical folder with lots of boxsets, operas and oratorios. Have transformed the former to a top-level folder and removed the composer layer from the latter.
Result after rebooting: Roon seemingly being a bit snappier with displaying album pages and maybe a tad faster with artists. Nothing has changed with (classical) composers or composition lists, however, which was my main hope and reason I keep my ´always-active´ core library modest at 60-70k tracks.
I think I do not want to split the content of the top-level folders further as I do enable and disable them regularly and that gets messy with more than 10 folders. Biggest two folders being 1,000 and 1,200 albums.
What is your experience with optimizing folder structure and the best practice to do so?
Being able to disable/enable folders easily seems to be your most important usability requirement. Having access to your entire library your least important requirement. So I really do not know what to suggest.
I use roon in a completely different way as I suspect most people do. I want access to my entire library at all times as I primarily use roon to unearth hidden connections via roon’s discovery, recommendation, playlist, radio etc. functionality. If I know what I want to play I just put on the CD or use the streaming native app. I don’t need roon for that.
In practical terms this means I keep roon directories below about 600/700 and also only a few levels. The only use case I have for disabling/enabling folders is when migrating a folder to a new storage device. So that would be very infrequently, maybe a handful of times over the last 7 years. I’m not sure I understand why you do that so frequently. If I couldn’t access my entire library at an acceptable level of performance all the time I just wouldn’t use roon.
I keep a USB drive disabled but it contains big boxes that are duplicates of already ‘separated’ albums so access is not important.
I agree with @tripleCrotchet i want all my albums available for Roon to interlink
I think in terms of performance, unidentified albums is a biggy as is albums stripped from boxes that dont ID individually. In this case they are IDed as the big box they came from and carry the credits baggage of the original box.
Manually IDing these would drop the credits load to the original single album
In a recent experiment i imported box then imported albums stripped from it. Without the box in place and IDed it was chaos with albums being seen as part of the big box . With the box in place, the albums all IDed properly as the single albums.
I can now delete the original box ?phase 2 of the test
I haven’t been systematic as the task is just too large but where it is noticeable I delete the box credits from separated CDs. This also seems to have an impact on performance. So with larger, especially Classically oriented libraries, there are a number of factors.
That’s accurate as I usually keep those folders disabled which are not properly tagged (approx. 60% of my complete library).
On the other hand enabling folders quickly is one of my goals but not the most important one. Having a snappy roon experience is no.1 particularly with composer´s pages and composition lists. And I see performance dropping exponentially when enabling some more classical folders containing boxsets, operas and oratorios when active library is north of 60k tracks. Not so much with pop or jazz folders.
Thanks a lot for your helpful recommendations as they seemingly help album and album overview performance.
600/700 are the number of albums per top-level folder or the total number of subfolders including “artwork” or “CD1”, “CD2” and alike?
If the former is the case I might try to split the two big top-level folders into two each which is handleable with my library.
Having met several regular roon users for some evening of listening to music, I have the feeling everyone has his or her own personal way of using it.
I have absolutely the same goal as you have but I see the biggest chunk of my library as some kind of back catalogue which I rarely use and only enable in small parts (e.g. when comparing recordings of a particular opera or oratorio). Unearthing hidden connections and enjoying to find something new does make sense for me personally only for perfectly tagged albums in my library and I simply do not want to invest the time to properly tag all the back catalogue stuff.
The other case in which I disable a big chunk of my library is due to my pretty versatile musical taste. Sometimes I know I am not in the mood for classical (or rock, or pop, or jazz) so I disable these folders completely and browse through a purely rock, purely jazz or purely classical collection. I am aware I could potentially use a focus filter for that but it works best for me.
Top level folder, and no more than 2 folders deep including CD1, CD2 etc.
But I wouldn’t spend much time on it. Restructuring your directories might give you some marginal improvements but it is not going to be a silver bullet with the large number of poorly tagged and unidentified albums and compositions you describe. You need to fix that first but as you realise that is a significant undertaking.
That is seemingly a problem if the box has a lot of tracks as well as a lot of credits and compositions so roon seemingly has to search and match everything exponentially.
Noticed the same behavior not only with sampler boxsets but with operas and oratorios which in many cases have 60…100 tracks per albums and more than 50, in some cases more than 100 artists assigned.
Maybe you misrender my situation. My compositions are locally tagged as accurately as possible and almost all albums identified (less than 0.5% are unidentifiable). Poor tags creating a lot of ghost artists (which I started merging with the real ones years ago) seem not to be dependent on local tag quality. Made several attempts to clean up and subsequently perfectly tag an album, then reimport it but nothing has changed. So I have the feeling these tags are coming from MusicBrainz, i.e. roon´s internal database which I cannot overrule even if I choose (prefer local tags).
Yep. For that reason, do not spend anytime restructuring your library directory structure. Its worked for me and others based on certain assumptions, library management habits and priorities. But that does not mean it will work for you. Risky too.