That is indeed working well with roon but it is also a hint that metadata quality behind these unidentified tracks is actually good. I wonder what is the reason such an enormous amount of tracks nevertheless not being identified. If we can rule out the possibility that most of it is bootlegs, ´rips´ from analogue or non-standard releases (such as public domain collections, big boxsets and alike), I see a pretty good chance that many more of the 40k tracks can be identified by roon.
I had a similar situation after initial scanning of my library showing more than 2,000 albums (>20% of my collection back then) as unidentified although most of them having metadata. When investing some time into that issue, I found out that most of albums were not identified due to the following reasons:
wrong duration of one or more tracks
improper or contradictive artist´s names in the tags
missing tracks or improper number of tracks per album (bonus tracks and alike)
wrong disc or track numbers
wrong folder numbers for (classical) boxsets or parts thereof being recognized as a wrong album
In the majority of cases no other work was required other than activating the manual procedure of ´Album editor > identify album´ and accepting the first suggestion. I wonder why roon is so picky with minor metadata inconsistencies like track duration as it is obviously capable of recognizing most of these albums correctly.
If we are not talking about bootlegs, DJ sets or rips from vinyl/DVD or very very niche releases, I would consider 5% unidentified albums rather a high number. I have a significant number of non-standard releases and at first had like 20% unidentified. Simply by applying the aforementioned routine plus doing some research and tagging for the very stubborn albums I got this down to 1 or 2%.
So, in most cases the data is there, it just does not fall into its place automatically.
I did not put that clear enough: Roon should make an educated guess on the not identified albums. I believe it would get 90 percent right that way and five percent just ok. Which would leave five percent of the not identified albums for manual inspection.
Roon is making such educated guess. You can check its suggestion by applying ´Album view > Edit > identify album´ to any unidentified album - in many cases the first suggestion is correct and things fall into place the moment you accept. Roon seems to be denying fully automatic identification of the album in case there is a further contradiction in the metadata or file data. According to my experience, the most common ones are wrong track duration, missing/additional tracks, wrong album or primary artist name, wrong assigned disc number.
I could imagine a very easy and comfortable solution by letting roon connect every album with its most likely Tivo/MB metatada set automatically according to its own guess but flagging the ones with contradictive data as ´identification questionable´ or ´to be confirmed´. Would have saved me a lot of time.
This would make a lot of sense. Those flags might be shown when one selects that album for display with the option to confirm/edit. So all would be sort of identified in a first pass and confirmed “at runtime”, should that be necessary.
@DrCWO It looks like you’ve added multiple folders via the Roon app’s Settings → Storage → Add folder. I have a very similar file layout, but I just added the FLAC folder and that’s it. Probably you had subfolders of FLAC that you didn’t want to include? I’m guessing Roon didn’t anticipate people having more than one or a few folders in this view. Maybe they’ll add sorting here, since they do have it when you drill down into one of these top-level folders.
I wonder what would happen if you went into your file server by command line and did a FATsort or something similar? I have a DAP that I love, but its crude software seemed to show music files in random order. Using FATsort on the SD card made them appear alphabetically.
Its mainly because the main matching algirithm of Roon is based on creating a checksum based on the tracklength of each track in order, so if the duration of one of your tracks is different to what Roon thinks it should be for the album then the checksum wont match. I don’t know what the track length tolerance is but i would guess it is 1-2 seconds.
But Roon will also accept albums that have already been matched to MusicBrainz albums if the MusicBrainz release id has been added to the tracks. That is why you will always get more songs identified by Roon if you fix your collection with SongKong Music Tagger first. You would also get more matches if use MusicBrainz Picard but Picard is really designed for matching only a few albums at a time so is not so quick or simple.
No, it is more of tolerance. I have albums showing track durations deviating ±4 seconds to roon´s metadata (in many cases reissues of cland it is still identifying them automatically. The problem is, as you explained, if the deviation is exceeding 5 seconds, it will not identify the album automatically despite from guessing the right match.
Is there any way to use this new folder browsing superpower to add PDFs to the folders that then will appear with the albums in roon? Seems like you’ve always had to go into the folders on your actual server and add PDFs manually if they weren’t already included with a download as there was previously not a way to add them from an iPad or iPhone “remote”…but now with this new folder browser capability, I can dig down into the folders of individual albums from my iPad and edit…but I dont see a way to pull in a PDF to that folder from a network location, ipad harddrive, internet, etc. It would be great to have a way to add a PDF directly now that we have folder browsing or am I just missing this functionality?
Thanks
Doug
Roon have added a file browser, not a file manager to Roon, so no, the only way to add a PDF directly is the same as it always was - drag and drop an album folder (containing a PDF) into the Roon window and the album folder will be added as a sub-folder to the Roon Imports folder in your Watched Folder.
Edit: actually, just tested this, and discovered that Roon did NOT import the PDF (although it generated lots of redundant cover images). So no - there is no way to directly import a PDF into Roon. You will have to use the file manager of your OS.
That, presumably, is why I learned long ago never to use the drag and drop method of Roon (which is poorly designed IMO), but always use a file manager.
Ok thanks! I didnt think so but was curious if it was added. IMO I think it would be great to have if possible but maybe that would only be a small number of users.
Thanks
Doug
Yes, that’s right. At least in part. This year, we were without internet for a little over five long weeks at a time. In our case, we were also without a (landline) telephone at the same time. If you have a small company, it’s pretty stupid when your customers can no longer reach you.
What’s more, a lot of productive software stops working completely after a few weeks offline because the licensing servers can no longer be reached. And here in rural areas, mobile network coverage is so poor that I can’t even use my smartphone as a hotspot.
Yes, this time was nerve-wracking and financially costly. So it was all the better that I was at least able to listen to music with Roon at the beginning - until that was no longer possible later on…
Why is the offline period after which Roon still works limited to 28 days? You can’t download metadata, artist bios or lyrics from the Roon servers anyway, so licensing issues shouldn’t really play a role. Actually, a look at the accounts would suffice to determine whether the subscription is still active or even whether a lifetime license exists.
To be honest, I have little understanding for small and large software companies taking such a rigid approach and letting the paying customer starve to death - to put it bluntly.
