I never really agreed with the internet always on but a periodic check must be reasonable, imagine if your internet outage happened with 2 days to go to renewal , what do Roon do, let you have service for free until the internet comes back
License server checks are a way of life these days
This might provide a solution. Germany is fully covered.
You have to remember that the license server check is checking for license availability - not just for a license purchase.
Even with a lifetime licence, the check is needed to ensure that the subscription has not been picked up by a different roon server since the server doing the check went offline.
Hi folks,
I went through all the posts in this topic and still don’t know what advantage / or why so important is “folder browsing” for some of you.
What is purpose of folder browsing?
Serious question. I’m always happy to learn something.
I think the purpose of folder browsing for some people got clear in this thread and others:
While I have not been desperately in need of folder browsing, I have to say it is in my case very useful for purpose #4 and #5. And I am happy for everyone who always needed it and now has one additional reason to have fun with roon. Find it very elegant and useful how it is integrated.
Nit: you can use a numbered list instead of bulleted, makes it easier.
This is not Folder “Browsing.” This is Folder LISTING. It’s handicapped the exact same way Arc is. Since there is no way to get from the top of the list to the bottom, except by scrolling ad infinitum, there is still no way except by Search to get to Warren Zevon. It remains puzzling to me that Roon knows there are users with thousands of artists and albums in our libraries, and yet does not provide a realistic way to access those whose names start with a letter that occurs after “B” in the alphabet.
Dragging the scroll handle works, even though it’s not ideal.
It should also work to reverse the artist sort order, but this isn’t working for me. (Other columns do work)
I tend to assume that this is very very limited group of users - I mean those having a huge library plus thousands of artists being stored in one and the same folder without any genre structure plus a significant number of their albums being unidentified and lacking basic metadata.
I put this to discussion here:
Wondering how long this update should take. After an hour or so, Roon is still just showing me an animated logo. Is that normal? My library is 500 GB or so. Is it indexing the folders before it can restart? That seems odd to me.
I’m happy for the people that wanted this feature. However, I don’t see a use for it in my situation. One of the key features that brought me to Roon was how it beautifully populates Metadata and how I can see the number of recordings I have of any classical or jazz work that I have. This really helps with rediscovering old recordings and tidying up my collection.
If anything, I wish there were more sources for Metadata. Granted it’s only 4 percent of my library, but I wish I could populate the metadata for those, too. Most of said albums aren’t rare.
I fully agree, it is one of the features implemented in roon a classical or jazz lover could only dream of. But this has always worked only in case metadata is present and fully complying with the standards. I cases composition data is missing or not according to the standards roon can understand you always end up with a mess. I mentioned the example of one recording of Bach´s St. Matthew Passion leading to an additional 68 recordings of that composition as roon was interpreting every track as a separated recording.
In my understanding the problem is mainly consistency of metadata, not so much complete lack thereof. If you have Tidal or Qobuz attached to roon, you have additional sources of composition metadata and that is screwing things up in many cases like the aforementioned Bach Passion. Adding another source of metadata (like discogs, if it will be ever legally and technically possible) might worsen this situation.
Did you investigate why 4% of your albums lack metadata, or solely composition-related metadata? Are they unidentified ones or is MB delivering improper metadata?
As @Arindal mentions, did you know that you can add unidentified releases to MusicBrainz, and this will, in turn, feed into Roon?
I should have been more precise in my language. The primary problem is that 4ish percent of my albums can’t be identified. Some of them are from smaller labels, which I can accept, but some are albums that are available on all of the streaming services.
Thank you both regarding the Musicbrainz suggestion.
They cannot be identified at all because they do not exist in roon´s metadata sources or they are not identified automatically during scanning process so you have to confirm manually? It is a huge difference, and when I was stumbling across a high percentage of unidentified albums I found out that roon actually had proper metadata and even the right guess which album it is but did not automatically identify due to minor inconsistencies (such as missing/additional tracks, wrong track duration, wrong disc number).
Could you show and example of the identification process of one of the more common albums provided by streaming service being unidentifiable? Does it look like this:
(that album is completely unknown until someone is uploading the metadata set to MusicBrainz)
or like that:
In the end of the manual identification process I was astonished that the percentage of unidentified albums in my library was closer to 1% compared to 20% before. And the majority of the few being completely unknown to roon I would classify as exotic releases, not a single common one or by a major label. Maybe a handful either from well-known download platforms or from public broadcaster´s releases I would have expected to have metadata.
Thank you @Pogorowitz - that seems to be indeed an album completely unknown to roon existing neither on MusicBrainz nor TiVo nor Discogs (the latter would not help roon but it is a good litmus test how common the metadata is).
That is a bit surprising as it was an official Sony classical recording. On the other hand, it is a relatively recent release, just a few months old, and seems not to be available on physical disc outside of Japan. I would expect it to appear eventually on MusicBrainz as soon as someone who has bought the download or CD would upload the metadata set. I had a handful of similar cases (re-releases by Decca and alike) but they all got identified automatically.
If all your unidentified albums fall into that category, there is not much to do except from adding tags in case the files are local and not from streaming service.
@Arindal Yeah, it’s not a big deal. It’s a fairly small portion of my collection. Thanks for your attention.
It’s funny, I’ve been hoping for folder browsing for many years. Now that it’s here, I see Roon’s idea of folder browsing is entirely different than my own.
I have zero interest in browsing folders on my hard drive within Roon, the same way one might if playing from a Finder window. What’s the point of that?
I had hoped for the ability to create my own folders within Roon, and then be able to fill those folders with various albums, or tracks, and view the contents of that folder in multiple ways. As albums, as songs, by artist, in different orders, bit rate, etc. I sort of have that with tags, but not quite.
In 8 years with Roon, I’ve never jibed with the Focus feature, I find it overly complex and unintuitive, even though I admire the engineering.
Yes, I suppose the new folder feature is technically folders, but I can’t see myself ever using it. I paid big bucks for Roon to avoid browsing my music in the most antiquated way possible 
