Help with a MADDENING Editing Issue

Support
1

I am editing on my Windows 10 PC and my iPad iOS app.

I hope someone can come up with a suggestion to help me find a workaround for a maddening editing “situation”.

I have just moved my Naim curated music to Roon. It’s just over 3 Tb of music albums and about 1200 are in a proprietary form of WAV that Roon can’t interpret. That means nearly 100% of these 1200 records needs some editing.

So I’ve been going through this library of music alphabetically by album title and editing almost every record. What I’m discovering is that after an edit which changes the alphabetical order, Roon returns me to the first page of “A’s”, sorted by Album Name. That means to get back to the next record that needs editing I have to scroll past all the records I’ve already edited, one page at a time, until I find my place again. That’s not so bad when I’m still at “C”, but the farther up the alphabet I get, the more records I’ll have to scroll past to continue my editing, eventually multiple dozens of pages every time the alphabetical sequence changes. Sometimes the scroll function will not take me to the next record but will mysteriously and inexplicably skip to the “U’s”! Or some other place remote from where I want to be and I have to start over.

It’s very frustrating to deal with these problems. Anyone have any suggestions for a work around??

It would be very handy to have an A to Z header that is common in situations like this and I could at least skip to the alpha letter closest to where I am editing.

BTW, using the search function doesn’t help because I can’t do certain edits like a merge.

2

If you sort by album title, top left there’s an arrow which allows to switch between A to Z or Z to A sorting. Also, you can simply type the the letter where you left at on your keyboard and roon should jump to the first album starting with that letter automatically. I hope this helps.

3

That sounds hugely helpful. Thank you!!

4

I don’t know if this would work for your situation, but you could use an outside metadata manager to just make the changes you need and then have Roon reanalyze them. You could also try having Roon use the file tags if that will help things, or have Roon ignore them and have Roon set the album title and whatever else you need. If you want to explain exactly what you are doing maybe we can find the best way to do it.

5

quote=“AnimalOnDrums, post:4, topic:115626, full:true”]

I don’t know if this would work for your situation, but you could use an outside metadata manager to just make the changes you need and then have Roon reanalyze them. You could also try having Roon use the file tags if that will help things, or have Roon ignore them and have Roon set the album title and whatever else you need. If you want to explain exactly what you are doing maybe we can find the best way to do it.

[/quote]

If there were another metadata editor with an iOS app to use, that would be of interest, but I’m much happier using the Roon iOS app now that the maddening issue has a good resolution.

I’m going through the large music file one by one starting with “A”. At least 95% is classical or opera. First, I check the album cover against the Naim app to confirm a match. Fortunately, I don’t have too many albums with incorrect album art.

I often have to edit “Title”.

Then I almost always have to add the names of multiple artists.

I usually have to add conductor under “Credits”.

Then I hit “Save” and move to the next one. Tedious because there are so many!! But fairly straightforward.

The most frequent difficulty is often a multi-disc set and I won’t be able to find one or more of the missing discs. If I am lucky the missing disc will be sitting next to or nearby its mate or mates. But sometimes I simply can not locate the missing disc to the set.

Another problem is that I haven’t figured out a way to use the app if the album cover is wrong. In that case I have to turn to the desktop Windows editor. Once there I have found it easy to choose to copy the url of the page the album photo is on.

The biggest difficulty are those with the title of “Unknowns” and “Various”. Roon was unable to identify about 200 albums. It put them in one of those two folders in the Nucleus. I can clear a few in the app if Roon can identify the album. If not I’ll have to directly edit those folders in the Nucleus and that makes me nervous.

6

If I had do to a lot of editing I wouldn’t do this in Roon.
I’d go with SongKong for the first step to try if it can get the tags automatically and then - if the results are not satisfactory - I’d choose a Tag editor like Tag&Rename or Kid3 Tag Editor (for Mac) to do the job manually.
That could probably speed up things a bit.

1 Like
7

I would advise the opposite. These “automated” taggers have a talent for screwing things up even more.

I think the way the Op is going about it is the only feasible way if you want to have FULL control as to what you see in Roon in terms of artists, soloists etc… You can fix some rough stuff in the file tags but then I’ve done the rest of it the same way. Its certainly tedious…

9

I’d recommened a combination of the suggestions above!

Bearing in mind that you may one day move away from Roon, or try to play your files on another device - or in your car - or whatever / whenever, then I’d suggest you edit the files themselves.
Also remember that despite (Roon database) backups, sometimes things can go awry / get corrupted - and then all your edits are gone…

But - as also mentioned - although you have a lot to do, I wouldn’t recommend an ‘automatic’ or ‘batch’ metadata update either - because things could possibly go horribly wrong or not turn out to your liking.

So - edit the files / albums ‘offline’ - one by one - at your leisure & to your satisfaction.
I can’t help with a metadata editor for iOS recommendation (I use MediaMonkey on Windows) but I went through the same exercise some years ago when moving from iTunes & LMS to Roon and everything works very well.

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10

Indeed that’s why I do a combination of both. If SongKong messes things up you can easily undo the batch. For “common” albums it mostly works just fine.
For album sets I choose to do it manually. One way or another, I don’t use Roon for editing MetaData as it is not convenient for me.

1 Like
11

Hi Echolane. I am missing a basic point: you apparently had a UnityServe with the NAIM proprietary metadata management system which means your WAVs have no “standard” metadata at all. But Roon should anyway be able to identify them, right? I have in due honesty not tried to import a “metadata naked” WAV file into Roon to test this assumption …

12

Do any of the file taggers have apps for the iPad?

Sitting is painful for me, so an iOS app I can use with my iPad is pretty much a necessity.

13

When I made the decision to move from Naim to Roon I had counted on passing my music file to SongKong which advertises it can “read” the proprietary Naim WAV metadata. Unfortunately for me, SongKong can read Naim’s metadata if generated by the Naim UnitiServe but not my Naim Uniti Core. I am in contact with Paul Taylor of SongKong who is willing to extend SongKong’s capability to my UnitiCore, but making no promises as to when that might be. Naim in its infinite wisdom has a DIFFERENT interpretation of WAV in the Uniti Core so it means programming the enhancement from scratch.

To answer your question, yes, Roon seems to be able to identify the correct Album Title of much (but not all) of my music albums. That’s one positive at least. On single disc albums that Roon can find metadata for I often have little or no editing to do. It makes a real mess of multi-disc sets, in part because Naim inexplicably stores some of these multi-disc sets in separate folders! In others, it does not. That is causing me the most difficulty. That and those albums where Roon can not find any metadata. I have quite a few of those unfortunately. A tagger is unlikely to help me with either of these latter problems.

I can look into my Roon generated metadata in the Roon Nucleus using Windows File Explorer. There is a folder associated with each album called Naim.metadata or something similar. I can open that folder and see the Naim generated metadata and I’m pretty sure I can do some copy/paste functions to change a folder name appropriately so that it will look like Roon found the Album Title, then drag the folder into the proper Artist folder on the Roon Nucleus. This will signal Roon to try to find metadata and then I will perform whatever additional editing might need doing. I’ve done this with two albums so far and it has worked. There are still about 148 to go in the Unknown folder. I have yet to look into the Various folder but it promises to be a similar situation. Lots more extra tedious and meticulous work ahead of me with these.

14

No, there is nothing really available for in-depth tag aditing on the iPad. The only one there is is called is “MP3Tag” (not to be confused with the similarly named Windows App) and all that can do is edit “Artist” “Album” “Title” “Year”. So it’s in fact completely useless.

15

You can use a tag to identify the files you’ve edited. Then use the focus function to filter out those albums you’ve already edited. However, if it was me I’d use DBPoweramp to transcode those files to FLAC or something that can be tagged. Part of the problem for Roon is those WAV files have no tags and so Roon can’t identify them.

16

David_Gibson

16m

You can use a tag to identify the files you’ve edited. Then use the focus function to filter out those albums you’ve already edited. However, if it was me I’d use DBPoweramp to transcode those files to FLAC or something that can be tagged. Part of the problem for Roon is those WAV files have no tags and so Roon can’t identify them.

Thanks for the tip on the Tag / Focus process. That sounds handy to know about. But I’ve no interest in re-ripping all my music to FLAC, nor sitting (which I avoid as much as possible) through such a lengthy and tedious task. I prefer the uncompressed WAV anyway and I think it will take less time to edit than re-rip and edit. Luckily, I still have my NAIM Uniti Core and its app which shows me my carefully curated metadata. You might say it’s my metadata database. I refer to its metadata when I’m editing.

17

There’s no need to re-rip the files. You can set DBPoweramp to transcode the existing files, essentially making a new copy of the files in a different format. However, there’s no denying it will still be a fair amount of work. No sitting involved. Just set it and let it go. But, again, your choice. There are a lot of different ways to accomplish these things.

18

Sorry for your troubles, at least you have something to keep you busy in these social distancing times! :wink:
I just wanted to give you a hint of a great application (Windows only, sadly) that i have been using for more than 10 years now.
It is called EZ Audio Converter and is an extremely useful toolbox for audio files (and ripping, should you be inclined).

I am not affiliated economically.

19

Thanks for your very kind sympathy. To be honest, I was beyond dismayed when I learned that SongKong only decoded the WAV files of the NAIM UnitiServe and not my Uniti Core. It took me almost two weeks before I could make myself roll up my sleeves and get started on the editing. It’s definitely keeping me busy!!

I’m not very happy with Naim’s proprietary approach and in future I will be avoiding companies that take that approach.

Thanks also for the tip on EZ Audio Converter. It looks very useful, particularly with converting DSD. My DAC, the Berkeley Audio DAC Reference Series 2, doesn’t decode DSD.

1 Like
20

Now supported

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21

That is the greatest news! Thanks so much for the heads up!!:blush::blush::blush::blush: