How Best to Reorganise Local Files?

Roon Software Discussion
1

I want to reorganise my local files - I have currently two destinations where I store my local library, and I intend now to merge them, through creating a new folder and inserting both folders …

I’m not quite sure how the metadata is connected to the local files … Is there something I should consider before doing this? Or can I freely move the files around and change paths, without fearing that (manually edited) information won’t get mapped right?

2

I’ve moved your question from an old thread into a new topic of its own…

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Is there a special reason why you want to merge the two locations? That might be of importance for how to merge.
In general there are no special rules for the storage - folders for artists, with subfolders for albums works fine. If you are making a new location and delete the old ones after the move of the data, simply force a rescan of all locations and when done remove the old ones from Roon settings.
Do not forget to run a backup first!!

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metadata is built in (a part of) your actual music files. So it will remain with the files no matter where/how you move them. (Note, one exception is if you ripped your local files with itunes; itunes kept the album art files in a separate database rather than embedded in the files themselves).

My files are organized as follows:

/Music
…/FLAC
…/Artist/Album/tracks
…/Compilations/Album/tracks

and then I have the same structure under “Lossy” for any mp3, m4a, AAC files.
/Music
…/Lossy
…/Artist/Album/tracks
…/Compilations/Album/tracks

My track file names are
track number (2 digits) - track name
except for compilations where they are:
track number (2 digits) - track name - track artist name

For example

/Music/FLAC/The Beatles/Abbey Road/01 - Come Together
/Music/FLAC/Compilations/Deadicated - A Tribute to the Grateful Dead/01 - Bertha - Los Lobos

edit: For multidisk albums, I have disc folders under album name:

/Music/FLAC/Artist/Album/Disc 1/track num - track title
Some people instead use disc number as part of track number rather than subfolders:

/Album/disc.tracknum - track title

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5

Thanks a lot for your help @Gadnoz_Seek, @garym and @Geoff_Coupe

This helped, good to know. I moved the folders around, it all works and no metadata lost … I will also do some “spring cleaning” soon, and organise the files in a similar way.

I use PlexAmp for access outside my network, and one of the few negative things to say about PlexAmp is that you would need to switch storage location if you had organised the files as I did before.

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