How do I download Hi-Res music files onto my QNAP NAS?

Support
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Hello Roon Community,
I’m getting closer to putting it all together! My iPad has the Roon user interface app up and running My Intel NUC has ROCK up and running. I just finished setting up and configuring my QNAP NAS. My question today is how do I download the Hi-Res music files off the internet web sites and put them onto my QNAP NAS. I have a Lenovo ThinkPad PC running Windows 7. Do I download the music files using my PC? Do I download them using Roon somehow? Do I need to mount my QNAP NAS as a network drive? I tried mounting my QNAP NAS on my PC as a network drive and this is what I am seeing…Do I need to create some special directory structure on my NAS to store my music files?

image

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This can’t be done through Roon, you’ll have to use another device, and the PC will be fine.

Yes, and it appears you’ve done this and it looks good.

Yes, Roon will certainly be simpler if you do. It’s also best to structure the folders a little to make life easier for you and Roon. A root folder on your NAS called “music” will work, capitalise or use another name as you wish. Finally, try a sub-folder arrangement to keep things tidy and assist Roon, say:

/music
  | - <Artist>
    |- <Album>
      |- CD1
      |- CD2

Note that the lowest level disk folders will only be necessary to help Roon with multi-disk sets. This article will help with more details: https://kb.roonlabs.com/FAQ:_How_can_I_ensure_multi_disc_sets_and_box_sets_are_identified_properly%3F

Good luck

1 Like
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I assume you’re talking about high resolution music you have purchased on the internet and not talking about Tidal and Qobuz music you just want to link into your library on Roon?

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@Jim_F’s point is well made, you can only download purchases.

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Hello @TKelley, you have the option of integrating TIDAL or Qobuz in Roon, but for tracks purchased from other sources, you’ll want to save a copy of those tracks in a watched folder. You can set this up under “Settings>Storage”. Please let me know if you have any further questions!

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Okay here is what I did…Maybe any of you QNAP NAS guys can confirm that this is correct???

I had to create a shared folder on my QNAP NAS. Check out this link on how to create a QNAP NAS shared folder.
https://docs.qnap.com/nas/4.2/SMB/en/index.html?share_folders.htm

Once I created the shared folder you can map your shared folder to a Windows PC but you have to do it through QFinder Pro. Check out this link. https://www.qnap.com/en-us/how-to/tutorial/article/mapping-a-shared-folder-to-a-windows-computer/

So I created a new shared folder on my QNAP NAS called /TimKelley

I then mapped this drive to Z.
I then created my “/music” directory
Does this seem to be the correct thing to do? Check out the image below. Does this look right? Thanks!!! --Tim

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image1373×589 101 KB

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Hello @TKelley, everything looks correct and ready to go! Any issues getting things set up in Roon?

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What are the BEST websites for actually downloading hi-res audio files? Sometimes I want to download the entire album, sometimes just one or two tracks. Do I just download the track (or album) and that’s all ROON needs or do I need to download other stuff (like the artwork for example, I think the word I’m looking for is metadata). I want to actually OWN the songs that I download (DRM-free right?). Thanks --Tim

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I have a Qobuz subscription and buy HiRes downloads of things I like that sound good. Qobuz and Tidal both support purchases. Bandcamp is good as well but not so much with HiRes. Google’s your friend here :wink:

You generally don’t need to do anything about metadata with Qobuz downloads but I’m not obsessive about it. I usually download the cover image and any booklet as well.

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I prefer Qobuz. They seem to have everything if it is available.

I have a separate folder for each artist, Sountracks, and Various Artist Ads. Classical is a nightmare.

I’ve not found a need to map my folder as a drive. I just access it through explorer and go to ‘network’.

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Okay so I’m trying to make things EZ for ROON by organizing my music download files. How do I do this? I have an artist named Seal…So /music/Seal I have 2 different songs (tracks) by him. The first song is on an album called Seal. And the second song is on a different album that is also called Seal. The first Seal album was released in 1991. The second Seal album was released in 1994. Any ideas on how to organize my directory structure so they show up on the ROON user interface correctly?

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The metadata details are read from tags and Roon’s own database of albums so you can give the folders different names and it should be ok. Using /music/Seal/Seal1 and /music/Seal/Seal2 will allow you to logically separate on the file system and should work fine in Roon also.

15

Hey! I played a song!!! Wow what a great moment for me and ROON. I have been trying to put this all together for over a year now. Looks like there is 1 hickup though. The Seal song “Crazy” is showing up in the ROON App as “Dreaming in Metaphors”.??? What’s up with that?? How can I fix that?

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You need a remote client that isn’t your phone, iPads and Mac/PC remotes are all good. When you have the tracks listed in the album or queue view there are three vertical dots at the end of the row for each track. This opens an extended menu with options like “Add to Playlist”, “Add to Tag”, etc. Choose the “Edit” option with a small pencil icon next to it. You will be faced with a dialog with three options, “Track Options”, “Metadata Preference” and “Edit Track”. Edit track should provide you with the means to fix your issue. Good luck.

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You could also try reanalysing the album.

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Hey that worked!!! Wow making good progress today that’s for sure!! Lets keep this train rolling!
Next question…I have the ROCK operating system running on my Intel NUC8i7BEH1.
I setup my NUC’s BIOS so that it will wake up on LAN. I seem to remember that ROON does NOT support sending a Wake On LAN message to my NUC. Is that correct? I don’t understand why. It should be easy to do?? Anyway I downloaded an app onto my IPad called Mocha WOL. Super EZ to use and configure. It will and does wake up my NUC. So then…How do I configure ROCK so that it will put itself to sleep after 3 hours of idle/non-use? Can this be done with ROON? Is it a ROON setting somewhere? If not can it be done in my NUC’s BIOS settings somehow? – Thanks Tim

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As much as I’d like to keep the train rolling here I’m not sure I can help. The BIOS won’t work as it’s only concerned with dragging your computer to the point where the OS can take over. It doesn’t monitor processes. ROCK isn’t your friend here as it’s not as flexible as RoonServer running on a Linux distro. It’s designed as a turnkey appliance but sacrifices flexibility to deliver this. It’s worth searching the forum as someone may have tried this. One solution might be to shut the box down to a schedule each night, this could be done with a cron job. If I was trying to script this I’d probably start by sifting the log for activity and then running a shutdown if the log didn’t contain any playback in the last x hours. This would still probably bite you by shutting down when you didn’t expect it. A NUC is a very low power device when idle anyway so you could view this as a nice to have? :wink:

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I have quite a bit of Seal CDs. The 1991 is Seal. I have the 1994 as Seal II which seems to work.

I prefer to put tracks into an album folder. So, Seal > Seal (his 1991 album) and another folder Seal II (1994 album). I put the track into the proper folder and make sure the track number is the corresponding track number in that album. I use Mp3Tag as my tag editor even though Roon doesn’t actually use tag info. I make sure that even every file name has enough info to know where it belongs, i.e. Seal (album artist) - Seal II (the album title) - 01 (track number) - Bring It On (track title)

For that one track that is being mislabelled by Roon but ended up getting fixed. My OCD would kick in and I would edit the file name and put it in the correct folder structure and re-scan so Roon gets it right.

Just a reminder… you might not always be using Roon the rest of your life, so tag it and structure it with as much proper information as possible. Good data in is good data.

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All good advice, I freely admit to being a bit sloppy about metadata and trust that a machine will fix it for me :frowning:

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Hello @TKelley, and thanks for the update! I spoke to the team about your WOL question and they said that ROCK should be just fine with it if your BIOS is set up properly.