How do I make Roon see a track file that was originally missing

I copied some albums to the Roon music drive, and a few tracks were missing (often happens with HDtracks downloads, I didn’t notice this before I copied it to the Roon drive). So Roon sees the album with a track missing, refuses to identify it, but I can manually force the identification. But the track is missing. I repair the HDtracks download, copy the missing file to the Roon drive, but Roon doesn’t notice. How do I fix this? I have tried several things without effect:

Re-scan.
Fix track grouping.
Delete the folder and copy it again from my working machine where the download was done.
Delete the folder, rename the folder on my working machine and copy it under the new name.
Move the invisible track elsewhere on the NUC where Roon isn’t watching, and then copy it back.

Roon insists in remembering this album with the missing track.
What do I do?

I tried deleting the album from Roon (instead of Windows) and then copying it back again; even worse, that missing track #5 is still missing but now track #3 is also missing, even though both files exist.

  1. There must be some robust way to get Roon to re-scan a folder
  2. My tricks of deleting and copying again are not acceptable for the average user who may not have another computer

Seems like a big problem. Unless I’m missing something.

If you only have one copy of each track in Roon, merge albums from album browser.

Sledgehammer would be move (or “temp”) the folder, Clean up library (check you understand exactly what that does) restore folder. Then you’d really be starting from scratch.

Can’t merge in a single album if the missing track is just missing; merge is about two albums.

Yes, I can probably sledgehammer it, but I shouldn’t have to. And many customers can’t.

@mike ?

I had this exact thing happen to me today. 3 tracks were missing from an album I just added. Rescanning or reanalyzing the album wouldnt fix it. In the end I had to restart Roon server. Strange how a rescan did not detect the missing tracks.

Did either of you try a force rescan from within the storage settings ? This should pick up the changes I.e. The new missing files added.
The rescan, re-ID from album edit won’t do the trick.

I did not force the rescan because I was hoping the restart would be quicker than waiting for Roon to rescan my entire 44K song library. In this case I was right but in the future I will remember the force rescan option.

So if rescaning the album from the edit menu does not work whats it purpose? To just pick up tag changes?

In my experience the missing track is somewhere in Roon as a one-track album. I have experience this literally 100s of times (due to file name problems). Thus merging albums solves it.

YMMV.

Problem is finding the single track album and the old album. I’d love Roon to consider that all tracks in a folder might belong with each other before I need to go down the other route.

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When I’ve come across this, it’s been findable with Album Browser “View by Import Date” because the missing track has just been imported (having had its file name corrected from Mac-compatible to the more narrow Windows-compatible).

That’s directly related to my usage case however, and may not be relevant to Anders.

Usually when all file tracks are in the same album folder, the cause of the split is inconsistent album name tags.

Always worth checking those first.

Not in my case. The missing track is nowhere to be found, not under any of the correct metadata (track name, artist, album). And there is no track with nonsense metadata imported in the last week.

I wasn’t aware of that distinction. Did Force Rescan on the storage location. Roon gave no indication that it was doing that. Waited 12 hours, no change.

I checked the tags, they are correct.
And the behavior is very strange:

  1. First one track was omitted (I thought that was because on the initial import the track actually was missing and I have seen Roon remember this omission even when it is fixed)
  2. Then I deleted the album and copied it in again, the same track and one other was missing
  3. I just now deleted the album (from Roon) and copied it again, and those two plus one more track are missing

So @mike it seems to me there are two issues here:
A. Very strange behavior with not recognizing tracks even though they have previously been good
B. We have no functionality for forcing a directory rescan, or whatever it should be – something to force Roon to look again, without going out to the operating system

I have not yet done a database cleanup, will do that later after I have had time to take a backup.

Not sure I understand B. There is a folder rescan action available in Roon storage settings. Nothing to do with OS.

There is a question open as to whether folder rescan is the same a Roon startup.

When you have your back up etc then:-

Remove the album folder

Cleanup database (settings)

Add album folder back again

See what happens …

What I meant with B is this:
First, if I delete the album from inside Roon, it only deletes the files it knows about, so those two or three unrecognized tracks will remain on the disk. So the database cleanup will not be complete. So in order to fully delete the album, I have to go to the OS.
Second, copying it back involves OS operations, and having the original files on another computer. Which I do. But for a user with a single computer, who ripped or downloaded the file to the Roon server directly, the file first has to be copied over to another location for safe-keeping, which is another OS level operation.

All of this is error-prone. And I you make a mistake, you may need to contact HDtracks and ask them to release the files for re-download. Not a smooth experience.

Sure, I will test the cleanup process when I get back to my system. But this is not a process that we want to promote to prospective customers as the recommended solution to a frustratingly common failure.

You know Roon ignores any folder called “temp”? I would:

  1. change the folder of that album (in the OS) to temp
  2. restart Roonserver/Roon
  3. clean up database*
  4. change folder name back

No danger of losing the files that way.

*As before, don’t do this unless you understand exactly what it will do.

This happens to me all of the time. I have a folder of singles which I am constantly adding new singles that I have ripped or downloaded.

I started out with the original folder upload with songs. It is all there. Then I decide to add a few songs to this folder and they do not show up.

They show up if I search for the song directly and they appear in a area of just the 1 or 2 new songs I have uploaded.

I have stopped the Roon Server, then copy the new files, then start Roon Server. I do a rescan of folder and they just do not show up. Very frustrating. If I create a playlist, then I can have all of the songs listed in one place. I should not have to do this.

Now this is for a folder than I am familiar with and I wonder for all of the other folders which are album rips how many songs are missing there. +2 another reason for browse by folder feature.

What album tag do the files you have added use ? Are you just dropping random tracks in ? If they don’t really carry album tag details then they won’t show in album browser very well. Track viewer is where you would find them. Unless you create a pseudo-DIY-album to hold them in.

No tags are used. These are WAV files. For the folder that I was referring to, which is nothing but singles, I name the file by the Artist and then the Name of the song, example would be Collective Soul - Shine

Now for my albums, they are also WAV but I add a Number in front of the file name as so I can listen in the order that they are listed on the CD - example would be 03 - Boston - Foreplay Long Time. The folder that I have these in are the name of the Album which are is a subset of a folder of the Artists Name.

Roon does a real good job identifying my Albums with this folder structure.

I guess we can call it a DIY album. I have named it “Select Singles” and I am constantly adding to it. Some additions show up and some don’t.

Roon is primarily built around helping us navigate through the millions of albums and discs that are out there.
When we first add a bunch of random tracks in a folder to Roon it will most likely assign that collection of tracks as an album (albeit without an ID). This will have an album ID in the database and will periodically be re-checked to see if there is a match anywhere.

I suspect that when you add more and more tracks over time, the album ID and records get thoroughly disturbed.

The use case of having a DIY album that constantly changes might be quite an edge case that needs looking at. I think it stretches some of the implicit and explicit assumptions made in the designs.

Also, I think that using tag-less .wav here where only parsed file naming elements can be used for tracks ID is also not ideal. Tags would be a much better way to go. Structure in file names works if you manage music by OS lists etc. That isn’t what Roon is about.

@Eric or @mike may want to comment here