Hi Gary,
As an Australian I have a fair few unidentified albums, but my collection is under 1TB so not a patch on yours.
In relation to your specific questions:
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Yes, provided the files are of a supported format you will be able to play them whether an album or track is identified by Roon or not. You will also be able to add your own album or Artist art;
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I have a very common directory structure of music/band/album/files. You have described your structure as having one big file called music and then separate files for bands and one file for compilations. I suspect you may be speaking about directories. If so, then that structure will not be a problem. If, however, you do mean that all your music for each band is in one actual file then we will have to ask a dev about how to proceed. That would be quite unusual, however, so I am going to assume that you have a music/band/file directory structure.
I hope you tryout Roon. I think you will be pleasantly surprised at how far the metadata goes (but I’m certain your collection will go further). I would make the following suggestions:
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Roon can handle a 6TB library, but I would suggest starting off with a 1 or 2 TB subset of your library to check things out. @audiomuze has a large library and did something similar. He may be able to comment or make recommendations about testing Roon on a large library.
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During setup you will have a choice between making your music directory an “organised” folder or a “watched” folder. In your case I would definitely recommend “watched”. That way Roon will leave your file structure completely unchanged. Organised folders may be a useful tool where you have a lot of different file structures from all over the place and you just want Roon to sort them out how it likes, but that isn’t your situation.
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Roon allows you to choose whether to prefer it’s metadata, file tags, or edits you create in the Roon database. You can set that priority for one album, a group of albums or all albums. When Roon doesn’t have metadata it will use your file tags. Where your file tags are used Roon will still create links to Artists, Composers etc, even if it’s own metadata doesn’t identify them.
There will be some things Roon doesn’t get right. You will doubtless find examples of bands with the same name having albums incorrectly attributed. That sort of thing can be fixed by Roon’s metadata providers when reported, but it does seem to be a very slow process.
Cheeers !
Andybob.