How to export and import the "tags" I made in ROON?

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi,

I would like to know if ROON has a function to export the “tags” I had made for my music library, and then import it?

Thanks,
Felix

2

There is no direct function to export/import just Roon tags.

Tags are, of course, held in the Roon database, so they will be included in the Backup and Restore functions of Roon.

If you want to export the tags for use in other applications, then Roon has two ways of exporting your tags:

  1. As copies of the music files in your library, with the files holding tags as metadata. Note that TIDAL and/or Qobuz albums or tracks will not be included, because there are no local files held for these entries in your library.
  2. By exporting a catalogue of your library to an Excel spreadsheet. This catalogue will include your Tags, and will also include entries for any TIDAL and/or Qobuz albums/tracks in your library.

More information is here in the KB.

3

Hi Geoff,

Thanks for your information!

I suggest that ROON should have both Tags export and Tags import functions.

In my case, I installed ROON and play it under RAM OS. It has a limitation space for Disk-C for running RAM OS, and the new version(v1.7 build 505) of ROON is not able to translate my old database successfully(due to not enough free space in Disk-C) so that I need to rescan my music library by new ROON and the old tags lost…

If ROON has tags export/import functions then I won’t lose my old tags!

Best Regards,
Felix

4

Hi Felix, can you post this as a request in the Features Request category of the forum? Posts in that category are read by the Roon Labs team and considered for future versions of Roon. Thanks.

(I’m a customer like you and not an employee of Roon Labs)

5

Done.

Thanks,
Felix

6

Hey Geoff, thanks for these options. My issue with this is that it exports based on an artist first hierarchy. My albums are all stored in a flat layout. Every album has it’s own folder and the folders are named "[artist] - [album name] ([version ID]). This all gets lost with the export. I can’t export unless it replicates the current folder structure.
Not sure if this is a common issue though but a real show stopper for me.

7

If you want a full catalogue of all the albums/tracks and the file paths, then it is best to do your export from the Track browser. Make sure that you have the filepaths displayed in the browser. On the right of the column headings is a drop down arrow - click that and you can configure what you want to have displayed in the browser, and hence exported in your catalogue.

1 Like
8

Thanks Geoff, but this doesn’t give me the original library folder structure. It gives [artist]/[album] while i’m after [artist - album].
e.g.
[Andrew Bird - My Finest Work Yet]
and not
[Andrew Bird] / [My Finest Work Yet]

Sounds like it needs a feature request.
Thanks

9

So this is a definite add feature for sure. Many have tagging for personal content like live recordings. its a whole sub culture here. We share and trade Legal live recordings we make and acquire with large groups of people. Having the ability to do custom tagging for sortation for search and playback beyond classic meta tags stored in the Flacs is paramount. When one does this work being able to share these tag files would be amazing.

10

I just asked a question about playlists in a similar fashion. Surely there are common use cases for import/export of most roon defined data where full backup/restore of the database doesnt hit the mark.

11

playlists seem to be easier there are apps that will copy those and save to XML etc. so you can sort of work around that. Transfer Playlists Between Music Services | Tune My Music

12

Found this thread while dealing with DB corruption and having to rebuild from scratch. I did find that if you export all of your Albums as XLS the resulting file will contain Tags, which is a great and makes rebuilding tags much easier and quicker. And while it doesn’t fully support some of the requested use cases above (like @Adam_Egert ) you could so something like filter album view to only show “Bootleg” then export that list. It won’t come over with the built-in tags (like Live, Bootleg, Compilation, etc) but filtering before export can get you close if not all the way.

However I was surprised to see that exporting Tracks to XLS does not include which Playlists a track is in, even though that information is displayed in the UI (most of the time). So the only way to completely and manually re-create your playlists is to export every play list individually and then go into each track (after re-scanning your music sources) and adding them one at a time to each new playlist.

Am I missing something? Has anyone been able to export a list of Tracks with Playlists (rather than exporting every individual Playlist to XLS/CSV)?

13

Partially answering my own question: I found an interesting workaround to more quickly re-built playlists.

  • Go into a playlist and select all tracks
  • Select Add to Tag from the hamburger menu
  • Create a new tag called something like “Playlist: NAME”
  • Once done, go to Tracks and select all
  • Export to XLS

The resulting XLS will contain the new “Playlist: NAME” tags for any track that’s in a playlist, easily sortable and able to be grouped so you can just click through. In my use case I removed any song row in the XLS from the resulting export that wasn’t in a playlist so I could sort by artist then album then track and add each one to multiple playlists at the same time. Still going to take forever, but it seems like a better solution than exporting individual Playlists to XLS and going that route.

The only downside is if you have playlists ordered a certain way, that will have to be recreated manually after you’ve added all your tracks, unfortunately. I have playlists which recreate greatest hits collections from tracks on the original albums and all of those sort orders were lost in this process.