How to group box sets

Roon Software Discussion
1

I find Roon the best thing since sliced bread, but sometimes it idiosyncrasies absolutely drive up the wall, because it stubbornly refuses to do simple and obvious things!

I have several Beatles Boxes on my harddrive:

  • The complete CD Collection
  • The Beatles in Mono
  • The Beatles Stereo Box Set
  • Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band 50th Anniversary

They are each located in a folder, with a subfolder for the individual albums. I have gone through the trouble to give the albums the correct disc number tag as specified in the respective Roon album.
Roon has identified them as individual albums, not as box sets. I have no way to identify which album is part of which box set.
Now I would like to display all the albums in one folder, so that I can merge them into one multi disc album. However I have not found any way to do this. I cannot imagine that this simple task is not possible in Roon.
Am I missing something, or is this something that is against the philosophy of Roon (which I suspect). If yes, how do I accomplish the task of getting the box sets identified?

2

Roon does not manage Box Sets :disappointed_relieved:

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3

  1. Each album you want to merge into a box should have the same album title. For example, “Some Box Title” and not “Some Box Title - CD 1”, “Some Box Title - CD 2” etc.

  2. All the CD’s should be in the same directory and just called simply CD1, CD2, CD3 etc.

  3. It is often better to number the disks 1/10, 2/10, 3/10 etc. rather than 1,2,3 etc.

  4. Because roon failed to make a box during your initial import you will now have to “merge” them. If you are happy the numbering and naming is correct, highlight (right click) the albums you want in a box from the album view and then click “edit → merge albums”. It should be straightforward after that. If it is not and roon complains it is because all the albums don’t have the same name and/or there is something wrong with your directory naming, and/or their is something wrong with your disc and track numbering. You will have to fix that first. Roon will offer to do this for you but it is usually better to cancel and straighten out the naming and numbering and try again.

Be warned though. There are many complaints on this forum about roon box handling and you may not like the results. Only you can decide. Personally I find roon box handling fine for small boxes but not at all for the very large boxes that are so common with classical music.

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4

Thanks @Tony_Casey for the description of the clean process.
I have found a way to merge the CDs of the boxes manually:

  • I had already previously set the individual disc numbers as Roon would expect them
  • Then I moved all the Beatles Box sets to another drive and cleaned the library
  • Then moved the first Box set back. Now the CDs appeared only once and it was easy to select and merge them
  • move the second Box set back, select and merge
  • dito for the others

It would be much easier if Roon allowed to focus on any folder, not just on the watched folders.

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Glad to hear it worked out.

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It’s great that you got them into the sets. I assume this comes with the impossibility of determining which album each CD is except by looking at the track list. For a product with such a perfectionist design philosophy, I am surprised this issue has persisted this long in Roon.

I mostly just stripped out the box sets into their individual albums because of this. That has its own challenges, but it is better than trying to find an album or disc only by number.

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7

Somehow you can’t seem to win them all, even with Roon. Roon is really great, but it does have some rough edged that can really start to itch after a while.

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8

The magic in Roon is a cut above anything else I’ve seen. I do wish there were more resources to handle all this other stuff and also keep enhancing the magic.

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