I’m new to Roon (1 week in my trial) and so far I’m liking it a lot…, for my album collection.
Besides my collection of albums (including compilations, EP’s and singels) I do have a “track library”. I buy a lot of individual tracks from different sources and sometimes I also pick some tracks from albums and add them to my track library. Reason is the ability to find tracks quickly (I use my track library primarily for DJ-ing).
My track library is organised by a hierarchical folder structure mainly based on (sub)genres. In iTunes I have this structure mirrored by playlists and playlist folders. I don’t have the album tag set because I don’t want these tracks to “pollute” my album library.
Now how can I organise my track library within Roon? Should I use Roon playlists, make a compilation for each “subgenre-folder” I have on disk, or forget about trying to organise individual tracks with Roon?
Any ideas, help, best practices are very welcome. I really would like to convert myself to a lifetime subscriber when my trial ends, but I also need this track library to work…
For a similar use case I chose to do the following…
A bunch of single tracks, 7" and 12" vinyl rips etc I put into a single folder.
I did actually set an arbitrary album title tag which was “Vinyl Rip singles”. (You could use the folder title or other meaningful tag)
Each track is tagged with the correct title and artist.
I selected an appropriate artwork.
This DIY album does sit in my library and obviously doesn’t have a matching album ID.
It shows as a ‘Various Artist’ album which is logically correct.
All tracks show up via search and artist listing.
I don’t feel it pollutes in any sense and I can easily go to it to play or select etc.
Sounds like you may have a series of these kind of sets. Might be neat to tag them all so they naturally group in DIY albums in your library. Set genres etc as you see fit.
Others may have other ideas on how else to manage here.
The method below should enable you to replicate your folder structure with Tags and Bookmarks. It would be a flat structure, however, because Bookmarks aren’t hierarchical.
First create a temporary new watched folder in a convenient location. Call it Work or something recognisable.
Move the files from one of your folders (don’t copy, move them so the Roon database never sees duplicates) into the Work folder.
In Roon:
Tracks/Focus/Inspector/Storage Locations/Work
Select All (right click or long press one track then top left menu to select all)
Triple Dot Menu/Tag Manager/Create Tag
Bookmark Icon/Add Bookmark
Move files back from Work to their original location.
Now you should be able to bring up Tracks with the relevant Tag using the Bookmark.
Repeat for each desired Folder.
Add the relevant Tag(s) to new Tracks as required.
The trick of creating a temporarily folder to batch process a given set of tracks works like a charm, and will most likely come in handy to batch-edit other stuff as well.
I might use a combination of both methods: create DIY albums, use tags and bookmarks to organise my track library.
Thanks both of you for helping me out. Although I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy, Roon does take some time to get used to. But I’m sure it’ll pay off…
You’re very welcome and I hope you continue to enjoy Roon. I’ve shifted this thread into Roon Software as it doesn’t appear to need attention from the Support devs. Please feel free to post here or in Support if you strike any issues.
Ok, so I’m trying to get my folder structure with individual tracks in Roon as DIY albums. Using tags and bookmarks works as expected, but I’m struggling with the way Roon displays these track collections or “albums” as you wish.
When I go to Collection > Tracks > TagX, I see my list of tracks, but the Artist column shows Various Artists. In this view I expect to see the Track Artist in the Artist column since these tags are properly set in my files. Only on a album level (the album artist title) I want to see Various Artists.
I have been thinking about this and it would be super useful to be able to select a directory in the focus, the above workaround is cunning, but is still a workaround.
I’m opting for bug in the sense that I can’t see a way to display Track Artist instead of Album Artist or to prefer file metadata as regards Artist. This is similar to History where Artist defaults to Album Artist, and consequently the meaningless “Various Artists”, when Track Artist is what the user wants to know.
Let’s drop flags for @mike (may be away atm) and @joel.
Agreed, there is a feature request to that effect.
Edit: This is the feature request I was thinking of. It looks like its mainly me asking about increased folder filtering in Focus. This is a separate issue from browsing by folder which has another feature request thread. If you think greater capacity to filter by folder would be useful in Focus (or if you think it would be the end of civilization as we know it !), please pop into the referenced thread and comment.
Thank you. I’ve spend some time trying to figure this out, but apperently it wasn’t me. Hopefully it can be fixed because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
I think it may form part of the metadata revisions coming with 1.3. See the posts by Mike in this related thread. If it is a 1.3 thing then that may mean a longer wait for implementation than the usual bugfix cycle.
I confess I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to metadata changes. It may be that @Carl or @Ludwig have seen mention of proposed changes to Album Artist - Various Artists references in Tracks, History etc. I’ve got a feeling in my waters that there was another thread about it, but can’t find it now.
I just found out that there is a 120 track limit for albums. I guess that needs to be sorted first to be able to continue this route of making my DIY albums…
Playlists also show Various Artists in stead of Track Artist, probably sharing the same view.
It’s kind of ironic that after spending hundreds of hours of tagging my library, and spending $499 on Roon to enhance this meta data, I can’t see “track artist”, arguably the single most import piece of data of a track after track name maybe…
On a more serious note, I really would like to hear from a Roon rep. whether or not this will be fixed (as well as the 120 track limit for albums). If not, I will have to reconsider my lifetime subscription. One of the reasons to subscribe for life is this community and what seems to be a very competent and responsive development team, so I’m confident that it will be solved.
If there is a better area to report bugs, please let me know.
I have around 20000 singles in my collection and like to arange them in DIY albums. Some are 100 tracks, some are 300 tracks, but the biggest DIY album is 4600 tracks. For all the tracks in an album I set the Album Artist tag to Various Artists and each track has its own Artist, Title and also its own embedded Cover Art.
So I agree to what is mentioned about the 120 track limit and the track / album title issue, but I would also see the embedded cover art shown for each song when I set the option “Use cover art from file” for that album.
This handling of individual tracks or DIY albums is the only thing I miss from squeezebox
