I am just curious how other members libraries albums have been successfully identified. I have 7,680 albums 766 were not identified.
I have Nora Jones CD that it didn’t get right. I was surprised by that. It made that separate albums for each song, because it has multiple composers on the album.
not as well as expected and it is annoying
Nearly all of 1500. I think the original rip and identification is the critical thing, the one’s it didn’t identify tended to be the ones I hadn’t paid attention to when ripping. Obscure cheap compilations that I had bought to just have that one track seemed to be the worst for identification in my collection.
Overall, the basic identification rate for my library at a ‘CD level’ is very poor. My library is about 50% classical, 25% jazz and 25% pop. I am about 18 months in to an initial roon install and I would say I am only about 50% through a JRiver migration and mostly there is no low hanging fruit anymore. A long way to go. I would say:
APE, ISO, WV - 0%
Box Sets - 40% (with the proviso that roon’s box set handling above about 10CDs is unusable)
FLAC Vinyl Rips - 10%
FLAC CD Pop - 80%
FLAC CD Jazz - 70%
FLAC CD Classical - 60%
So overall, roon’s identification rates in my library at an initial ‘CD level’ is probably about 30%. But this is not the whole story. In order to get the best out of roon, it must take the identification process a layer below the CD level to properly identify all the performers / composers / compositions on each of the ‘identified’ CD as well. Otherwise roon cannot find the hidden links in your library, and you loose much of the benefits.
Of the 30% or so CD’s that roon identifies in my library I would say that only about 50% of those require no further meta-data grooming. Mostly this involves ‘normalising’ the spelling of composers / performers / compositions but it often needs the hunting down of opus and catolgue numbers and the re-grouping of composition titles by work/part. I also find box-set handling unusable so I often spend considerable effort breaking up boxes (especially original jackets) and re-tagging so that at least some of the CD’s are recognised at an individual level.
This represents a very considerable tagging effort but if I don’t do it then I find that roon will not clump/group/merge various meta properly and much of roon’s benefits to me personally are lost as I am not much interested in the DSP and multi-room features. Roon does provide ‘merging’ tools so that in principle roon can be ‘trained’ to recognise the spelling conventions of your library, but I have never been able to get them to work very well and usually find the nuclear option of re-tagging the files to something roon understands to be quicker.
My initial impressions of roon were that it would reduce my custom tagging effort. To my surprise, the opposite is the case. Mostly I think this is because roon needs more precise tags to get the benefits than were ever necessary with folder view interfaces. Maybe beyond a certain private library size, getting the real benefits of roon is diminishing returns. Are others having this experience? Don’t get me wrong, I like roon a lot, there isn’t anything remotely like it. But identification rates should be better and also tools that ‘train’ roon to recognise the peculiarities of private libraries to reduce grooming effort should be better as well.
I have about 450 albums, Roon identified most of them I had about 10 that i had to “fix” to get them to show (structure and characters in the names), and the box sets had to be fixed to get them to show as multi-CD collections. Then there is classical, had to fix a few things with metadata and box sets.
My library is a combo of EAC (Exact Audio Copy with minimal tags) and more recently dBPowerAmp (with all tags available) ripped to FLAC.
This was the main reason I gave up on Roon !!
I have approx 3000 albums , the initial load left around a 1000 unidentified due to a whole range of reasons. Still at the rate I was fixing them , I would still be doing it this time next year
The inability to edit is a big issue, having to nip out to a third party editor added to the pain
I just couldn’t face the pain, as couldn’t my wife , I was like bear with a sore head. I gave not quite gracefully.
I still have a love hate relationship, I am dying to get involved again BUT…
Sorry to say JRiver gives so much more navigational flexibility but short on metadata, the good news is I have more time to listen and not edit …
Mike
Roon’s power depends more on correct metadata tags inside the files than expected.
“Garbage In - Garbage Out” 
I used Jaikoz to edit the file tags (it uses metadata from Musicbrainz and Discogs) first, re-scanned the files in Roon and the identification is more reliable.
If I remove the TIDAL albums from my collection, then I have 1,016 albums remaining. Of those, 199 have not been identified by Roon. However, the vast majority of these are personal recordings or podcasts. There are only 30 actual albums, ripped from CDs, that have not been identified by Roon. And as Oliver P says, GIGO applies; good metadata really helps Roon to nail identification.
I have maybe 50 unidentified albums, I couldn’t identify not even manualy.
And not only exotic stuff, even 3 albums by José Feliciano released early in 2017 could not be identified. Or Luka Bloom’s Refuge released 6 weeks ago.And a lot others
It’s been a while, but only around 400 of an initial 5500 were unidentified, many due to tagging quirks of my own design.
I now have 87 unidentified albums remaining, largely mixed up of live bootlegs, cheapo classical I ripped years ago and a few wilfully obscure titles.
I have a lot of vinyl rips of relatively obscure music in my collection (dance singles, African and Brazilian albums, etc). Roon hasn’t done a great job of identifying those albums. I hope the team figures out Discogs integration soon to solve that problem!
Hi Scott,
I have been ripping some of my vinyl using “Vinyl Studio” which has a setting where you can actually search for your album tracks and, if it finds the tracks for you but not the cover art, you can scan your album cover and integrate it. Hopes this helps.
My problem with the Roon scans is that, prior to start using it, I had ripped over 2000 albums (CDs, LPs, etc.) stored in a NAS and had spent a great deal of time organizing them in different folders according to genre and multiple other categories, such as downloads from HDTRACKS and other sources but Roon fails to present them the same way and, I have to keep doing searches in order to find what I’m looking for…
40 Unidentified here, total number of albums=1587. Majority of unidentified albums are underdogs (bootlegs, childrens songs, demos etc). Roon did a great job there, most likely helped by proper tagging. As I’m told, I have a taste for unpopular music…
(Must be honest : approx. 150 of them had to be identified, manually).
@Denis_Fiallos : Instead of setting the “Music” folder as a watched folder, you could choose to watch all of its seperate subfolders instead. So in your case : watch Brazil, Christmas, Classical… etc.
Be careful : I’m not sure how Roon will handle that change, it will probably want to rescan/re-analyze. Make sure to make a proper backup, first !
When watching all the seperate subfolders, you can use ‘Focus’ to only show the albums in one of those paths. And then search (funnel symbol) or scroll through ONLY the albums in that path. You can create a bookmark for each view if you like, for quick access.
My story is different.
100,000 tracks, only 5% classical and opera and just under 20% foreign.
I find that Roon does a good job of recognising albums, a not so good job of recognising artists and I suppress everything to do with Genre.
What is frustrating is trying to make changes inside Roon. I groom the library outside of Roon but the different levels where Roon is allowing external data to rule or applying its own logic are frustrating. There is no clear and unambiguous control panel governing behaviour.
Having said that, Roon has come a very long way and the end result is by far and away the most user-appealing interface for normal users to dive in and find something they like.
Initially, some 700 out of 9.500 albums were not recognized. That is 9.500 flac non-classic albums.
It helps to bring 2 seperate discs of a double album under one title, most of the time that will also identify the album in that same action.
Special versions (such as remasters, extended re-issues, Japanese SHM or MFSL) do not get recognized as such.
Label samplers, DVD, Blu-Ray, it is all beyond the capabilities of the catalogue.
I have three disctinct versions of Kind of Blue; to Roon it’s all one and the same.
So far I’ve whittled it down to about 350 unrecognized by foregoing the mentioned distinctions, accepting 10 tracks out of 12-15 as recognized and adding the surplus as ‘extra’ or bonus tracks.
Out of 2,869 albums only 42 are not Identified. Most of those are obscure albums, bootlegs, local artists, etc. I’m AMAZED at how well Roon did with my collection (mostly rock and classical). Great product!
I’m at a loss here.
there’s this possibly bootleg live album by Anders Osborne (Live at Jazzfest 2004)
It is not identified.
Now Roon shows me this:
757 unrecognized out of about 4800. Many of these are just common titles, unusual releases, like needle drops.
@Egbert_Braam It just means that we now have metadata at the album level, but no track listings or track level metadata.
