Impact of Identified versus Unidentified "Album" on Roon Server

On several recent threads discussing the ablity of Roon to handle large music libraries, the issue of unidentifiedd recordings, aka albums, has been mentioned. Some people believe that these unidentified recordings have quite a negative impact on Roon Server due to various factors. Others, like me, believe that these unidentified recordings have much less of impact on Roon Server due to various factors. I will lay out the reasons for my belief below and hopefully together we can figure out what is the correct answer.

Why I believe that unidentified recordings have less impact on Roon Server than identified recordings:

I will use an unidentified bootleg live recording of a jazz quartet as an example.

The live bootleg of the Jane Doe Quartet is placed into one’s Roon library where it is “unidentified”, meaning that Roon cannot find a match to the recording in its database and therefore only the information in the file tags for the recording are being used by Roon. If the file tags are data rich, e.g. each member of the Jane Doe Quartet is listed in the file tags, then Roon should be able to find and build hyperlinks for each member of the quartet. However, if the file tags do not provide detailed information, then Roon will not be able to find nor build any hyperlinks.

Based on the above, my contention is that an unidentified recording with minimal information in the file tags will have a very small impact on the Roon Server. More detailed file tags might result in a greater impact on Roon Server, however this one area where I welcome feedback from more knowledgeable individuals.

Now let’s look at the impact of an identified recording from the same Jane Doe Quartet.

With an identified recording inported metadata “replaces” the file tags as the primary source of information about the recording within Roon. The richer and mre detailed the metadata then the more of an impact on Roon Server the recording will have. Hyperlinks may be available for all different kinds of information about the recording - record label, musicians, producer, engineer, etc. On the other hand, scant metadata will yield very few hyperlinks and therefore result in very little impact on Roon Server.

As I stated earlier, this is only my understanding and I may well be wrong about some, if not all, of these things. Hopefully a few more knowledgeable individuals will help us all to arrived at the correct answers and improve everyone’s understanding of the impacts of various recordings on Roon Server.

The whole identification process is one of Roons most intensive processes. Even when albums are already identified Roon often has full metadata updates where it can and often does use up 100% of its the cpu allocation refreshing metadata. As a result remotes can stop responding to other events and it can affect playback until it’s finished. Many of us have reported this odd behaviour but as of yet nothing has come of it. I have only 9 unidentified albums in my collection so it’s not this, I have a good number of compilation albums but not excessive amounts and only a few large box sets of max 11 discs. So it’s not this either. These metadata updates are seemingly random as there is no pattern or set time and 99% of the time they are when you’re likely not using Roon so for many they are unaffected.

Roon have said or I should say one member of support mentioned in a thread where a user was having major performance issues that a large proportion of his collection was unidentified albums and bootlegs etc and was likely the cause for this users performance issues. It was claimed that Roon will continue to keep trying to identify these albums and with a large number consume a great deal of resources doing so. Not just at these metadata updates I mentioned but at any rescan and likely other times. So it may well have an affect but I am sceptical it’s the whole picture.

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There were huge threads about exactly this problem lasting for months not too long ago. This isn’t a conjecture. There were improvements to the issue, it seems (as complaint volume fell) but I suppose it can’t be made to disappear completely. In these threads we learned that Roon tries to identify these albums periodically - which makes sense because how else would it pick up new data. A few tens of even hundreds won’t matter, but we also learned that there are Roon users who have thousands of them.

It’s not the only known potential performance killer, but if users ask how many tracks they can have on a Nucleus One, then the answer can only be that it depends on these factors.

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