I’m still in the process of adding my collection. For albums that consist of more than one CD, I have the problem that I have to rename them all, from disc 1 I make cd1. Is there no alternative? Some have albums that consist of more than 100 CDs…
You can put each box set disk into its own sub folder…
Artist/Album/CD001/01 Track Name
Artist/Album/CD001/nn Track Name
…
Artist/Album/CD00n/01 Track Name
Artist/Album/CDnnn/xxTrack Name
I use dBpowerAmp for ripping and batch conversion, with this application it is possible to setup a template format for the folder structure and file naming convention.
At present I have a mix but have the intention to eventually switch to have CD number prefixed track names.
the developers should be able to program in such a way that all folders in a folder that are numbered consecutively, whether cd 1,2,3 or disc 1,2,3 or vanilla ice cream 1,2,3, are merged. Unfortunately my English is not so good anymore, hope it works (with translator) anyway…
Example 1 seems to be a VA Sampler album.
Example 2 seems to be just a collection of previously released “ordinary” albums. IMO you’re best off leaving it that way (Roon showing you the individual albums) and add a Roon Tag to them if you wish to preserve the information that these are part of a collection (Albums you must hear).
Note: There is a track limit for what can go into a single “album” (single disc or multi disc). I can’t recall the current limits, but to me it looks like your example 2 will probably be too much.
It is just a guess, but in your first screen shot the albums in the subfolders although not named CD1, CD2 etc. may be tagged with “disc number” = 1, “disc number” = 2 etc. It is possible that “disc total” = 10 has also been tagged. It is likely that the album title has been tagged the same for all 10 disks. Maybe this was intentional, maybe not, depending on your source. I might also be completely wrong. My experience is that roon may split an album into discs using other logic/identifiers than the subfolder name, but renaming the subfolders is the easiest way to guarantee it.
If you have a lot of these sorts of albums you may need to check that roon can display all tracks on each disk. The limit used to be about 180 tracks per disk although I seem to remember reading that was extended but I cannot remember by how much. If your “albums” exceed this limit, the display will be truncated. I generally split the few unidentified 1001 track compilations I have into 10 artificial disks for this reason.
I would agree with @BlackJack that in the second screenshot I would leave well alone and let roon identify the individual albums. If it is important to you that you can collect them all together on one screen then just tag them all with “1001 Albums You Must Hear”. A quick and easy way to do this is externally by mass tagging ROONALBUMTAG = “1001 Albums You Must Hear”. I do this all the time with local content with mp3tag. With streamed content you just need to tag directly. For example I can collect all of EMI’s “Great Recordings of the Century” with a ROONALBUMTAG
Not sure I understand how you are managing such a large library without a tagger. Sounds like you have managed to get by with folder browsing. Roon just doesn’t work that way. In fact it is deliberately designed not to. You are going to have to do an awful lot of tagging if you haven’t been doing that to get your local library to work properly with roon. Unfortunately that may well take years.
I do not have very much local content on my roon server as I am away from home at the summer house during lockdown and that has become a habit. But I can show you the principles of what I would do in your second “1001” albums above. I happen to have 13 Arthur Grumiaux albums locally on my laptop. The sub-folder structure looks like this:
I can load all of these folders into mp3tag in one go. I have not seen any practical limits on the number of folders I can load. In this case it is 13 but I have loaded several thousand in the past.
In mp3tag I can customise the editor pane on the left hand side with all sorts of roon relevant tags. In this case I have selected all 13 albums and mass tagged ROONALBUMTAG = “Arthur Grumiaux Lock-Down Albums”.
I do this a lot as a kind of substitute for folder browsing. Others do something similar with bookmarks. I too would prefer the simplicity of folder browsing in many scenarios but this is a roon design choice and this is one workaround.
I second the use of mp3tag for tagging (name is not descriptive, as it handles almost any digital music file codec). Easy to use, but also very sophisticated and can be easily programed to do many things in a batch manner. If folders and file names are descriptive, one can even create tag (album, artist, track number, disk number, etc.) in a batch manner with mp3tag. I’ve done batch editing on 50,000 files at a time with mp3tag.
Thank you for the help, as you say, and I was afraid I will need years to come. What the heck. It took me 30 years to build up the collection, I’m only 61, so when I retire, I still have a lot of time to tag my albums…
