I’ve been a Roon (lifetime) user for 4 or 5 years - mostly without issue.
I always keep up with new releases - currently running Roon server version 2.0 (build 1442) on ROCK (an Intel NUC), Roon version 2.0 (build 1445) on a Mac Mini.
Artwork (certainly on my own rips) is important to me and, for years, I have kept additional artwork as either JPG or PDF files in a folder named ‘scans’ inside each album folder. This has worked flawlessly for years.
Just recently (I suspect the most recent update) Roon has stopped recognising this ‘scans’ folder and won’t display local artwork/scans - BUT only in some cases. i.e. artwork from one album with a scans folder content is shown but another album’s isn’t.
Oddly, in the case of albums whose ‘scans’ folder is not being recognised – if I move the artwork files out of the scans folder into the root album folder they do display.
I have checked all the artwork files and they are fine.
I am not about to rename all my local ‘scans’ folders.
Is anyone else experiencing anything like this?
And can anyone suggest what might be going on - esp. bearing in mind artwork in my local ‘scans’ folder has worked flawlessly for years?
It’s good to see you on community again! Sorry it’s an issue that prompted your recent post.
We’d be happy to take a closer look into things. Could you please provide an example of a freshly imported album experiencing this issue? A more specific date, time, and name would be most helpful.
From there, our team will enable diagnostics on your Roon Server and investigate further.
One simple example: I have 5 self-ripped albums by Scritti Politti none of which had additional artwork - other than an embedded cover image (JPG). I made new artwork for all 5 albums (all JPG) and put them in a folder called ‘scans’ in the root album folder - as I have done with many 100s of albums before.
Not one of the ‘scans’ folders is recognised for some reason. I have checked there are no ‘hidden’ files lurking or spaces in the filename, I’ve changed the scans folder name - I’ve tried various things over the last 2 or 3 days and nothing works consistently.
One notable oddity: if I move one of the JPG files out of the scans folder into the album folder it is suddenly recognised - but not the other files - unless I move them out of the scans folder. If I do that, and they are visible, but later move them back to the scans folder they disappear again.
All very odd - can you suggest what might be going on?
To confirm, have you given Roon proper share settings on the scans folder? Here’s more info on setting up the proper share settings (no need to follow the adding of a network share steps - just the Mac side share settings) :
Hi Ben. I’m not sure of the relevance of the ‘how to set up a shared folder on a Mac’ link. As I have said already I’ve been using Roon in this way (scans folder as a child folder of the album folder) for years without issue. My local files are all on an SSD attached to my ROCK NUC and shared via ROCK’s built-in SAMBA implementation. I don’t think file sharing settings are relevant.
What might be relevant is another oddity I’m noticing with albums which are not showing their artwork - Roon is also not showing these album versions (i.e. any text I’ve put in brackets after the album name). To be clear this is only happening on the handful of albums which are also not showing artwork. To use Scritti Politti again as an example - see the attached screenshot – note all 5 albums have text in brackets after their names (with date & catalogue no) but you’ll see from the screenshot that only 2 albums are showing versions text - and the 3 without (the first 3) are also the ones not showing their artwork. This is happening with a few other artists.
This is a reach, but it seems like maybe your import settings got reset. Have you reviewed all of them to prefer your local data and performed a “Force Rescan” operation? And possibly a re-start after that?
Hmm… that wouldn’t explain why 99% of my library works fine. I’m only aware of 3 artists where this issue is happening.
FWIW I’ve tried a ‘force rescan’ several times over the last few days - the last being 2 minutes ago. It seems to rescan remarkably quickly - I have about 45K local tracks and the rescan takes about 3 seconds. Is that usual?
A Roon core (ROCK) restart also has no effect.
Later today I will try completely deleting all albums by the 3 artists I’m currently aware of, cleaning up the library, restarting everything – and then adding the albums again - one by one.
Did you have a moment to review your current import settings? Would you mind sharing a series of screenshots of how they are currently set? That might help the community here (of which I am merely a part) help you a little more.
My import settings are exactly as they have been for years and haven’t changed. The only relevant settings are Artwork (Prefer file) and ‘look for album version in square brackets’.
But, as I said, these settings haven’t changed in a long time - another reason I’m sure import settings are not causing these issues.
Understood. One final crazy and hopefully-not-annoying question/idea…have you considered re-creating those few “scans” folders from scratch, then re-populating them with the artwork?
So, the fix was simple and painless - just changing one character in the relevant album titles resurrected both scans and album versions. Changing the titles back to what they were a few minutes later also worked.
It was clearly nothing to do with import settings or share settings (thanks for the suggestions though).
I’m still baffled as to why this happened - and why several force rescans and restarts had no effect. Is it possible that those albums’ data was somehow corrupted?
I had a few hickups like this. First… if any scans are named folder, front or cover, roon will pickup that as the cover art, and bypass the embedded artwork in the file. So, I always must remember to rename my scans to frnt and covr. The reason for this is that I always have the embedded front cover around 1mb to increase speed and in the child folder, the front cover can be much much larger.
This is the directory structure I have: artist\ (year) Album [if web release/SACD] {release year, label, catalog no#} in all my directories. For a few albums roon would not show artwork if the album was not detected properly and has been deemed “unidentified”
Sometimes I have to change the catalogue no# with “space” or something in order for it to work.
This is a rare thing. but sometimes tinkering is needed slight_smile:
I have currently around 4500 albums.