It appears that Roon is mostly about playing music anywhere. How about an interface that would recognize what is playing on a Roon enabled device and provide the rich info provided by Roon without Roon being involved in the playback.
BTW, I started a free trial, but was able to get Roon to recognize only two albums of many. I’m a retired software dev. I’ve written file finding routines that search through directories and subdirectories to find files by type. I was picturing the Roon software doing something similar and was surprised it didn’t work when given a directory folder as a search starting point.
I don’t need a player… but software that would recognize what is playing and provide rich information would be worth paying a monthly subscription.
There is something wrong and you should open a topic in Support for this with all the details. Of course Roon traverses the storage location(s) that were defined in Settings, but as per usual practice it refers to file tags for info, not predominantly the folder and file names.
It sounds like what you’re looking for is a file / metadata tagger that can perform acoustic fingerprinting across an untagged set of audio files.
Take a look at Musicbrains Picard which uses AcousticID, along with track count and length, in an attempt to identify and tag your music files.
For a local music collection it makes sense to do this off-line, in advance, rather than at the point you play music. That way you have the info before you pick a track or album to play.
If you want further control there are apps like mp3tag that allow you to further match and adjust your metadata tags.
Once metadata tags have been applied to your files Roon can use those tags to pull in further information based on them like biographies, images and reviews.
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One area where real time ‘Shazam Like’ acoustic track identification might be useful in Roon is when listening to live radio or non-album content like downloaded podcasts and mixes from Soundcloud/Mixcloud.
SongKong is another option that will identify and tag your music. Unlike Picard you can use it on a music collection of any size in one go so there is very little effort required from the user.