I listen to a lot of classic jazz on Qobuz and was wondering if there’s a way to know if an album is a mono or a stereo recording without listening to it first. Maybe I’m just not seeing it.
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Really? Nobody? 
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I’d love to see this as well but I fear it might not be provided with the metadata.
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Finally a response! 
I was beginning to wonder if my question was even visible to the folks on this board.
Maybe I should ask for it in Feature Requests. 
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I think the only way currently to distinguish stereo and mono recordings in Roon is to use the Focus functionality in the Album screen, using Format.
But nothing like an Album icon on the Overview screen as yet, as available for bitrate etc…
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Thanks for you input. Your suggestion makes sense but the only option in Format is stereo, not mono and it classifies all of my recordings as being in stereo when I know that some are mono recordings.
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Oh, sorry - my Music HDDs are currently in storage, so working from a very limited library and seemingly just as poor memory; I could have sworn that Mono albums are detected in Focus.
I have two 5 channel albums and they are seperately detected.
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I don’t know how Roon does it, but it has certainly recognised some (but possibly(?), not all) my mono recordings and marked them as such. Because they exist, I also get the opportunity to select them in Focus.
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No problem. I appreciate you giving it a shot.
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Interesting. I wonder why it works for you but not for me. 
Maybe you have something set differently than I do.
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As far as I know, all my mono files are MP3s (podcasts).
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Ah, and I don’t have any MP3 files. That might explain why yours are displayed as mono recordings.
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There must be something in the MP3 format that Roon picks up on then - I have both mono and stereo MP3s.
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I’m sure Roon’s Audio analysis picks up channel information - this information is shown at the track level, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work.
Perhaps it runs into issues when an album is mixed between mono and stereo? The two 5 channel albums I have are FLAC and all 5 channel.
Can we check that your Mono albums have been processed by Roon?
On an Album page for an album that only has mono tracks:
click the three vertical dots next to any mono track>View File Info
EDIT:
It’s just dawned on me that some mono recordings are likely to be mastered across two channels or when ripping to FLAC, but just duplicated. So Roon won’t pick up the difference?
So ignore the above.
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Sorry, I should have been more clear. The recordings I’m referring to are not local files but album favorites that I stream from my Qobuz library. I clicked on the three dots as you suggested and the file info shows them to be 2 channel recordings.
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I was just thinking that it would be helpful to know if a particular recording is mono or stereo when I’m perusing the Qobuz catalog.
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Ah, that might explain it (I edited out that question as I thought you were refering to your own local library).
I’m certain that Qubuz tracks will always show as 2 channel, as they are not subject to Roon’s audio processing/detecting. And as I added above, possibly mastered as 2 channel anyway.
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Yep, it would be useful, but I guess that it is more a metadata issue for the likes of TIDAL and Quboz.
The only way for us end users would be to add a Mono tag to our albums (if I’m correct in that some (most) Mono albums are mastered in Stereo, streaming or not).
I’m going to get my HDDs out of storage next week, so I’ll update the thread with what I find.
Or hopefully someone more knowledgable will come along…
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Understood and thanks for all the help!
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You’re welcome, it’s an interesting question! I was so sure that for local files Roon can always detect Mono recordings.
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