Network Details (Including networking gear model/manufacturer and if on WiFi/Ethernet)
Netgear Nighthawk R7000 Router, Roon Nucleus, all Ethernet, no WiFi
Audio Devices (Specify what device you’re using and its connection type - USB/HDMI/etc.)
Have four stereo systems, therefore four Roon endpoints, two Audio Alchemy DMP-1 Media Server + PS-5 PS, Oppo UDP-205 and two Windows 10 computers
Description Of Issue
I have recently moved from Naim to Roon. My music files are all WAV, but a proprietary form of WAV that Roon cannot interpret. The result is that with the exception of “Title” all my meticulously curated metadata is not seen by Roon. That means virtually ALL my music files need editing, That amounts to over 3 Tb of opera and classical music. I am using Roon’s editor doing as much as possible on my iPad using the iOS App and supplementary editing using the Roon app on my Windows 10 PC. Roon states that these editing changes do not change my file. But I WANT it to change my file. It is worthless as it is. I have a backup of everything I submitted to Roon. Is there a switch I can set to force Roon to apply my edits to my music file?
No, Roon will NOT modify your music files in any way, and this is by design. All of your edits are being held solely in Roon’s database.
If you want to store metadata in your music files, you should use a third-party metadata editor instead of Roon’s editors.
The only way to force Roon to put basic metadata into your music files is to Export a copy of the files to a separate storage location. However, since you are using WAV formatted files, I don’t know how well this would work.
There’s nothing special about the files. It’s just wav. But being wav, no embedded metadata. Naim just store the metadata in a separate database. Sound familiar?
Edit - Sorry. Just seemed a bit unfair to blame Naim.
It’s absolutely fair to blame naim. You can embed wav with metadata or you can provide an exporter or warn users it’s a one way street.
I realise naim were early adopters/introducers of this sort of tech so I am being a little harsh. I looked at their early offering as I was a naim crack head at the time but I could see that I couldn’t get the files off it to feed my MP3 player so went elsewhere.
Yes. I know it can be done. But support is patchy. I never saw any advantage to Naim’s server-style kit either; didn’t seem to offer anything I couldn’t do with EAC and a NAS drive for a tenth of the price. But with the technology at the time, could we really argue that Naim made wrong choice to go with wav, which worked better with their contemporary streamers? Hindsight is wonderful…
But back to the original theme… I would agree with Nick that the least painful option in the long run would be to transcode to flac and use a tag editor.
Sounds like a mammoth task but converting to FLAC would be first prize, it will give you all the advantages of tags and an external tag editor with custom tagging
There are transcoding packages around , even JRiver can do bulk converts set it going drink lots of tea
I made the conversion from WAV to FLAC with over 4k CDs ripped to wav years ago. I bulk converted using dbPoweramp, and then MP3tag and other 3rd party taggers.
No, I bulk converted to flac. My albums were all in Artist/Album/track title schema. The track titles had a lot of the basic metadata and I could import from track title to tags. However, I had to hand tweak many albums, especially classical.
I’ve been following the advice with great interest. The predominant suggestion seems to convert to FLAC. BUT i don’t see how a conversion to FLAC will add value because the metadata that Naim used cannot be accessed. So, if I understand this process correctly, I will end up with FLAC files with the same deficiencies, an absence of virtually all my metadata. In addition, for reasons I still don’t understand, in dealing with multi-album sets, Naim might have put Disc One in one folder and Disc Two in another folder. A conversion to FLAC would perpetuate this problem too. It’s a mess I need to sort out at the file level or I will always be in the mess that Naim has left me in. This is why I want to directly edit my music files and the most convenient way would be to use Roon.
I have actually edited the Nucleus files directly using cut/paste function of Windows File Explorer. Which scares me. I’d rather be working with a proper editing software. Roon seems to have perfectly adequate editing apps so I just wish I could edit my files directly and permanently via Roon.
Does naim store the music in folders?
Are they like Artist/Album? Or something similar?
If so you can get a tagger to automatically add that information to the file metadata and the file name as well.
That would be a good start for more extensive tagging.
Apologies for saying this but no one would use the roon editing to fix that many albums as it is terrible.
Mp3tag or similar are so much better.
If NAIM stores in a manner similar to Sooloos and there is no folder structure clues as to what is stored then that will be tricky. At least with Sooloos you could export files which would use tagtool.exe to embed new tags based on the Sooloos library records.
If the wav files have no sensible local/folder info or any tags then I am beginning to run out of ideas.
Are there any library reports that can be run from NAIM? These could be used as tagging scripts if available.
Yes, it stores in folders by Artist, then Album, then Track.
As for the Roon Editor being terrible, it seems functionally adequate. It makes all the changes I want. It occasionally does things I don’t like and don’t understand that feel like bugs. That said, I have no comparative experience with other taggers. From my perspective, its worst feature, IMO is not being able to force it to change my files. I’ve jumped from one dirty puddle into Roon which won’t allow me to change the dirty puddle I brought to it.
