Is there a way to stop ROON splitting albums based on individual file DR (Dynamic Range)

I think there’s something else going on here (but I’m not sure what). I say this because it’s common for individual tracks in an album to have different DRs, and Roon is quite happy about this. For example in this album of Mahler’s 8th, the first few tracks have DRs of 6.0, 14.4, 18.7 and 8.2. The average DR for the album as a whole is given as 14.

Interesting. Every album I check seems to have identical metadata and nothing standing out other than 1 track being significantly different DR than the rest.

Furthermore, I’ve just purchased the Breathe Deep album from Qobuz, and downloaded and added it to my library. Nothing untoward, the album has the full 11 tracks.

The first few tracks have DRs of 7.2, 5.8, 9.5…

Just a thought, are you downloading from Qobuz directly into your Roon Library? This may be what is confusing Roon, because the albums slowly build up. Better to download into a staging folder, and then copy the complete album into your Roon Library.

It’s a nice album :slight_smile:

Yes I download directly into the folder but how come that would matter? Seems to have caused a lot of issues tho…!

Yup, downloading from Qobuz takes time, and the album is built up track by track. If you do this directly into a Roon Watched Folder, then Roon is trying to identify things as soon as the first track appears, and it can get confused very easily. Either use a staging folder outside of Roon’s watched folders, or stop Roon while you’re downloading.

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I tried rescanning the album from scratch and it finds all the tracks then separates them again. Would have thought that would fix it if the slow dribble of songs caused issues. The files should still be the same as what they are from qobuz servers I would have thought.

Problem is I have far too many albums to fix manually. Can’t think of a way to mass fix it either yet. I only noticed tonight years later because I disabled qobuz and tidal to just look at local content.

EDIT:
Oooops, it must have taken me ages to compile my message, since a ton of activity has evaded my attention…

I’m just a nother user and can’t offer a definitive solution for your problem, but…

As I haven’t ever seen something like your problem in my library, I’m sure Roon doesn’t split albums between different DR readings - if it really did, this would cause s…tstorms about it on this forum!

It is worth noting also, that not all tracks of an album necessarily have the same DR.
That said, you are seeing DR readings computed for a set of 8 or 10 tracks, as in your example, compared to DR readings for a single track, respectively.

I know that for sure, since I have recently setup a Raspberry Pi, running official EBU128 DR metering software while streaming to my RAAT endpoints, so I can verify individual track DR and accumulated album DR.

My guess is, that it’s most likely caused by inconsistent tags, embedded into the individual tracks.
Maybe have a look at them in Roon and an external editor for reassurance and report back.

Good luck in fixing this annoying glitch…

Thanks for your input mate.

Because the digital files come straight from qobuz servers it’s really really weird. That would surely rule out tagging or metadata issues.

There have been reports about metadata issues with Qobuz.
Qobuz usually just publishes whatever is supplied to them by the content owners.
So definitively no guarantee here!

True but the moderator above grabbed the same album and had no issues. But mine was months ago so I dunno….

Guys, look, the cause of the issue is quite simple, and the moral of the story is: don’t download albums from Qobuz directly into a Roon Watched Folder while Roon is running. Case closed, as far as I’m concerned.

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That may be a workaround (I’ll try it) but this really shouldn’t happen. Just because the files arrive at 50-100mbit per second instead of gigabit over lan really shouldn’t matter or impact how the album metadata is written to the database. That’s poor I’f it does in reality.

Qobuz metadata often suck had to edit loads of my purchases from them.

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Never happened to me and I have done it a few times, but mostly I download tar files rather than individual tracks or use the app to download them.

I strongly suspect that when you are copying across the LAN from a staging folder, the structure of the album and placeholders for the individual files is established almost immediately in the Watched Folder, whereas when you download from Qobuz, the tracks are downloaded one after another (as you will see if you use the Qobuz app to download albums)

Over the years I have learned my lessons in regards to metadata.

Every album in my library goes through the same process, regardless if it’s Qobuz, HRA, Amazon, or my own rip:

  • drop files in staging folder
  • tag with exact Discogs release (create if not available)
  • tag with Musicbrainz release
  • make sure it has high quality artwork
  • add description that can identify release (source, version…)
  • run my own Python script that makes sure dates are in proper fields (original release date, release date) and album name allows me to identify the release)
  • run another python script that put them into the properly named folders and file names

Yes, that may sound like a lot of effort, but the reward is a 100% consistently tagged library.
Totally worth doing. Oh - and I won’t let any other software touch my tags…

Feel like sharing your scripts? Sounds pretty cool. Understand if not,

The issue is not unique to Qobuz downloads, so is not a Qobuz tagging problem. I have seen the same ‘split album’ issue copying files to a watched folder on an old and particularly slow NAS drive from a locally ripped and tagged cd.

Not sure they’ll work for anyone else, but here you go:

GitHub - koehntopp/discogs (fixtags.py and bliss.py)

Please use issues or Github contact details in case of questions.

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