I recently rebuilt my Roon Core on macOS (clean Core, restored from backup, local RAID reattached).. Everything restored correctly (album counts, Qobuz sync, playlists, etc.).
Roon correctly tracks newly added Qobuz albums (they appear in Home > Recent Activity and Focus > " Added in the last x days"), but in My Library > Albums, sorting by Date Added does not consistently surface newly added Qobuz albums unless I first apply Focus>Format>Qobuz.
With that filter applied, Date Added works as suspected (newest first). Without it, streaming and local albums appear interleaved unpredictably. This seems to be a limitation in how Date Added is applied in mixed local+ streaming album views, rather than database or backup issue.
Is this a known limitation or planned to be improved.
I moved this from Uncategorized to Support because you had already described so much. It would be better to use the Support > Get Help button for future requests, so that you get a proper ticket number and everything.
Thanks for letting us know. Just to confirm, this issue only started after performing the restore, and before the restore this behavior was working as expected? Can you please share a few screenshots of the different views you get?
Thank you for the reply. Yes, this only started happening after I backed up my 8TB hard drive to another 8TB drive. I can ;send screen shots but the only think you will see is the MY ALBUMS page open with a lot of album covers (both files and Qobuz) and the Sort by set to Date Added. Nothing is not functioning, the problem is the Date Added sort by function is not adding the most recently added files or Qobuz metadata to my library. It is a large library (1845 Qobuz and 9727 files/albums) and I realize that creates some issues but, I have been a Roon Subscriber for years and never had a problem with the Date Added function, It does add the particular album to the collection but I have to go under BR’OWSE in the sidebar, click on HOME and than it shows the proper Recent Activity (album added).
Thank you for the reply. Yes, this only started happening after I backed up my 8TB hard drive to another 8TB drive. I can ;send screen shots but the only think you will see is the MY ALBUMS page open with a lot of album covers (both files and Qobuz) and the Sort by set to Date Added. Nothing is not functioning, the problem is the Date Added sort by function is not adding the most recently added files or Qobuz metadata to my library. It is a large library (1845 Qobuz and 9727 files/albums) and I realize that creates some issues but, I have been a Roon Subscriber for years and never had a problem with the Date Added function, It does add the particular album to the collection but I have to go under BR’OWSE in the sidebar, click on HOME and than it shows the proper Recent Activity (album added).
Thanks for the additional information! This could be a case of how Roon is interpreting or re-writing the Date Added timestamp for your local files after the backup/restore.
When you cloned your 8TB drive, macOS likely preserved file creation dates but updated file modified or folder timestamps, or Roon re-scanned your storage in a different order after the server restore.
If the storage path changed or Roon sees the directory as “new,” it may assign new Date Added timestamps to huge batches of albums all at once, leading to a scrambled mixed list.
Can you confirm that your Storage Location did not change in Roon?
Roon Settings → Storage
If your RAID was mounted under a different path even briefly (example: /Volumes/RAID 1 vs /Volumes/RAID), Roon treats the entire library as new, and all Date Added timestamps get rewritten.
If you see multiple versions of your music folder or see “watched folder disabled,” fix the path so only the correct folder is enabled.
You can also try toggling “File Creation Date”
In Roon: Settings → Library → Import Settings
Toggle both:
“File Creation Time”
“File Modification”
If one of these was changed during the restore, the mixed sorting will break.
Thanks for your response. I believe you and I have crossed paths during my many years on Roon.
I appreciate your suggestions. I have attached screenshots of the Settings > Storage and Library > Import Settings. I was not able to find a Date Added in the Library which would definitely help clean up my issue. In the storage screenshot, you can see that the only thing I have enabled is my Roon Raid. This Raid was created after I initially made a copy of my 8TB to another 8TB. I than transferred one of the 8TB to a 12 TB drive as a safety. I went on and erased both 8TB’s and than started the process of creating a Raid. It was successful as I did get all of the Files and Qobuz albums. The problem is that the Qobuz albums were the last thing I added as I was building my Library and they used to all show up first in the My Album section sorted by Date Added. Although I have all of the albums from Qobuz, they no longer show up at the top of the Date Added list. Since i use this for new music discovery, having them scrambled in with all of the files makes it very hard to find unless I just use focus for Qobuz. The problem with that is when I hit Focus > Format> Qobuz, I do get the proper listing but in my overall My Albums list I only see Qobuz and not able to see the rest of my collection from the Roon Raid.
Sorry, this is a little long winded, but i have been dealing with this for about a week, many hours a day to try and rectify it. The screen shots are not in order but the one for Storage is one screen shot and the other three are from the Library.
I look forward to your thoughts and thank you for reaching out.
I completed what you suggested and unfortunately, same result. It is a bit confusing as on one hand it works as it should with a large library. The fact that it wont sort by Date Added properly is perplexing. Just a quick review:
Im looking to improve consistency and transparency of the Date Added function especially as it relates to streaming albums (Qobuz) in large, mixed local and streaming libraries. I have tried to resolve this over the past week and have done a complete Core rebuild, database restored including a full cache clear and restore. Before I created this RAID with two 8 TB drives, I had a fully functioning Roon library (1800+ Qobuz and 11,000 local file library). I added the Qobuz library over the last couple of years and have not been adding local files (CD rips, or file sharing) at all. Therefore, every time I opened up the Roon library under MY ALBUMS and sorted by DATE ADDED, the Qobuz titles would come up first since they were the most recent added product. Since I use this for music discovery it was a great way of sorting. Sorting by ARTIST is not a problem and everything is there. Im not missing any of the files or streams, it just does not show up in Date Added as it should and have no idea why it is different than it was when the library was on one 8TB drive. When I do add a new Qobuz stream, it shows up in BROWSE>HOME>>RECENT ACTIVITY. It also shows up in MY LIBRARY>ALBUMS when I launch FOCUS>FORMAT>QOBUZ. The problem with doing it in Focus is that I get all of the Qobuz albums and it shows up on the monitor with appropriate metadata but it takes out the 11000 files from access unless I cancel out of Focus and combine my ROON RAID with QOBUZ LIBRARY. Get all of the albums at that point but sorting by DATE ADDED does not function as it should. Basically for long time users with large libraries, DATE ADDED is one of the most important discovery and recall tools. In its current form, it works reliably only in limited contexts and becomes confusing while browsing in MY ALBUMS It is only reliable when isolating streaming albums via Focus, and unreliable as a unified timeline for the complete catalog in the MY ALBUMS browser.
Thanks for listening Benjamin. I am a dedicated lifetime ROON user and will do whatever it reasonably takes to resolve this problem. Please let me know if you have any further suggestions!
Thanks for giving that a try! At this point, we’ll need to attempt to reproduce this behavior in-house, using a copy of the same backup you recently restored from, which caused you this inconsistency.
If you could:
Zip up your RoonBackups folder (right-click it and select “Compress…”):
I have uploaded my Backup file folder. A couple of questions:
As you analyze my Backup files, it won’t disrupt anything that I have in Roon, Qobuz, etc.?
Are there time stamps that you can adjust for the Quobuz metadata? Also, when I open up MY ALBUMS > Focus > Format > Qobuz it does open up my Qobuz library in the correct order by the date that I added the albums. Unfortunately as I previously mentioned, I am able to see the Qobuz albums as I originally loaded them but, when Im in the focus, format, Qobuz sort it takes away my ability to combine both Qobuz and my Roon Raid together.
When I uploaded the backup folder, it is under my name but I put my Mac email address and not the AOL address in the “email” entry. I use both so it doesn’t matter to me but while it was loading up the zip file I realized my mistake. AOL or MAC is fine with me for correspondence!
I hope you find a solution to this mystery and appreciate all of your help.
Thank you for uploading the backup and for the detailed explanation — it’s very helpful.
To answer your questions first:
Analyzing the backup will not affect your library in any way. We only use a copy of the data in an isolated internal environment. Nothing in your live Roon setup, Qobuz account, or metadata will be modified.
There’s no manual adjustment we can apply to Qobuz timestamps on your live system — the goal here is to understand whether the current behavior is expected by design or a regression / inconsistency in how Date Added is calculated for mixed local + streaming libraries.
We’ve now passed your backup to our QA team so they can reproduce this behavior internally and verify whether the Date Added sorting you’re seeing is working as intended or needs improvement. Once QA completes their review, we’ll follow up with you with next steps or findings.
Thanks again for your patience and for taking the time to document this so clearly — it’s exactly the kind of real-world use case that helps us improve the product.
