Issue with importing final CD as separate album in Roon (ref#824QWC)

What’s happening?

· Something else

How can we help?

· I'm having trouble adding music to my library

Describe the issue

I successfully imported 3 cd's of a 4 cd set. After adding the final cd, roon somehow decided to create a second album instead of adding it to the original one it created and shows only two tracks. What gives. This software is not intuitive for a newbie.

Describe your network setup

comcast router windows 11 roon rock core

What software did you use to rip the discs? The album metadata has to match in order for them to stay together.

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How did you tag each Album?

For Roon to know that all members of a (box) set belong together you need to name each individual original CD before importing them as (something like) ‘CD1’, ‘CD2’, ‘CD3’, ‘CD4’ with no spaces.

This thread may help…

I used dBpoweramp. When ripping the cd’s to my hd before moving the music files to the roon server, I noticed all but one of the cd’s in the set had a folder.jpg after ripping. The one that did not is the same that caused roon the problem. How can this be corrected?

I created a folder for each CD in the set. If that was wrong, then I need more help. I find folder management difficult. Easy to create, difficult to delete, and difficult to rename,

dBpoweramp - which most of us use and love around here - has a funny way of getting the album metadata inconsistent across some discs in a multidisc set. I recommend having a good metadata editor at your side to ensure all pertinent metadata matches across your discs. What platform are you using as your daily computer? Windows or macOS? Looks like Windows. I recommend Mp3tag - the universal Tag Editor (ID3v2, MP4, OGG, FLAC, ...)

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Scott,

If you need help with dBpoweramp, we can surely provide answers and specific help for you there too :slight_smile:

Those are graphics files of the (printed) cover art (usually only the front) of the CDs which you ripped. There should be one such file inside each folder corresponding to each (individual) CD.

If dBpoweramp doesn’t gather (from the sources where it gets the CDs’ metadata from) a folder.jpg or cover.jpg etc file, you can put one in for yourself in Windows Explorer before you import it all into Roon.

Because you are essentially importing a(n in your case four-CD) set into Roon as one aggregated ‘product’, you may want to settle on a single CD cover which corresponds to the set - as such a ‘combined product’ in question.

Then put that same image file in five places: one at the root level of the set (that is, above/outside the four (sub-)directories in each of which you have individual albums’ tracks); and one in each subdirectory itself.

Those subdirectories should each have the same stem name (‘CD’) followed by the numbers, 1 - 4. So

  • CD1
  • CD2
  • CD3
  • CD4

no space between the ‘D’ and the number 1,2,3,4

There is no connection between either the name or the ‘content’ of these image files and what Roon expects. So any inconsistencies between how dBpoweramp left your files after ripping and Roon’s attempted import is unlikely to have been caused by that.

Maybe - at least until you become (more?) familiar with folders in Windows Explorer, it might be wise to let dBpoweramp create them for you. Would that be helpful?

If so, we’ll gladly talk you through that process. Here, for example, are the settings which I use - admittedly on macOS, but I assume it’ll be essentially the same on Windows:

In that Naming field, you’ll put the string:

[album]\CD[Disc]\[track] - [title]

(the only places where there are spaces are either side of the dash (‘-’) towards the end before ‘[title]’.

which will create a separate folder for you under the set’s parent folder for as many CDs as you are batch ripping under (again on macOS) dBpoweramp’s File > Rip from multiple drives… menu item.

I realize that I am making the assumption here that you have more than one CD drove from which you are ripping. In that case dBpoweramp will make a directory structure ready for Roon and which corresponds exactly to what Roon expects - especially in terms of naming folders etc.

Do please post screenshots here of what you are doing so that we can see how your (sub)folders are arranged and what is in each.

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Its worth noting that tools such as DbPoweramp are not reading metadata from the CD itself, the CD does not contain any metadata. What it does have is the correct track order and the track lengths of each track to a level of precision that you dont have once the tracks are ripped to the computer. The combination of track order and track lengths allow a checksum to be created that is usually (but not always) unique, and then that checksum can be used to lookup metadata from online sources.

But, important to note the checksum is per CD not per album, so for multi disc albums the lookups for each CD are independent. The checkum may not be unique so you can get a completely wrong match because the match just happens to have a set of tracks of the same length and in same order as yor actual album.

The more subtle error that can occur is that the right album is matched but the online source being used by DbPoweramp is different to the other CDs and has slightly differences in naming. So you end up with slight inconistencies over the discs that are easy to miss but cause roon to consider it as a seperate album.

The best solution it to always use a metadata tagger afterwards that can be applied to multi discs in one go to ensure a match to one album. My own SongKong Tagger does this, as does MusicBrainz Picard

The other advantage worth noting is both of these tools add MusicBrainz Ids to the tags if the album can be matched to MusicBrainz. On import Roon recognizes these tags and will usually use these to find the right album instead of having to search and match based on the metadata.

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Absolutely correct for you to highlight this. Thanks.

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Hi @Scott_Ballinger,
Were you able to import the final CD from your set?

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It is quite a common occurrence that for all sorts of reasons roon’s auto-import has not quite worked. Roon has a CD merge feature precisely for this particular mistake.

1.Highlight both discs

  1. Click the “three dots” icon and then “edit” and you will come to a page where you can merge the albums.

  1. Click on merge albums and you will come to a page like this

  1. Check that roon has guessed correctly how to number your tracks and merge your CDs into a single multi-disk album and you are done.

If roon has not guessed correctly then you can use the rather clunky album merge GUI on this page to renumber tracks and disks and move them around. Usually though it is far easier, as several others have said, to use a 3rd party tag editor to make sure all the disk titles are identical, the album artist is identical and all the disks have been numbered from 1-4 correctly before trying to reimport.

I think most of us would also second not only @DDPS’s post but unreservedly endorse Paul’s advice here.

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