Issues/bugs hopefully to be resolved in due course

I am using RoonServer in a headless configuration on a powerful 2 processor Xeon 8 core machine under Windows Sever 2012 R2 Essentials, where my music files are stored (according to LMS of my current Squeezebox Setup 93592 track in 5636 albums with 18770 artists; according to Roon 99043 tracks in 6593 albums with 3092 artists, mainly FLAC files, the rest AAC and .mb4 files), with plural Roon installations on MacBookProfs and IMac for administration and playback. I have Roon version 1.1 (build stable, 64 bit.

Ron is gorgeous and I certainly will go for a subscription or - more likely - for a lifetime membership at the end of my trial period. I intend to use Roon in addition to my current Squeezebox/LMS setup.

Nevertheless, I found some issues and indeed - apparently - bugs which hopefully will be improved and resolved in future releases of Roon. The problems concern the edititing of meta data and the combining of plural albums in on album.

Concerning the meta data:

Although an editing of meta data for individual track is offered, it appears that the edited new meta data, in particular title of the respective track do not show up in Roon. Accordingly, currently I have to stay with the track titles found and displayed by Roon, which sometimes are not as good as the track titles I had introduced in the meta data of my FLAC files.

Concerning the combination of albums into one album:

Firstly, Roon appears to sometimes spit different FLAC file sets originating from the different CDs of a multi CD album in different albums which LMS identifies to constitute one album.

Secondly, the editing of album associations via „Fix Track Grouping“ is really cumbersome. In the albums view you see immediately on basis of the album art which „albums“ belong together and should make up one album having plural discs. Under „Fix Track Grouping“ it is difficult and time consuming to find and add the tracks to be added to one respective album. The meta information indicating the disc number is not used, so that adding track groups of other discs in the wrong sequence would screw up the resulting album. I hope that you will work on this issue. A good solution would be that one could select the albums to be combined in one album in the album view, with the option to define the sequence of the discs as far as the correct sequence doesn´t follow form the disc number meta data.

Thirdly, there is a major bug which makes the current „Fix Track Grouping“ essentially useless since it can screw up the library. In a longer working session to edit the album associations it occurred repeatedly that by adding tracks together using the „Fix Track Grouping“ tool did not result in a corresponding new album but that the track identified to constitute one album were added to a new album which I had already produced using the „Fix Track Grouping“ tool earlier in my working session. Deleting such wrongly included tracks from such a wrong album using the „Fix Track Grouping“ tool results either to a separate album having wrong album title and artists information or even to adding these track to another new album produced earlier in the working session.

My solution now was to cancel this album editing, to delete all music files from Roon´s library and to newly add my files to Roon, and to live for the time being with the meta data found and shown by Roon and wrongly spit albums. I trust that these issues and bugs will be resolved in the further development of Roon

Hi Otto,

Some of the things in your list can, I think, be solved now, others I hope can be solved in the longer term:

Metadata Preferences
Edits you make to track title using Edit/Edit Track/Title should show up in Roon when the Edit checkbox is ticked. If you are not seeing this we will ask Support to look into it.

You can select a group of Tracks or Albums (ctrl-a or longpress to select all) and under Edit/Metadata Preference tell Roon to prefer it’s own data, file data from tags or edits for that group.

Merging Albums
When ripping CDs you can end up with multiple albums that should be one album, whether in a multi CD album or sometimes a single CD. When I was ripping I found that multi-CD problems could be avoided by specifying disc numbers in the ripping software.

As I think you are doing you can select albums and merge them using Edit/Merge Album. This will take you into Fix Track Grouping where you can allocate disc/track numbers. If your disc/track numbers are correct then you can hit Make Album without further editing.

The writing to previous merged album bug you describe has been experienced by others, including me. There is an open ticket for it in the Roon bug system (# 12963) but the first step in squashing a bug is to reliably reproduce it and this one is proving elusive. It’s one of those annoying semi-random things that occurs occasionally, but not all the time. Let’s drop some flags for @brian, @mike and @vova to see if there has been any progress in that regard or what may be planned for merge in the future.

As a workaround, I found that when merging albums if I closed and restarted Roon between each merge operation then the prior album merge bug didn’t appear. That is clumsy, but not as time consuming as fixing the bung merges or wiping the library and starting anew.