To get the folder to show up as an unidentified album, you’ll need to change the meta data. So I’d recommend trying my way with any mixed track folders you have. Use a good meta data tagger like MP3Tag to mark and find albums correctly, or add the info yourself.
I made sure when I started, all of my local files were tagged correctly. So, spend some free time and start to organise the music with the correct data and do it one by one.
foobar can do all of this with onboard tools, no need for additional software 
If the naming structure of the files and folders is consistent, you can get very far with this method.
Just remember to try out the tagging syntax on a few files and folders before you go bulk.
I have. I ripped my music 20 years ago and went through that chore with iTunes. Metadata curation is a total pain, but there are some good tools out there for it. I think you’ll find that most of us are pretty fastidious with our collections. It took me years of casual and constant tidying to get everything where I want it. The nice part is that metadata is part of my tracks now, and not in a proprietary roon database, and thus I’m not tied to roon in any way.
A year or so ago this topic came up with a guy who was a DJ and had what looks like a complete mess of tracks. He realized that roon wasn’t for him, and I realized that the mess of tracks wasn’t for me.
Sheldon
I don’t agree. My folder structure adds additional information that is meaningful to me, and in case I don’t find something in Roon, I can go dig there (I never had to, but I like having the fallback just in case).
I can play them as well with any player, either on the PC or to the streamer in the hifi system, with some players that support non-Roon protocols that my streamer understands
Sure, I understand the pain in a way, but please no more “we must have folder browsing in Roon” topics. Lots of info and workarounds in older threads, in case you don’t find the solution here. Good luck
The KB has a lot of good articles on what Roon is looking for within the directory structure to make importing easier for Roon.
Roon is heavily focused on Artist → Album → Track. It does this very well. Classical has been getting better (I’m told, I don’t have a lot of classical) where things get more complicated.
Looking at the example layout you gave will make things more difficult for Roon to identify tracks to albums. However, with the metadata in each track it should do a competent job of importing against a proper Artist / Composer. These then might show-up as singles but, again, it depends on the data.
I know some people who have very large EDM collections of tracks which were never released on an Album. Roon works fine, even with arbitrary directory / track layouts, as long as the metadata in the track is correct.
Basically, it sounds like you need to fix the metadata. Basically, pull the directory layout (which Roon won’t look at beyond trying to associate tracks to albums) into the metadata. That will let you build custom albums or tags or whatever which matches your current layout.
I don’t use tags and I don’t touch metadata. But I also fall into the category that almost 100% of the stuff I have “in Roon” naturally falls into Artist → Album → Track. When I did the rip of my collection I used a classic artist/album/track structure and verified the basic data being attached to the file was accurate. I still have stuff Roon can’t identify but it always shows-up somewhere because there is always an artist and track name Roon can use.
It is unclear just how much of this metadata you have to backfill but if you wanted to created “custom albums” I believe this can be automated by one of the metadata taggers out there. Tell it to use the directory as the album and the file name as track name. That should get you closer to at least a large collection of “unidentified” albums in Roon. Unidentified doesn’t really matter it just means Roon can’t associate it with external metadata or use its vast collection of art, reviews, etc.
Good luck.
I think that access to audio files via the folder structure should be offered as well, but understand that this will not come. Sometimes I need the folder access to find music files for which I do not remember the artist name and the album name, but for which I aa pretty sure where to find them in the folder structure. My work around for such a situation is to use a parallel LMS installation. However, I do not understand the concerns of the Roon people. One may regards and treat the file system path as individual meta data of a respective Roon user.
I review the metadata of every digital file before I load to Roon. I did this before Roon ever existed and it took me quite a long time to rip my 2000 or so CDs I still do this when I purchase digital downloads. It is only rarely, that I do not have to do anything. Sometimes I need to go back to a file/folder to correct something. Roon actually allows me to identify these errors.
Generally I can locate the file myself as I have a system for organising my files but occasionally I will use Roon to identify the file path. I will then use a third party software such MP3tag to correct the file and reload to Roon.
I play around in the “identify album” to get a match for the albums that do not match. There are few that remain as ‘unidentified” - but of course they are still playable. I occasionally will go back and amend the underlying album metadata to get a match.
When you can’t remember them and need to folder browse find them, then search in Roon as you will now know what it’s called and add them to a playlist or tag them with something you will remember like the folder name or whatever. Then you can use focus to search for that tag and create a bookmark to instantly jump to it from there on in when you can’t remember. Do this for everyone that comes up. We all forget names when we have large collections but I do this to help me remember.
Sorry, dear CrystalGipsy, but his is nonsense, at least for a large local library. I have ripped about 6300 CDs to FLAC files. How shall I know at a certain point of time which CDs I will not remember name wise in future? What tags could this be? Something like “nice music to remember”?? Besides this, I do not use playlists at all. I believe in the concept of albums, and I am well aware of a number CDs that I like, in particular based on the album art and also based on the folder structure, but I am not very good in remembering names. In this respect ROON lacks a functionality that would be helpful, but I can cope therewith by using LMS.
Sorry by I can’t see anything more ridiculous than paying for Roon and wanting to rummage through PC folders to find something.
Add them to Roons favourites if they are favourites you play a lot that you can’t remember. That’s the purpose of tags. Use them then you don’t loose things. You can use anything as a tag. Bookmarks are there to save complex searches all these help you find what you want. But they need a bit fo work from the user to start with.
You can even break your music watched folders in a way that can help to some degree. Then break down using the storage path focus. It’s limited but if your one who organsises in genre folders then you can add each genre folder as a separate watched folder. Roon will see at all the same but you get the option to focus on storage path.
Playlists can be used for whole albums not just track. I listen to albums to and find them useful for putting them together.
More than one way to skin a cat. Roon has dared to be different and move away from the archaic approaches of other library software, something the majority applaud. When I had LMS I neve used folders and didn’t with iTunes before that, you adapt to it or you just won’t get the most out of it.
automatic music organizer and album cover finder - bliss (blisshq.com)
Bliss might be able to help you. Like anything though I would do it on a copy of your music.
This is pointless, 99% of roon users would appreciate by folder view and technically it possible. We have path in Track view? Right? 
But… ther is IDEA against… eeee… phenomena at least eaual to lack of USB support in apple devices.
Yes, this is disadvantage. Yes this has no sense. Perhaps in 3.0 version when there will be no function to implement. Yes, I knoe a lot of peaople that use Squeezbox or DLNA clients because ther were not able to switch to it.
The impossible for roon is i.e. Apple Music integration because there is no API for it but not folder view. This is strict author decision and since we pay for it we agreed for it. Whomever I spoke about it confirm this some kind of paranoia to blindly force it but this does not change the fact the folder view is not supported and most likely will not be until roon will be sold to some other hands. Period.
[citation needed] 
I hate to say it, because I feel like I may be edging closer to pot stirring than I like, but I personally would not appreciate having folder navigation. In fact, that is the whole point (or much of it). Abstraction. A UX that is simple, elegant, and allows and encourages appreciation of and focus on music and its history & context. That’s one leg. There are others (discovery, high quality reproduction, etc). But abstraction is a feature not a bug. It’s been started over and over again. And though I might use a folder navigation feature, it would actually detract from my ability to focus on the music itself and not artifacts of how I’ve organized it myself.
Now, is Roon perfect at all the supporting features? Hell no. Search has a long way to go. There are people working on it. If I don’t like the state or the rate of progress, I can leave (yes, I paid lifetime a while back, but that doesn’t mean I’m entitled to feel or act entitled, it just means that I’ve taken a specific financial risk).
But losing the USP / losing the thread would probably be enough to make me and a non-trivial chunk of users leave. There’s a segment of users who want Roon to be “fancy-loooking foobar” and another segment who want it to be “the magazine that just works” and another who want it to be “the perfect custodian of bits”, and sometimes these groups goals are in tension with one another. This seems like one of those cases. I imagine Roon will stay the course, whether one group says “must” or not. And we, as in all things, depending on where we live, must decide what relationship (financial or otherwise) we want to have with the entity making these decisions.
Best of luck to you all, enjoy the music!
@Johnny_Ooooops You nailed it, I agree 100%. The „non folder support“ is a strategic decision concerning the roon architecture and it makes total sense to me.
I think the longest thread was this at 508 entries, still NO by the end.
when you rip a cd, it looks like you make a conscious choice about which folders those audio files go into, right? (I think @Geoff_Coupe alluded to this in his post.)
So in roon settings, could you just have each of those folders be a separate storage location?
I don’t know how difficult this would get, as I don’t know how many separate folders you have, but you could at least use focus to drill into those storage locations.
Yes, I recall that. The argument (against) I remember most strongly - and in full acknowledgement off pot-stirring traps - as being put forward by Roon, was something about folder browsing instilling or encouraging undesirable behaviours? (Humble apologies if I got that wrong)
It was pretty much when I realised, belatedly, that it was not going to happen, despite it never figuring high on the list of undesirable behaviours I witnessed as a youth worker back in the day. Times change.
Of course, I do still folder-browse in the privacy of my home, and even in public. Probably makes me a perv of sorts 
.
Roon should not have to implicate itself in it, if they object to the practice of course. (And I am serious, they can do with their software whatever they like. Of course they can. And they do.)
Glad I can stealthily use Plexamp, which implements folder browsing in a most unobtrusive and inoffensive way, to satisfy my undesirable urges at home and on the road. 
Peace.
I linked this post a bit further up in this thread. While your “undesirable behavior” thoughts are funny, Roonlabs have a point. They actually said it encourages behaviors they don’t want to exist. The thing is, implementing this would be a design choice with eternal consequences for Roon, and every future design decision would be constrained by not breaking folder browsing and the myriad of workflows that users would build upon it.