Large library and library import settings

[Jazzfan_NJ (Listening to JAZZ since 1972!)]

@support

I am new to Roon but have been using LMS for over 10 years so I’m not new to music streaming.

I installed Roon a little over two weeks ago using a Windows 10 desktop computer as the Roon Core (i7-6700 @ 3.40 GHz with 16GB of RAM). Roon imported my very large music library, which is located on two Drobo arrays and contains over 52,000 albums with over 700,000 tracks spread across four volumes, and everything was working great until…

Okay so once all my music was imported into Roon I realized that I was not happy with the way some things were being shown within Roon and by the fact that over 11,000 albums were listed as “unidentified”. So I started to play around “under the hood”.

I changed the Genre setting to have Roon use my genre tags as well as Roon’s own genre tags. Then I changed the import date from “date imported into Roon” to “date file modified”. I may have tweaked a few other settings but I’m not sure (I’ll explain this below).

After I made these changes Roon then proceeded to apply these revised settings. That was over three days ago and since that time Roon has been “applying” these changes and is still not finished. That would not be a problem except for the fact that Roon is not able to play music - not from my library, not from Tidal and no internet radio as well. I know that Roon is still applying the changes because the progress bar does keep showing progress. Plus Roon is now struggling to add new music to my library, something which Roon handled with speed and ease before the never ending “applying library settings” cycle began.

I’m hoping that Roon will go back to “normal” behavior once the “applying library settings” is complete and I will update this thread once that happens, that is if Roon ever does finish.

Why I’m writing this is to request that more extensive information about these Library import setting be made available in the User Guide so that other individuals with large music libraries do not experience this behavior. The trial and error approach that I used does not really work with a large library.

I should also note that while my collection does contain plenty of non-standard recordings (bootlegs, vinyl rips, etc.) many, if not most, of the unidentified albums are in fact standard albums by well know artists and an 80% to 20% identified to unidentified ratio is very unacceptable in light of all the boasting about how smart Roon is in the promotional material.

In fact it was seeing that many of my John Coltrane recordings were “unidentified” with no genre listed (not even “jazz”) that first prompted me to start tweak the import settings, which in turn has led to over three days (and counting) with Roon not being to play music, which after all is Roon’s primary function.

[evand]

Firstoff, as someone else with a large library let me say that your library is inordinately large, in fact impossibly large, I can’t get my head around how you managed to collect that many albums and listen to them in a single lifetime.

With that out of the way, a few things to note:

• applying changes does take time - I don’t even want to begin to guess how many hundreds of thousands if not millions of changes need to be written to your database as a result of the changes you’ve made and applied to a collection of that size. It’s going to take time, and even more so if your database is not housed on SSD. If it isn’t I feel sorry for you, and no, it’s not Roon’s fault or shortcoming, albeit I do agree they could do a better job setting out the ramifications of making these changes before you ingest your entire library only to subsequently realise other defaults would’ve worked better for your use case.

• Roon does a great job at recognising most albums … if, and only if, you follow their recommendations regarding filename and folder name conventions - that’s set out in the knowledge base

• Adding new music (because 52,000 albums can’t possibly be enough ) whilst Roon is applying wholesale changes to the associated metadata model is looking for trouble - there are already a ton of r/w operations in train.

Finally, to anyone looking to ingest a library (especially an inordinately large more music than you and your kids could listen to in combined lifetimes sized collection) first point Roon to an empty folder rather than your actual music. Then go change the settings, especially any that involve Roon combining or preferring your tag metadata over its own and any regarding import date of albums. When you’re happy with those settings, and only then, point Roon to your collection and go away for the weekend (and in @Jazzfan_NJ’s case the week).

[Jazzfan_NJ (Listening to JAZZ since 1972!)]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

First the Roon database is located on an SSD and it’s still taking forever to re-index.

Second I would love to go back an rename over 11,000 album folders as per Roon’s recommendations. (only kidding). But seriously Roon did a great job of recognizing 80% of my collection so the filename and folder names that I use must match Roon’s naming conventions.

Third I agree that adding new music to Roon while is still working on the metadata changes is not the way to go. I will wait until Roon finishes the metadata revisions before adding additional new music. My bad.

And lastly, I’m not really that upset that it’s taking Roon so long to complete the changes to the database but rather I’m upset because I can’t reliably play anything from my library. What happens is that when I select something to play it takes about 5 to 10 minutes to start playing and then one of two tracks will play and then stop. Pressing “play” only starts the one/two tracks cycle again - after another 5 to 10 minute wait.

As I stated earlier I’m new to Roon but I have been using Squeezeboxes and LMS (Logitech Media Server) for over 10 years. Before this hiccup Roon was working perfectly and I absolutely loved it - Roon is light years ahead of LMS even with the slight loss of some of the functionality of the various Squeezebox displays since Roon more than makes up for it with great user interface and experience.

Just for the record - when I was using LMS I needed three different programs/apps to do the work of Roon and even with these programs the LMS user experience was nowhere near as nice or useful as Roon’s.

The three programs were/are:

Moose - an LMS interface for Windows PCs which uses it’s own database to provide super fast simple text searches across the library, e.g. searching for “Miles Davis” in Moose will return all matches to the text string in albums, artists and tracks/songs. Unfortunately Moose is no longer supported.

Muso - another LMS interface for Windows PCs but with a much more graphic display than Moose or LMS and more information about the album and artist. The information that Muso uses comes from Last.fm and is not as good or useful as the information that Roon provides (which I believe comes from AllMusic) and Roon does provide very useful hyperlinks. And the Focus feature, which I love.

iPeng - a LMS control app for iPhones and iPads - a great program which I’m sorry to leave behind. The Roon mobile app works great so I’m sure that after a while I won’t miss iPeng.

Now I will review the Roon knowledge base to check on those naming conventions.

[evand]

Was a LMS user for many years, know all the programs you’ve referred to, but didn’t use them for long because they’re Windows based, so ended up with LMS on Linux, database on ramdisk and iPeng.

[Jazzfan_NJ (Listening to JAZZ since 1972!)]

I forgot to mention in my previous post that adding new music to Roon is a breeze (except when foolishly trying to do so while Roon is re-indexing its database) and much easier than adding new music to LMS. Even with a fast computer and an SSD it still took LMS over an hour to add new music my library (and several days if a full clear and rescan of my music library was needed - which happened about twice a year). After doing a new music rescan on LMS I then had to re-sync iPeng on both my iPhone and iPad, rescan the LMS database on both Moose and Muso on each computer that they were installed (about four computers/laptops - one in each room/area with a Squeezebox. A hell of a lot easier with Roon!

[Jazzfan_NJ (Listening to JAZZ since 1972!)]

Adding new music (because 52,000 albums can’t possibly be enough ) whilst Roon is applying wholesale changes to the associated metadata model is looking for trouble - there are already a ton of r/w operations in train.

You were so right! I finally gave up waiting for Roon to finish so I just shut Roon core down and restarted it. Well that did the trick. Roon rescanned all four volumes of my music library, found and added all the new music files and finished applying the changes to the import settings.

Now everything is working once again and I’m chilling to some nice christmas jazz.

Thanks again for your help.