Library Cleanup

I’m frequently changing my files, case in point here is updating album art, and I found Roon kept deleted files until I restarted, despite using the library cleanup function. Is there something else to be done for this?

I normally manage files externally with several Tag editors etc depending on what I’m doing

You don’t need to do it but I normally do this …

Move the album folder to work on outside of the Roon watched folders

This effectively deletes it from Roon

Work on it

Roon> clean up library, remove any odd files

Return folder to watched folder , Roon will reimport , reanalyse etc

Sounds long winded but it works, the other advantage is that it stops Roon from trying to reassess files as you work on them and churning away

That’s essentially what I do/did, as I have multiple backups of my library outside Roon. With the jpeg in question here, when I moved it back in, Roon showed 2 images. If it makes a difference, my core is in Linux. Restarting the server fixes this, but I expected Roon to behave like other UPnP servers and cleanup without a restart.

Can you please illustrate with examples. Also, are you making use of the prefer Roon, prefer file, best quality options during import and/ or at the file level?

BTW, Roon does not delete any media files unless you explicitly tell it to do so, i.e. delete album.

In this case I’m only talking about artwork, and every “prefer file” import option is checked. I’m not aware of any such file level options. I just found a “clear image cache” option which may help here. In the absence of definitive direction, I’ll do as the previous gentleman suggested and delete, clean, re-import.

Also, it appears to ignore the prefer file option when it determines it “knows” better. I’ve noticed this behavior since 2016 on certain track titles. Another aside, it appears to assign favorites on its own, apart from my doing, and I suppose the purpose of the heart tab/button on the main screen is to see them, but nothing shows there except a banner “try turning off favorites”, which option I can’t find. I individually removed the hearts it assigned.

Is there a way to turn off favorites? How would one clear history?

Your options are:

  1. Settings > Library > Import Settings > Artwork
  2. Album Editor > Edit Album > Album Artwork

Regarding favourites, Roon does not set these. I assume you are referring to the Albums screen. In this case the heart is a filter and the only reason you are seeing the message “Try turning off favourites, or remove some focus criteria” is that you search is too narrow and no albums are displayed, i.e. there are no favourites (for the given filter.)

It would be really helpful if you could illustrate examples of both points with screenshots. It’s near impossible to understand what you are seeing without additional information and screenshots are a good start albeit some more information regarding your setup would be useful too.

I understand what you’ve said. Thanks for the help Martin.

Just to be clear, library cleanup makes Roon forget about files it had previously seen, but which aren’t currently available.

It basically means “stop remembering those files – they’re either gone forever, or they’ll be back and I want them re-imported completely fresh”.

It does not rescan your storage devices, or your file tags. To rescan your storage, you want to go to Settings > Storage > 3 dots next to storage device > Force Rescan.

Mike, would you please address the first half of my post on composition grouping:

In your original example I _think__the first album is recognised by roon so it applies the metadata from the providers for that album. For the second it doesn’t recognise it so it falls back on tags and file/ folder names.
This works fairly well, for example, with my mainly non classical collection but not so well, or not at all, in the users with big collections unless they do a whole load of pre-rip and post rip work from what I’ve seen on the forum.

Hi Ged, I think you’ve correctly analyzed this. I wish there were a way to specify no grouping (at all) as an import option. My grouping is accomplished via file naming which is not recognized.

The thing is the reason that roon exists at all is to recognise albums either in your collection or in Tidal etc. Although the roon team may well not agree in my view it is aimed, or works best for, the shallow T shaped music person.
Broad spread of music with a stub of interest down into one or more areas. Some light weight collection work done but by no means exhaustive.
Thinks roon is great as it gatthers stuff up and sorts it, allows exploration through search, focus and hyperlinks. Subscribed to Tidal and library has grown as a result. Is surprised to find there are credits on albums as never reads the CD cover, too busy with the music.

There are, again solely in my opinion, two categories of mainly classical users who are stressed using roon.
The first has everything arranged by a system. CD colour, composer, work, folder then file… The exact way doesn’t matter as roon doesn’t work that way. It can possibly be arranged through a lot of hard work to approximately do it, but not quite. This leads to frustration and hardening of view points from promulgators of a certain viewpoint and those that don’t get it.
The second are those who want, probably rightly, for every single character of metadata to be correct and are driven up the wall when it’s not. With the current state of the providers this isn’t going to improve soon.

I like roon and for me it does great things and has improved over time but it metadata, box sets, parts, compositions are going to continue to drive those who care about it’s completeness and veracity bonkers…

I have all the metadata I need imbedded in my folders and filenames, and therefore no grouping + ‘prefer file’ would suffice, but I haven’t seen anything particularly wrong (except for the Japanese names in one album).

What I really like about Roon is the robust, cross-platform performance. Many other UPnP components don’t perform consistently, and then you face the inevitable IT finger-pointing in distributed environments. Roon avoids so much of this.

Upnp shudder. That’s one of my reasons to abandon other solutions too.