How do I move my database library where all my music is stored from one location to another without losing any of the library information linked to the tracks?
Have you put a lot of user edits in or is it largely as presented when you first watched the folder?
If the latter then it isn’t an issue just to unwatch the first location and add the new location. The ID phase is pretty quick.
If you need to keep edits you have made then the dev guys will have to advise if that is possible.
@ncpl is on the right track here – let us know what you’re planning to migrate, and we’ll walk you through it.
Ultimately, this kind of migration will be done automatically via cloud syncing of your account – all you’d need to do is sign in on the new computer. For now, that functionality is still under development, so if you’ve done a lot of edits or created a lot playlists that you want to move, we can help you do this manually.
Thanks for the question @jato1569!
I have several edits that I would like to keep as well as other library information as play count and favorites.
Ideally I would like the possibility to move my watched folder from one storage location to another and keep the tracks mapped to the library.
I don’t need to move my core location just the folder currently being watched.
Ok, I’m going to send you some more information via PM.
On a similar note. I would like to rename my watched folder and presume I would also lose my edits. No big deal as can wait for cloud sync but was wondering.
There’s a lot of complexity here, as we can’t simply track the edits attached to a specific file – the same file could appear multiple times in your library, and each could have its own edits/album associations/etc.
Without knowing exactly how your setup is configured, it’s hard for me to be sure exactly what will be preserved, but here’s what I would recommend – I hope you’ll report back and let us know how things go:
- Shut down your Roon install
- Rename or move the folder
- Restart Roon
- Remove the original watched folder
- Add the folder in it’s new location
- Report back
My guess is that at least some of your edits will not be preserved, but we have some plans to make this better, both by using cloud syncing to track your content and all associated edits, and by making some changes to how we track files in your watched folders.
Thanks for the question @Egres!
Thanks for the reply, I have invested time getting albums right and edit versions tags to risk losing so will wait for cloud sync. Hopefully my back-up strategy will save me in case of catastrophe.
Ok catastrophe has struck Lost Edit Version & Preferred Album Art with build 29 so if my back up library from before build 29 is of no use will attempt the above.
If I move a folder, identification will be a challenge, association of edits with folders. May not be a whole library.
I suggest you look how Adobe Lightroom handles this. Images in the library show marked as missing if you have moved them; you can click on one of them and help Lightroom locate it, and then it uses this located image as an anchor to find a lot of others that were located in the same folder, or in other folders nearby.
Thanks @AndersVinberg – we’re thinking through a number of possible strategies here as we finalize plans for cloud syncing and backup.
We’ve always viewed the iTunes UX where “missing tracks” in your library are denoted with an exclamation mark as kind of distasteful, but preserving user edits is paramount here of course, so we’re thinking through the implications carefully.
@Egres – I’ll be in touch shortly and we’ll figure out what’s going on.
I suggest you look how Adobe Lightroom handles this. Images in the library show marked as missing if you have moved them; you can click on one of them and help Lightroom locate it, and then it uses this located image as an anchor to find a lot of others that were located in the same folder, or in other folders nearby.
Figuring out how to improve management track identity is a big blocking problem in a bunch of areas (edit durability, cloud sync, etc).
I’m familiar with the Lightroom approach, but the idea of having a bunch of “missing” music in the app is really unpalatable, and it less helpful at solving distributed problems (like, if you import the same files on a different PC in some theoretical multi-location future, we want to match them up with your edits there, too).
The most heavyweight and reliable approach is to insist on embedding a durable “roon id” in each file before allowing you to move stuff around. I hate it, but it would work perfectly. I want to find an alternative that’s “no-touch”.
So maybe you can approach what you will do with sidecar files somehow??
Why not do a MD5 hash of the file & keep that in your DB?
Rik
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Content hashes of files are an element of our current approach, but they are not sufficient by themselves.
- A content hash is not a unique identifier, since you could have two copies of the same file in your library.
- The content hash changes when you use tag editing software outside of Roon, and that shouldn’t cause the identity of the track to change within Roon
A slightly better idea is to compute a content hash of the audio content in the file only instead of the whole file, since that is much less likely to change over time. This fixes the second problem, but not the first.
I didn’t even consider hashing the tags - just the raw audio data. As for multiple copies, I guess that’s a use case I don’t personally have 
@brian Sure it is unpalatable, but we are talking about how to handle unpalatable situations. And they are not hypothetical: I set up Roon with my music on a drive on my computer and now I’m thinking of moving it to the NAS, and that would lose all my metadata edits. Very real issue.
What I was thinking about the Lightroom approach is something like this: I move the library away, and it just disappears from Roon, as it does now (because maybe I wanted to delete it); but you keep a separate list of the “lost” files, so if I want to salvage the situation and link that metadata to the new location, I go into a “repair” area of your Settings/Storage tool, open up the lost files browser, pick one of the albums and tell Roon where it now sits, and you extrapolate from that and find all the other ones based on systematic path structures, assuming I moved a whole directory and not individual albums.
The same thing could apply when I have Roon on multiple computers, backed by a cloud directory: on the new computer the metadata syncs from the cloud, and probably all of that music is marked as missing because the local storage paths are different; I do the same thing, locate one of them, and you find the rest. And from that point on, metadata syncing through the cloud would find the corresponding albums provided I kept a consistent directory structure; any album I didn’t copy to the second location would be omitted in the regular browser.
Sure, if I have multiple directories and there are duplicates of albums in various directories with different local paths and I have done different metadata editing for them, it’ll get messy. Then I fall back on the universal advice: “if it hurts when you do that, stop doing that.”
I agree, this is a major problem. I just replaced the computer Roon was on and have been spending over 4 days (still counting) rebuilding the database. If I could have just transferred it (as I have been able to do with JRiver), it would have been a much better solution.
Bruce
@brian I looked in AppData: I have 1.5 GB of Roon metadata and other stuff you store. About 1,500 albums.
Occurs to me that it is important to back this stuff up…