Hi, I am trying to sort out why my Roon installation is running slowly and being unresponsive to searches and clicks to view artists or albums.
In the Settings > Setup menu I looked at the library maintenance options and this is what I see:
I don’t want to select any of these options until I know what’s going to happen. I’d much rather see what the problem is and solve it and avoid having to delete potentially useful data.
I’d like to know what the 2318 tracks that are being proposed to be removed as I suspect that they have been moved either by user error, some hiccup in a previous db migration or something else. At least by knowing what they are I’d be able to take an educated decision.
I’ve had a look through the logs and there are entries against tracks marked ‘trace’ or ‘debug’ but nothing that directly ties an entry there across to this report.
Can anyone help me to identify what these are please?
I’d just run the cleanup, it’s not like your audio files will be affected in any way. When you’ve done that force a rescan of your watched folders. Some reanalysis may occur if files are ‘newly found’, but from where I’m sitting it’s unavoidable and a once off.
Thanks for the advice but I’d rather know what I’m about to change. I understand that I won’t be affecting the actual files but presumably I could be affecting my history, playlists … files with edited metadata?
if you’ve got all your albums identified in Roon it doesn’t matter. Use album Focus to focus on unidentified albums. If that comes up empty then you’re not going to be losing anything that’s not already replaced.
I’ve always told Roon to clean up the Library semi-periodically whenever any of those categories have any entries. It’s all database stuff, nothing to do with the music files themseves (watched folders, not organised). I’ve never noticed any adverse effects. Frankly I can’t think of an example when a user might choose not to clean up everything suggested.
I appreciate this isn’t answering your specific questions, and I’m afraid I don’t know the answers to those. My own view is that this is more like trash collection than archiving. YMMV.
Thanks to you both for your help. I ended up taking the plunge!
My question to the devs remains though: If this is all behind the scenes stuff that we really don’t need to know about, why is it being surfaced at all and not ‘cron jobbed’?
Or, if there is a scenario where I have previously had a physical file in a particular location which has then got moved and Roon has therefore lost track of it, should there not be a manual way of linking the DB information with the new file location. This would mean that any history information would be correctly remembered rather than presumably lost.
Thanks for tips around focus @evand - I hadn’t explored that feature thoroughly enough!
If you disable (not remove) a storage location, then go to library maintenance, it will offer to delete all the database information about the disabled storage. This could be a very bad thing if you don’t know what you are doing. You would loose all edits and identifications.
That’s exactly what I mean. In my case I know that I haven’t made many edits and I know that I have also migrated the Roon installation from one PC to a different server. This may have introduced some irregularities. I took the decision to delete because out of a total of over 200k tracks, 2300 isn’t a great deal AND because I haven’t edited, tagged etc. I am not in danger of losing too much.
It is rare that I give kudos to the J River team because I don’t agree with some of their business practices, but their library management is superb. I know exactly what impact a change I make is going to have before I do it.
Apart from disabling a watched folder there are no other circumstances I am aware of under which a database cleanup will remove records of any relevance so long as your library analysis is completed.
