Hello, crew. I’ve been using Roon successfully for a while. My library has over over 200,000 tracks at this juncture.
I have a fair number of partial duplicates, created in many cases when I have files in zip format that I unzip. Roon identifies the album being unzipped from the first cut or two and creates an album. But then, it creates it a second time when, at the end of a day, I force a rescan of my library and clean up deleted files, or just simply when the full album is unzipped.
At this point, I’d like to just stop and do a from-the-beginning rescan and creation of my Roon library database. I am betting that this will eliminate a fair number of the partial duplicates, if not all. But, I don’t want to lose my existing library database, at least until I have a new, working scan in. I do have my database backed up to my NAS, so I would guess that I could copy the latest version there and store it in yet another spot, just so I do have a working version of the legacy database around. Does that make sense?
To this end, can I do a full rescan and still use the existing legacy database to listen to music over the next several days while Roon does the rescan, or will Roon simply be locked down entirely while the rescan is being performed?
And if I do proceed with a full bottoms-up rescan, how do I actually do that?
Hi @Mike. Normally, I end up with a full album and a separate partial album. Yes, I have had parts separated, but far less often.
To be clear, after an unzip, I do a force rescan of the folder and also check for any files to clean up. The force rescan perhaps is why I normally do see a full album version.
I could manually remove the separate partial album but since it points to the same folder and file as the same songs in the full album version, I’ve not known how to properly do a removal that removes the partial but not the full.
As to what I am afraid of losing, pardon my Windows analogy. Before I install a new operating system, I like to take an image of the old in case I need to roll back. Here, if a totally new, bottoms up rescan of my library somehow went awry, it would be comforting to know I would have a Roon database to restore from.
And since I realize that a de novo rescan will take days, I would like to be able to use Roon with my old database while the new one is being scanned – if this feature exists in Roon.
I’m not sure what operating system your Core is running on, but you can just find your database and rename the Roon (or Roonserver) folder to something else, like Roon_old.
Then you can just reinstall fresh, which will create a new Roon folder. If you want to switch back, just rename the two folders (meaning Roon becomes Roon_reinstall or something like that, and Roon_old goes back to Roon).[quote=“Jeffrey_Robbins, post:3, topic:27163”]
And since I realize that a de novo rescan will take days, I would like to be able to use Roon with my old database while the new one is being scanned – if this feature exists in Roon.
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You won’t be able to run two Roon installs at the same time on a single license.
Windows 2012R2 server with Audiophile Optimizer in minimal server mode. Yes, I can locate that folder, rename and start over to see if I can do better the second time around! Thanks for the help. JCR
Unzip into a folder outside your watched folder, then move the album folder into appropriate location in the the watched folder. That move is an atomic operation, which avoids the problem you described.
To fix the each partial dup, you should first move the relevant folder(s) out of your watched folder, then force rescan the watched folder, then clean up the library in with Settings>Library>Library Maintenance, then move back the album folder(s) you want to your watched folder, and finally force rescan again. I’ve used this method to clean a lot of import messes.