An even more efficient approach would be to install foobar2000 on your windows machine. Click on Library > Configure and enter the top folder of your music folder structure, then let it add those files to foobar2000 music player. Then, when done, you’ll have a count of MUSIC (not art or pdf etc) files. For example, my track count is exactly the same in foobar2000 and Roon. Have fun!
p.s. for my about 115,000 tracks, I have about 140,000 files that show up in windows explorer. That’s because every album subdirectory has album art, a text file related to the ripping info from dbpoweramp, maybe some pdf files, and maybe some extra art files. So that’s normal for a music collection.
Richard_Messenger
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24
Thanks Gary.
I realised that that is a point that I falied to cover.
(I rarely respond to anything as negatively as I do Foobar. Can’t understand it, or why people like it. Sorry).
My weapon of choice is MusicBee. I had done exactly as you suggested and it confuses the picture no end.
Of course you are right, there is a lot of other stuff lingering in the folders, so I was perfectly happy with the Roon Vs Windows comparison. I know MusicBee plays files which Roon does not, but I am a bit puzzled.
you mentioned 99% FLAC. I wonder what sort of files are in this 1% that Roon won’t play that MusicBee will. Roon plays almost all types of files. And I think this came up before regarding checking the “skipped” files in Roon > Settings > Library > Skipped Files. Are you seeing anything there? And do you have any directory names starting with a “.” (eg, “…And You Will Know Us By the Trail of the Dead”). I recall I had to rename a ZZ Top album, “Recycler” as it contained “Recycle” in the directory name and was skipped but without showing up in the skipped files section (if I"m remembering correctly…it’s been a while).
Richard_Messenger
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26
You’re good!
These are the next things to work on.
As I’ve demonstrated I tend to go steadily these days.
Thought of you (and others in this thread) just now:
I’ve also had it happen before where I had to rename a file because Roon didn’t like something about the name.
Richard_Messenger
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28
Yes … I think that is the next step … along with investigating, as Gary says, any patterns with skipped files.
Nice to know I am not alone.
Richard_Messenger
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30
I compared the two lists … MusicBee formats Vs Roon … these appear to be on the former’s list and not Roon’s. M4A, MPC, OGG, ALAC, APE, Opus, TAK, WavPack, WMA, MIDI, MOD, UMX, XM. CDDA. I’ve not checked it closely, but I have some APE and DSF files.
That’s not so important and, frankly, now the totals (the tracks I have Vs the number shown in Roon) are much closer than I thought, this is something I will pick away at little by little.
I am going through the skipped files step by step. It is one of those jobs I save for later at night when my brain has turned to mush. There does appear to be a pattern. Over 50%, possibly as high as 75%, are single files. What I mean is that the whole album is one big file, not separate tracks for each track.
One thing that did surprise me is that at least a couple of albums were seen by Roon when I removed the date from the naming of the folder. Specifically, ‘1971 - Flowers of Evil’ is not seen by Roon. ‘Flowers of Evil 1971’ is. Things that make you go mmmmmm?
Also some good info about halfway down this page related to file and folder naming issues in Roon.
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Richard_Messenger
(Suspended for ad hominem attacks and toxic behavior.)
33
I just copied and pasted the two lists and those seemed to be the differences that I gave.
As I said, I have a couple of thousand files which I do not think are supported.
No big worry now.
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Richard_Messenger
(Suspended for ad hominem attacks and toxic behavior.)
34
My original suggestion about the limit on the size of a Roon library was wrong.
(I’ve seen several posts to that effect though).
I am slowly working through the gap between the number of files reported by Windows and shown in the Roon library.
One of the reasons seems to be that Roon really does not like albums being presented as one biggish flac file. I wish there was some way to persuade it to do so.
I don’t know if I have already said, but I remember making piles of albums stacked up, ready to play, for friends in just the right order. I think is called a playlist these days (tee hee). I used to do a pretty good job of it! I did not ever think I would find a bit of software to facilitate this process so well. It is getting difficult to imagine like without Roon.
I now have a super cheap unit in the bedroom (Topping MX3 and Pioneer SP-BS22-LR speakers) and it sounds pretty good connected to my PC with a long RCA and using Roon to control the tunes!
I think I have communicated already. I have found this super useful and am grateful for the responses (which I continue to work through) from all, particularly Sir Gary!
I still think you were onto something when you questioned Roon’s ability to handle very large music collections. And there is a noticeable discomfort in the tone of the support people when dealing with apparently size-related problems. Whilst it’s possible to point to users with large collections who run smoothly it’s also easy to find threads in the Support section where volume IS apparently an issue. And in those threads, when confronted with insoluble apparently volume-related problems, the support people often start to back away from published claims about Roon’s ability to handle a very large number of tracks. They start by labelling the user as an ‘outlier’, often when the user’s track volume doesn’t appear to be that exceptional to me, and they will then resort to saying it can do it but only on a machine spec’d more appropriately for running the Black-Scholes model on an option trading book than cataloguing and playing music. I mean, come on guys, if you take away the analysis function and the upsampling (which is track by track) it’s just a static data catalogue and as such it should be far less volume sensitive than it appears to be. And probably less resource - i.e. RAM - hungry. Clearly Roon is going to use more memory than Foobar: the GUI is far superior, 100% visual rather than text-based and with little or no latency when scrolling. But before settling on Roon I played around with Plex and JRiver which were also visual and fast. I chose Roon as the superior product for cataloguing and playing music. But I can’t help thinking that the design and implementation of the software that handles the database updating, backup, restore, memory utilization etc. in Roon is wanting compared to those applications. Just scroll through the respective support pages for Roon and those applications and look at the sheer volume of significant issues that are raised by Roon users. Roon seems to me like the Alfa Romeo of music players: easy on the eye, beautiful lines, great to drive when it’s working, every car enthusiast should own one once in their life… but there are fundamental flaws that only become apparent in daily high mileage use. And for every Alfa salesman who has questioned whether the owner maintained it properly, garaged it like they recommended, used the right oil… there’s a Roon support thread which asks whether the user has got the right graphics drivers installed, maybe they need to buy more RAM or replace the RAM they’ve got because it might have some faults etc.
I love it when it’s working but I think there are unresolved software issues some of which get highlighted in high track volume installations.
I agree with your sentiment and most of your points, but I don’t agree with this statement. Roon isn’t just holding a database, It is doing a lot of grooming on it. From posts I’ve seen, there can be a lot of background network chatter going on where the database is apparently being updated. If you have 300,000+ tracks, it seems like there could always be some good chunk of the database that’s being revised.
So, I get why computing capabilities can get fairly intensive with very large libraries. But the general point of what computer is ‘good enough’ when you get up to these fringe areas seems a little murky.
It’s not just grooming - it’s the crosslinking that drives up the complexity and the need for processing power. As I’ve said before, it’s the wheat and chessboard problem - as the number of entities goes up, the number of crosslinks rises exponentially…
It’s a good question to which I don’t know an exact answer. I’ll go with what I’ve gleaned from the responses from senior Roon team members when forum questions touch on the issue of what platforms are needed for what databases sizes. Paraphrasing, that seems to be small= 1,500 albums, medium = 3,000-5,000 and large (or possibly very large) = 20,000. Some of the thread posts where these guideline were given (I’m sure interested Roon users are familiar with these posts) are quite old and the point at which databases are to be considered extreme or outliers and in need of carefully spec’d hardware has risen (300k tracks in 2015-money became 550k in 2018-money and so on…) as appliance solutions got better. Still I would think that the number of users with databases above 20k albums is a fairly small percentage of the community and that should be considered large to very large.
I also wonder if there’s any difference between local tracks and Tidal tracks, and whether cross-linking (grouping) across the two causes different load / complexity issues. I ‘only’ have 10k physical / local albums, but I’ve been adding Tidal albums like crazy - both duplicates where I like master better or the rip had some issues or where I prefered the Hi-Res file. So I’m already at 12k, and won’t be surprised when I hit 20k. In fact, for me this is the pre-eminent use case. I assume it’s the same library complexity, but for all I know there’s an extra lookup table in there that’s getting hammered (nutty speculation -> I know ABSOLUTELY ZERO).
You might be right. I admit I don’t know how much fiddling with my database Roon does behind the scenes. Conceptually the Roon design clearly aims high. As well as providing a nice quick GUI and offering a lot of options around how you actually play the music, it wants to be a musical wikipedia for every thing to do with the artists, albums, and associated credits. I saw somewhere in a response to a thread question that a 300k track database is likely to have >1 million ‘credits’ entries (I’d love to see a cost benefit analysis on those…) and it aims to display all of this back to the user more or less instantaneously. It doesn’t prioritize: it will display all the information it has on the lowliest production credit person it knows about just as quickly as it will the biography of Johann Sebastian Bach. So I understand the point you’re making. I would still bet - and I have no firm basis for making this bet - that the volume of daily changes Roon makes to my database is relatively low. My bet would be that with the goals they’ve set for themselves they have their work cut out keeping up with the regular tide of new music and the level of updating of the back catalogue is quite low. So whilst admitting I might be wrong I feel that each of our own personal databases is largely static.
