Lot's of Unknown Artist & Album in Library

[cmonache (Chris Monache)]

Hello,

I have been a Roon user for a little over a year now and into the second year of my subscription. I have a question around library management, actually 2.

I have a mix of library files types but the bulk of my library is in WAV format. I have used Media Monkey for years to manage the limited tag capabilities of these files. Artist, Album, Genre… The tags I have set up are nearly 100% accurate for playback in Media Monkey, JRiver Media Center and SONOS. When I import my library into Roon I have a lot of unknown albums.

I have started to manually update a few of these but wonder if there is a better process. It would help if I new more about how you are picking up wav files into the library. When I edit the library manually it appears that Roon is trying to match file names and missing a lot on my library.

Anyhow would love to learn more to get my library work better in Roon.

Chris

[eric (Eric Stewart)]

Hi @cmonache ---- Thank you for the report and my apologies for the troubles here. Typically we do not address general support issue via PM as the idea is, that if one person is having an issue that gets worked out, others will have the same information available to them. Do you mind if I move this to the public forum so other users have access to this info?

This is indeed an interesting case as we normally don’t see .WAV files containing any tag information. Would you be able to provide a sample of your media for us to test in house with? Are you a dropbox user? Let me know and if not I can provide another delivery method.

Thanks!
-Eric

[cmonache (Chris Monache)]

Eric,

Thank you for the response. I am a dropbox user.

To give you some more background on my case. Kind of a geek on this subject. I have bene ripping my CDs since 1998 using Exact Audio Copy and have always gone WAV file.
Was trying to do high end audio play back from an old Dell Desktop and Soundblaster card connected to a DAC… the digital playback options have sure improved.

When SONOS came out I had interest as this was one of the first networked options. The main issue I had with SONOS was they could not handle a library of WAV files and they had a rule that looked strictly at file tagging.
I did not even know WAV files had any tagging capability but thought SONOS support I learned more about this and they implemented basic WAV file tagging support. As you can see in the attached image SONOS is picking up the Beetles Album’s I sent in the original email for support.

My process used to be:

1. Extract the CD using Exact Audio Copy
2. Import the music into Media Monkey
3. Update the Title, Artist, Album, then I would let Media Monkey update the track information and get the album art which I would save as a jpg in the album folder
4. Then update SONOS library

Using this method I get 100% coverage with SONOS but it appears hit and miss with the files created this way with Roon which I think may be trying to do match based on folder structure, track naming conventions, files sizes, etc.

My current process is:

1. Exact the CD using DBPoweramp CD Ripper
2. Update the SONOS library
3. Confirm Roon “Overview”

The only thing I think can be different is around the track information. The older part of my library is not consistent with track numbers and creating wav files with the track number included. I was using something other than MediaMonkey at that time that did not have the automated tag (meta data) search functionality. The first image is of a recent import. The second is one of the older waves without the track information in the title? Before using Media Monkey I used

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[eric (Eric Stewart)]

Hi @cmonache ----- Thank you for getting back to me and sharing your observations/process

I would still like to grab a sample of the media that you are noticing this issue with, to try and reproduce the same behavior in house. May I kindly ask you to please provide me with a DropBox download link via a PM. Thanks!

-Eric

[cmonache (Chris Monache)]

Hello, I have copied the two folders of the samples I have shown screen shots in my mail.

Share

Chris

[eric (Eric Stewart)]

Hi Chris (@cmonache) ---- Thank you for the follow up and the download link. I wanted to confirm that I have received the content and have placed this task in my “testing” queue. Once I have some feedback for you, I will follow back up with my thoughts.

-Eric

[mike (Mike Fass)]

Hi @cmonache – we’re going to see what we can do here, but to be clear, these files break a number of standard conventions that Roon depends on in order to identify albums.

The biggest omission in these files is track number. When Roon sees an album with a specific number of tracks in a specific order, we can look it up as if it were a CD. The table of contents (meaning, the lengths of each successive track) function like a fingerprint, but that only works when we know the order of the files.

Roon will look in the file tags for track numbers, and will also consider files that are numbered in a standard order (for example 8 - Remember.flac). Unfortunately, from what I can tell, these files do not contain track numbers in either the file tags or file names.

Moving on, many file types have widely accepted standards for file tags, including FLAC, MP3, ALAC, etc. Historically, WAV has not supported file tags, but we have seen a number of non-standard ways to include tags in WAV files, and we’ve tried to add support where possible.

Roon is able to read tags from WAV files, but it’s likely to be less reliable than other formats. We are going to analyze your media to see if we can do better here, but keep in mind that there’s no accepted way to store file tags in WAV files, so track numbers become even more important.

Lastly, I can see that some apps are able to read the tags from these files, and you have names listed Last, First – generally speaking, Roon is going to do a better job identifying your albums with standard artist tags, meaning The Beatles instead of Beatles, The. Roon does allow for smart handling of artist names, and will sort The Beatles to B by default.

If you number these files properly, I suspect your identifications will improve. There may be a way to automate this process in Media Monkey. We will let you know if we’re able to improve our handling of the tags stored in these WAV files, but even if we are able to read album and artist information, without track numbers I suspect Roon is going to be unable to match many of these albums.

Sorry that there isn’t a more direct solution to this issue @cmonache – let us know if you have any questions.

[cmonache (Chris Monache)]

Mike,

Thanks.

I will go back to my library and manually add the track numbers to the file name. I agree with you here that I need to label the files correctly. These files are from the earliest part of my library and I was just entering file name without track number. This has always been a pain to plan back tracks in albums in the proper order. The information you gave is very helpful in me setting direction to get my library cleaned up to better fit Roon per the example: (for example 8 - Remember.flac).

May take some time but I think to get the benefit Roon offers with library management will make the effort worth it.

Chris

[evand]

If you’re not married to wav as a fornat you could probably speed up the process significantly by converting the files to flac format and then loading the directory tree into musicbrainz Picard for identification using audio fingerprinting. Writing Picard’s changes to flac metadata will automatically incorporate track numbers, title, artist, album, year etc. which Roon could then leverage.