· Music won’t play or issues with my library
· Local files won't import or appear
· For some reason, an m4a album (and maybe others) from my itunes directory doesn't appear in roon
· Unmanaged network, 1Gb and 2.5Gb, music plays fine
Not sure if this has to do with the album being an itunes purchase (m4a). The log seems to say the album is discovered fine by roon. But searching in roon multiple ways, there is no sign of the album.
Hi @Peter_Galvin1,
Thanks for your post.
When did you originally purchase these albums? Digital rights management (DRM) will likely only apply to these tracks if you purchased them directly from the iTunes Store before about January 2009.
Did you use an XML file to import this iTunes library to Roon?
We’ll watch for your reply.
Sorry, somehow roon lost track of the network share where I keep my itunes files. I removed and re-added to roon storage and now it’s re-scanning.
Btw, if I have purchased files from before 2009 how do I get them to play in roon? Thanks.
Hello @Peter_Galvin1
Good to hear you found it, and thanks for coming back to say what it was. A lost network share is worth remembering as the first thing to check when a whole album vanishes at once.
On the pre-2009 purchases: Roon cannot play DRM-protected files, and there is no setting in Roon that changes that. The protection is enforced by Apple’s software, so the file has to be replaced with an unprotected copy rather than unlocked.
First, work out how many are actually affected. You may have fewer than you expect, since Apple upgraded a great deal of its catalog over the years. Protected files end in .m4p rather than .m4a, and in the Music or iTunes app the Kind column shows them as “Protected AAC audio file”. You can add that column from the View menu and sort by it. In Roon, they should also turn up under Settings → Library → Skipped Files, which gives you the list directly.
Then, the legitimate route is Apple’s own. iTunes Match is still offered, currently around 25 dollars a year, and it matches your library against the store and replaces protected purchases with DRM-free AAC at 256 kbps. It is the intended path for exactly this, and once the files are unprotected Roon will read them normally. The one limitation is that a track no longer in Apple’s catalog cannot be matched, so anything obscure may not be recoverable this way.
If a track cannot be matched, the remaining options are the ordinary ones: buy it again from a DRM-free source, rip it from the CD if you own one, or listen to it through a streaming service in Roon.
One practical step whichever route you take: once you have the unprotected files, replace the old ones in your watched folder, then force a rescan from Settings → Storage so Roon picks up the replacements rather than remembering the skipped originals.
We would steer you away from third-party tools that advertise stripping the protection. Beyond the legal question, they tend to re-encode and lose quality, and Apple’s own route gives you a better file.
Hi @Peter_Galvin1,
Wanted to follow up on this. Have you had a chance to check which of the older purchases are actually protected, either by looking for .m4p files or by sorting the Kind column for “Protected AAC audio file” in Music or iTunes? If you have already run iTunes Match or replaced any matched tracks with unprotected AAC files, the next step would be to copy those into the watched folder and force a rescan from Settings → Storage so Roon picks up the new files instead of the skipped ones. Let us know what you found or if you want to talk through the list, and we can help from there.
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