Hi,
I have many songs that aren’t from an album, a single, an EP, they are just alone tracks.
If I make a folder i.e.: “Various Artists - Single Tracks” and put them inside is the correct way for Roon to handle this situation?
And, also, If I have some of this songs into a playlist, in the future I will change the name of this folder or even I will split the folder into separate folders I will lost these songs from the playlist?
In other words, how I handle a situation like this?
I wouldn’t recommend this.
Much of Roon is built around and putting your music in context – when was this music released, who played on the recording, what label released it, which composers wrote the music, and so on.
Whether you have the rest of the album or not, most songs were part of a release at some point, even if that’s just a single. If you only have a single track from an album, that album can still be identified from our metadata service, and credits, composer info, release dates, and artist information can all still be retrieved.
This can happen if you only have one track from the record, but it can’t happen if all the loose tracks are part of some mega-album that only really exists in your collection. My advice would be to leave the files as is, and whether you have the whole album or just a single track, try to get them identified against Roon’s metadata.
There are other issues with your approach as well. Because Roon’s UI was built to represent the context in which music was released, so our album screens don’t scale very well to album’s that have hundreds of tracks on a single disc. This is something we’re working on, and we plan to address that limitation the future, but for now it’s another reason not to pile tons of unrelated tracks into an album.
In Roon, “album” has a specific meaning which is different from playlist, or tag. If you try to use album to mean something different, you’re going to end up fighting against the system in a number of ways, and you won’t be able to use the product as intended.
Where to put these files then…? How to store them?
You can put them in a various artists folder for your own peace of mind but that won’t make a difference to Roon.
So the common use of this is to create a SINGLE folder for every SINGLE song?
Yes. You could split them into artist folders so if you have single songs and put them in with full length CD’s, i.e. artist, cd title, tracks with the individual tracks sitting under the artist level but that is a lot of work. It makes no difference to how Roon displays them so I would choose the simpler path of a various folder with them all in there.
If you plan to have the full album or more songs from it, that’s logical. Roon may identify each from their album based on filename and embedded metadata anyway. Roon’s point is that they manage songs partly based on album and not well suited to the creation of custom albums per se. Custom playlists, yes, it handles those.
Even if it’s complex, I will create a folder for each track as “Artist - Songname”.
If you’re going through the trouble, might as well include album name.
What’s your goal here? We have some handling built in for “folder full of loose files” cases, so my recommendation would be to try importing the folder and just see how it goes.
Having tracks in folders will help with getting them grouped into albums properly, but if you only have one track per album, I would only start putting tracks into folders if they are erroneously being grouped into albums.
My guess is that once Roon sees a folder full of tracks with inconsistent album tags and non-contiguous track numbers, it’s going to import each one as a separate album, which is what I would recommend, and what you’ll get from tracks in folders too.
Give it a shot and let us know how it goes @RiseFall123, ok?
I will experiment then.