A tiny request: I know the topic has come up before about whether to pull cover files along with the music tracks as one creates an Organized Folder–and I acknowledge that it’s not a straight-forward decision in every case about ‘auxiliary’ files, especially when you just designate an existing collection as “the Organized Folder.”
But I have a well-established Organized Folder with 99% of my music there (1% in a Watched Folder for special cases) and any new rips are cleaned up external to the Organized Folder and then copied to the Organized Folder based on how I think they will be identified. But in many instances, they get Organized in some way that means a new folder is created, music is moved, but the original folder and cover file is left behind. I’d love to have it move everything and delete the original folder in this context. If it splits my folder into two, move the cover into the first one. If it combines 2 folders with 2 folder.jpg files, create folder1.jpg and folder2.jpg. And so forth. Seems fairly clean to me, in this context, and would just be one less thing to fuss over–confirm where the “organized” folder ended up, locate the original copied folder, move the cover image, delete the original. Not earth-shaking; just a would-be-nice enhancement.
I believe what happens is that folders with variants of the artist or album name are created. I think one using space delimiters and another using underscores is common. One will have audio files and another the cover jpg. Sometimes there may also be empty folders created under performers names. I found that if I tried to delete folders or shift files within them Roon put them back the way it wanted. In the end I stopped trying to understand how the Organised folder was organised.
Because of other issues arising from Organised folders I opted to keep my music generally in a Watched folder and use Organised merely as an identification/sorting tool, moving new music in and then on to a Watched folder. Even that is, I think, unnecessary and I can probably use Roon quite happily without any Organised folder.
The devs have said they are looking at the whole concept of Organised folders generally. Personally I think I’d prefer to see them go and have all of Roon’s thoughts about alternatives hidden away in the database rather than optionally exposed in the file system.
Personally in all my messages on the forums, I have tried to steer people away from using Organized Folders and support the idea of removing the option from the system.
The other situation I run into fairly frequently–particularly with classical–is when the artist is listed differently (spelling, several artists listed and in a particular order, different primary artist, etc.), which creates a new folder, naturally.
I respect the fundamental question that you and Rugby raise about whether Organized folders add real value to Roon, ultimately. Personally I like them overall since they seem to fit the overall philosophical approach of Roon, i.e., “let’s identify your album once and then let us handle the metadata going forward.” Particularly with the additional options now offered for “preferring” Roon vs. personal metadata and the like, I’m quite happy with the Organized folder approach. Of course, if it goes away, I can easily go back to and live with a managed folder environment.
I agree that organised folders are generally unnecessary and probably a road to unhappy customers / poor perception. Saw a post on another forum last night saying Roon ruined their filling, left orphan files and folders etc. … turns out they hadn’t read properly when pointing Roon to their library and incorrectly chose organised over watched.
I suppose the question is how would Roon otherwise deal with a collection presented as an unholy mess it it weren’t able to reorganize.