Been a Roon user for a long time now, recently my Roon server died and had to rebuild a new one on Rock using a nuc. Got several Ropiees around the house and use Control 4 and the Roon app to control them.
Anyway, I have a large iTunes library with thousands of files on it from various devices stored on my iCloud and finally decided to do something about it. Unfortunately was full of duplicates and poor rips etc etc. So to fix it, I’ve written a little Mac app. It dedups the library and then works direct across to the Rock server. Speed depends on your network but it runs 6 copies in parallel. It also manages transient drops to the server.
I’d advise stopping the Roon OS before copying otherwise Roon will try and rebuild the library every now and then. Just restart it when you’re done. Also it can delete from your original library if you want to do that too, to clean up the source.
I’m building a PC version as well which should be up shortly. Source is on Github. Let me know of any bugs or change requests, its very basic at the moment, and the sort of thing you probably only have to run once.
Two updates since the first post, both aimed at making big copies to a ROCK or NAS reliable.
1.2: Choose which albums/tracks to copy. Several files copy at once, each one size-verified and written under a temp name so Roon can never import a half-copied track. Failed files are retried and swept up at the end; if the server vanishes the run pauses and waits. The dialog shows speed and finish time, and every run is logged to a file.
1.3: The app now has its own SMB client and no longer uses the Mac’s network mount. macOS drops an SMB session after a ~30 second stall and ROCK’s old Samba can’t resume one, so every hiccup used to be fatal. The app now finds your server, browses it and copies to it directly — nothing mounted in Finder at all. The old mount-based engine is still there behind a checkbox.
One tip from testing, now in the help file: if a big copy seems to be killing your network, check whether Roon Server is busy importing before blaming hardware — on a NUC the import after a large copy can peg the CPU hard enough that the machine stops answering the network. Copying over several runs? Leave Roon Server stopped until the last one is done.
1.4 adds a File Commander: a two-pane file manager for your server. It uses the app’s own network connection, so the share does not need to be mounted in Finder.
Two panes are shown side by side. Each can be set to your Mac or to a server. From there you can:
browse folders, rename items, create folders, and delete
move and copy files in either direction: Mac to server, server to Mac, or between two folders on the same server
export a folder as a zip file
Notes on how it performs compared with Finder:
Moving or renaming a folder within the same server is done as a rename on the server, not a copy, so it completes immediately regardless of folder size. In Finder the same operation can take a long time.
Operations run over the app’s own connection and do not stall when the server is slow to respond. Copies transfer several files at once.
Deletes on a server are permanent, as servers have no Trash. Those are confirmed twice and written to a log.