Music Hoarder at 68

I must confess, I am a music hoarder. So far, my music library stands at 940,000 tracks, with about 120,000 being on my NAS, the rest as Qobuz Stream selections. Yes, I know it’s a sickness. When I listen to music I like, I’m compelled to add everything by that artist to my library, figuring if I don’t like it, I can delete it. 98% of the time, I listen to my library in the shuttle mode. In 5-6 months, I have deleted 6-8 tracks, at least half of which are interviews. Yes, I know that if each song played only once, it would take 6-8 years to play every one. And being 68, will I get a chance to get to hear them all?? (I plan to live to be at least 100, so that’s a moot point, I guess). Thank you Qobuz for making it so easy to explore new music. This musical explorer is in audio heaven! Hmmm, wonder what will happen when my library hits 1 million. Will Roon go bonkers, and self implode? And if it survives 1 million, how about when it hits 2 million?? ps, I love Roon radio for exposing me to so many artists that align with my musical tastes!! THANK YOU, ROON!!!

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A refreshing and interesting post :slight_smile:

I want to be @Neil_Russell when I grow up!!

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I’m 68, and refuse to grow up! When Dick Clark died, I became the world’s oldest teenager, and plan to remain such for at least another 30-40 years!!

Looking for adventure, head out on the highway!! (The musical Highway, of course!)

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I’m 64 (soon to be 65) and I also have a very large collection, although not quite as large as yours, but unlike yours just about 100% of my music library is local flac files (massive external USB drives). So I have been wondering the same thing about Roon.

My Roon core is a vastly over speced and over built Windows 10 computer and Roon handles my very large music library with no problems. Truly amazing!

Ralph, do us a favour and post your stats here:

I like seeing the average being pushed higher… :grinning:

Well, one issue is that even if the albums are Qobuz (or Tidal) they take up resources in the Roon database, the same as if they were physical files. So, server processing might become an issue as the library grows.

3559 albums (I think about 900 are ripped local files) and 52,976 tracks.

I think what this thread points out is how badly we need an easier way to remove streaming titles from our libraries. Again, for the umpteenth time - one or two click STREAMING albums deletion, please!

You can Highlight any number of albums and then delete them all at the same time.

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I realize that. But makes it difficult to say, listen to a snippet and decide if you want to keep it or not. I suppose I could listen, tag it, and then delete all the ones with a certain tag. Just don’t understand why some things have to be so onerous and involved in Roon.

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If I could post anonymously I would but I don’t like posting that kind of information in a public forum.

I don’t want Qobuz streaming albums removed from my library. Roon does a better job of handling the streaming albums than Qobuz does, as far as what you can do. I find the integration of my local albums with my streaming albums to be seamless via Roon.

I suspect that, but at about what number might that happen? That’s my concern.

Personally, I think it’s silly to link a bunch of songs and/or albums to your library just for the sake of being able to say you have a huge library. Unless you pay for them and buy the CD or download to your local device, you own nothing. To me, it makes most sense to link to music you like and want to listen to. If it’s new to you, give it a listen, then link it to your library if you like it and want to hear it again.

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Not what I was saying - this isn’t about integration. I’m saying an easy way to delete individual titles. I often add new titles from the Qobuz app on Fridays or on weekends as it can take forever to sync with Roon, and then later many are not something I want. It’s cool to play the high numbers game, but one can get overburdened with choice.

By listening to a huge library in shuffle mode, it introduces my to a far wider range of music than I would have otherwise. The albums are not added to my library to bump up the numbers, it’s done to bump up my enjoyment of music, to open up my eyes to new music and artists, and hopefully develop some new favorite artists to boot. And I do not blindly add albums; I first listen to 2-3 songs by the artist to see if I find his music enjoyable, or not. And, I must be doing a good job of filtering, as I have only come across 6-8 tracks I have not liked, which I deleted (and about half of those were interviews)… my way might not be good for you, or anyone else for that matter, and that’s aok, but it does a splendid job for me.

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Maybe I am a weirdo but . . .
I do not consider Tidal albums to be a part of my collection.
To be clear, I have no opinion about if others should or not. It is my opinion that a person should do their hobby the way they want to.
I only have about 3500 ripped albums, with just over 1000 as FLAC (slowly replacing all of them with FLAC), and 2 records.
As a new person to this HiFi hobby I started with the speakers (Graham Chartwell LS5/9s), a decent streamer/DAC and recently a turntable (VPI Prime Scout).
Before my HiFi I listened pretty much on my phone in my car, so the MP3s were fine.

Now to my point . . . I have always been a collector so my feeling that I must have all the files on my local system or on discs in my house is a hard habit to break.
I add titles from Tidal but after a couple plays I will either grab the actual album or be done with it and delete it from my Roon library.
My buddy has ripped files from his collection of CDs that are NOT available on tidal and nothing else locally and uses Tidal as his main Roon Media source.
In my head I worry about finding albums I enjoy and if Tidal goes away then I will not have the albums anymore.
Am I doing it wrong?

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I don’t think that you are wrong since Tidal (or at the very least some of the music licensed to Tidal) will come and go like the tides themselves. For reference please see Netflix, Prime Video, etc.

Well, you can get the same effect by starting Roon Radio off with a track and seeing what it pulls up. That way you don’t need to add them to your library, Radio will grab stuff NOT in your library to play to you. Then if you like you can add it in.

Streaming services always drop and then maybe re-add music. So, you do not have any guarantee that something you like will be there next month. Or it might be there, but because it got deprecated and re-added, you would need to add the album back in again.

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This is indeed a concern I have as well. Needed is a functionally of ROON which keeps track of such changes in the catalogues of Tidal and Qobuz concerning albums added to the ROON library, so that one may buy corresponding CDs to be ripped or flags to be downloaded or search in the respective other streaming catalogue, if a respective album is not available via the respective streaming service any more.