My Roon Issues in review

Hi all…

I recently purchased a special 3 month subscription on a Roon Black Friday deal. I have since been setting Roon up on my systems with the Roon server residing on my QNAP TS453A which is coupled to a Marantz NA7004 digital music player and a Cyrus One amplifier.

The Roon software works with this system perfectly!

Adding music to the Roon library also worked fine however that’s where I started to have some issues:

  1. When a particular album has 2 or more CD’s, often 2 or more album covers show up in the Roon interface. In other cases, a single album entry is shown with disc 1, disc 2, etc. shown as a sub-menu. I have gone through the entire collection of some 350 albums and amended the metadata for each one to include disc nos (e.g. 1/3, 2/3,3/3) to no avail…I find this inconsistency problematic!

  2. I have numerous compilation albums (e.g. Greatest Ever Sixties the Definitive Collection comprising 3 CDs) with numerous different artists. Roon would often take one or two tracks from the albums and call them separate albums even though the metadata is consistent throughout the albums.This is really annoying! It’s only by manually editing these files within Roon that some order can be achieved - a rather painful process when it involves dozens of files.

  3. With an overall collection of some 600 albums plus numerous sub-discs, the scrolling of the Roon album index is slow when, on my android tablet, only 5 albums are shown at one time.Yes, there is a fast scroll bar at the bottom however it’s rather hit and miss… It would be far better/easier to have a hierarchical folder tree system/layout available…

All-in-all, I find that in practical use, Roon is just too hard! I’m reverting back to my Kodi set-up on my server… (I’m rather glad that I’ve not spent a great deal of cash on this,)

Rob

I sympathize, but since you have 3 months why not persevere

I run 2 systems to make up for some of the shortfalls in Roon , notably box sets , but after 4 years I still think the good bits outweigh the bad

We wait for 1.8 quoted as the biggest ever in the hope that some of the niggles are ironed out

Roon excels with “known albums” , compilations can be an issue as Roon May see a track as part of an album, you can easily set the metadata preferences to use yours not a Roon’s that may he

Roon for sure has some aggravations just as you mention. I think Roon really comes into its own when you partner it with a streaming service such as Tidal or Qobuz. Both have good free trial offers, so i would suggest you try one or both before abandoning Roon.

Long click on both, three vertical dots in the top bar, edit, merge albums.

Roon sucks at compilations, so one way around this is, as before, to merge the mess into a single album.

If you’d like to avoid it in the first place, Roon gets part of its data from MusicBrainz, so get the tags right with Picard if you can, and update MusicBrainz with the stuff it doesn’t recognise. SongKong might also be an option. I’m not suggesting your metadata isn’t consistent throughout albums, just that Roon isn’t magic, and might be getting confused by an “original album” field or whatnot.

Folder view ? Not going to happen.

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Regarding your point #1: Most of it is avoided by

In the rare (in my experience) that the issue still occurs, merge them as Xekomi explained above

Hi Sue…
All of the recommendations/instructions noted in the FAQ were completed… The issues continue…
I’ll be removing Roon from all my systems…

Rob

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Hi Robert,

It seems a shame that your first post is to tell us and Roon that you are leaving. The forum is here to help. We have all encountered many of those issues that you face and posted workrounds or fixes. Yes Roon does suck at some things, but your point 2 for example is easily fixed by ensuring the metadata is correct for all CDs (critically, Album Artist must be set to ‘Various Artists’). I have hundreds of compilations and this has never failed to work. You can always come back in six months and have another go. All the best.

Tony,
I have done exactly that… I went through my entire library and amended the meta-data for all albums and the problem persisted. Eventually however, I did manage to solve that problem by manually changing the offending entries from within Roon.
The issue of multiple CDs in an album persists - no matter what I do - for many albums. Also, the issue I have with the scrolling interface remains as well.
Yet another issue is that once I finish using Roon on my system, changing back to say Internet Radio on the Marantz NA7004 is also a difficult procedure. This is not a Roon problem but just the Marantz interface…
Finally, there will be the cost of the monthly subscription - which is rather high. Considering that I do not stream my music to any other location, I do not use the full capability inherent in Roon…
The 3 month “black friday special” was valuable though…
Cheers…
Rob