I am new to Roon and just love it. Excellent UI, great metadata. Clearly made by music lovers for music lovers. Very exciting!!!
I have a fairly extensive local music collection (not using streaming services).
I am facing some issue with how Roon matches albums against its database.
Some albums are very wrongly identified. I guess this must be based on the matching algorithm / regex. Is there any setting to change how precise the match will need to be to do the match? I looked for it, but couldn’t find it. That’s my #1 issue with Roon. I have “perfect tags”, but probably around 5% of my albums are mis-identified (mostly bootlegs and audiobooks)
Less albums show up in Roon than I scanned. Need to do some more trouble-shooting, but assume this may be a result from two albums showing up as one? (i.e., two of my albums are identified as being part of one album by Roon). Is there an easy way to trouble-shoot? Is there some feature to honor the album folder and do not merge albums across two folders?
Is there a way to filter by “unidentified” albums?
Happy to join this community of what seems to be a very exciting product!!!
Start off by going to Settings in the Library area, you can set Roon to use it’s metadata lookup or use your file tags, once set to use your tags, try a re-scan. From what you said, you may want to turn off all the Roon preferences and use your Tags.
Also in Library check the Skipped files, it will list scan errors, not every format is covered in Roon, so some formats may not import. If don’t find the files your looking for, go check the format they are in and do a search for that format and roon and see if it’s a non compatible format.
I can’t remember where it is, but check the Focus, you should be able to find Unidentified Albums.
using Identify to identify an album is hit or miss, meaning sometimes it’s a hit, but other times you may spend a huge amount of time correcting the album in the identify panels, another option may be to Edit the Album info to make sure Roon can find it and self identify it.
About the issue of not all albums being picked up, I have some more info for trouble-shooting. Overview shows “175 albums” (which is accurate). Once I click on “175 albums” hyperlink, it only shows 172 albums (“all 172”). So, somehow 3 albums get lost. I haven’t found out yet, which the three are. But somehow 175 made it to Roon, but only 172 are in the album view.
I have already selected “file” for everything. However, Roon still matches the artist and the album. And some get mis-matched. 95% are fine (matched correctly or not matched at all), but 5% are matched to the wrong artist and/or album. I don’t mind to keep unmatched albums, but the wrongly matched albums create quite some hassel. And going one by one will take too long with my music library,
Thanks. Indeed, this makes the albums surface. Any idea why they are hidden and how to unhide them? And going forward not to hide any albums upon library import.
Any ideas how to change expected accuracy for matching albums upon import. My tags are perfect, but I got a ton of wrong matches. Matches are largely close, so a higher “required match” would solve my issue (e.g., requirement that number of tracks match, more words overlap required to confirm match).
It could be that the the “hidden” albums are “versions” or duplicates of the same album. If for example, you have different mastering’s, resolution, release dates of the same album, roon will auto-group the albums together and count them only once. They are “hidden” in that sense. For example:
You can set which release roon will choose as “primary” display. By default roon chooses the highest rez, but but you may have other criteria. I have no interest in high rez, for example, and choose the best master. You can also tell roon not to group these albums together on a case by case basis.
I do not know an easy way of finding these auto-grouped albums once roon has set them. Maybe someone else does? With a library of 175 albums going through the albums one by one is feasible. Obviously with larger libraries that is unpractical.
Thanks. 175 albums is just one artist for testing So, would love to prevent this grouping to happen.
My larger issue though that a meaningful part of the 175 albums is wrongly identified (matched to a similar album, which is not the right one). This seems a show-stopper for me as it would take me years to find out which albums were wrongly matched. I don’t mind “unidentified” ones (I can manually match them), but the wrong matching is a huge pain point.
My experience with roon is that you will need much more “perfect” tags than you were used to in the past. For example, you will need to tag labels and catalogue numbers that you may not have done in the past. Also roon is using Rovi as a primary meta-data source so you may have to re-tag significant numbers of your composition titles to match the canonical titles in allmusic.com. It takes a while to get a feel for the tag changes you are going to need for a successful migration, until it becomes second nature. But if you have a large library that you carefully curated over many years using a homegrown system that suited you but is not a “standard” roon recognises you have a long path ahead I’m afraid.
Roon, also in my experience will not identify every release precisely. It will get artwork wrong, release dates wrong etc. etc. If that is important to you, after a basic album/composition identification you will need to manually edit. I have done that on a few occasions for favorite recordings that are important to me and I have several releases, but mostly I don’t bother. Roon is not an archive perfect library tool in that sense. You may have more luck configuring roon to use only your local tags as has already been mentioned.
Roon uses 2 external meta data suppliers, AllMusic in its many names and Musicbrainz, if your album isn’t in these sources it will not be IDed
Bootlegs are a good candidate for being missing. I am not sure if audio booksystem are even included.
You can go to either site and look for your album. If you find it copy the Album name and rename the Album in Roon , that’s the best you can hope for
Thanks for your thoughts. My concern is not that albums don’t get identified. I have perfect album titles and album art. It has been curated over many years and is great.
I disabled all Roon features possible when it comes to picking up metadata. I just use the embedded tags instead,which works well. As a result, all albums have the right album title, coverart and many other good things.
The tags are good enough for Roon to match all key albums. So, everything well known and famous is perfectly matched.
The issue is primarily around bootlegs and lesser known albums (plus audiobooks). The issue is NOT that they are not being matched. The issue is that they are being matched to the wrong album. For example, I may have an album titled “Live in Tokyo”, which Roon matches to “Live in Tokyo 1991”. Close but a different album with different number of songs. The false match does not impact the album cover and title (as it takes them from the tags), but it does impact a few other things that it will pull based on the wrong matching (e.g., original release year, album type, etc.). That’s quite bad for my use case, so would prevent me to use Roon. I am just hoping that there is somewhere a feature that I can make the matching algorithm less loose (e.g., Picard does offer to set a % how close the match needs to be).
Where I have a number of albums I know that roon cannot identify, I keep them in a separate “watched” folder and migrate them one by one. That way I can control how roon imports them. I usually also attach a green “roon tag” so I can find them easily later. For example, I have a large number of Vinyl Rips and historical “restorations” I know roon cannot identify from labels like “Pristine Audio”. None of these albums are identified and I download them with truly awful tags. But If I copy them into my “Pristine Audio” directory one by one then I can control how they are migrated and matched/not matched.
TBH, I migrate albums in small batches anyway and just review/edit each one before moving on to the next batch. In the main album album view you can set to “sort by date added”. This way you can create a migration workflow so that you can check what roon is doing as you go along. This will take a long time if you have a large local library. Those with large local libraries are very much a minority of roon users so this migration scenario is not catered for well. This is the best way I have found to do it, I’m afraid.
Maybe, but essentially at a simplified level I think Roon works like this, it looks at all the tracks in a folder and tries to find a matching album based on an album with a list of tracks with the same track lengths in the same order, so if there are any discprencies between your track lengths and the track length for your preferred album (either in reality or in Roons metadata libraries) that may prevent a match. Roon also uses existing metadata such as album/title and existing Musicbrainz ids metadata to help but the most important thing is the length of the tracks.
There is an important distinction here, this will effect what Roon displays not how it identifies the album. Roon will under the hood match to the same albums whatever these settings, but it will just display different metadata based on those settings.
Interesting that you are getting a match to album with different number of songs, if they are rarer albums it may just be that this is the best match they have in their metadata database (AllMusic and MusicBrainz by no means contain everything). If you click on an album and try and reidentify it in Roon is the correct album a choice?
I can possibly help resolve this problem by working out why particular albums are wrong matching but would need the exact details of your existing metadata so if you want could do this.
Thanks a lot. Love the community and great to see even a SongKong developer being active here. I believe I may even have a license (though I no longer use it).
The issue indeed is bootlegs like “Live in Tokyo” being matched to a similar bootleg like “Live in Tokyo 1991”. Similar, but not the same. Some with same number of tracks, others not.
Issue does not happen for famous albums. Issue is most severe for audiobooks and bootlegs. For audiobooks, the “false match” are quite crazy pointing to completely unrelated artists.
Happy to provide all the logs and status reports. Shall I put them on pastebin or send via PM?
Got it, will create a few SongKong reports and send them over.
I’ve been using Plex extensively. Amazing for videos, but not as well suited for music (embedded artist and album art not fully supported). I tried probably around half a dozen alternatives and so far Roon seems most promising. Assuming I can somehow fix the “false match” issue. Not sure the Roon developers will want me to comment on the other solutions I have tried and their respective pros and cons?
So, would love to prevent this grouping to happen.