New User - few questions

I’m early in my trial and already have a few questions.

I’ve written about my first impressions in the [Finally the wait is over - first thoughts?][1] topic, and they are generally very positive. I’m most enjoying the slick interface and ease of new music discovery.

If anyone can help I’d appreciate it - no rush.

-There seems to be a fairly large number of random Tidal albums in my collection in the album view. Where did they come from? I’m a new signup to Tidal trial, so don’t have anything setup there, and didn’t see any options for this. A lot of it not even my kind of music so it doesn’t seem like its tried to guess suggestions. Maybe I did something wrong? In any case, is there any way to get rid of them all?

-I’ve lost my iTunes data (playlists, date added, ratings, etc) because my iTunes folder wasn’t the default path. Leaving aside why this isn’t configurable, is there any way to import this data after the event?

-Can you change the order in which things are listed under the artist? Its nice to have general info and concerts (really nice actually), but I would prefer them to be below albums - with albums listed at the top. Same for selected tracks - would prefer them at the end.

-How to ‘heart’ something from TIDAL - always seems greyed out? [edited to say it’s Albums]

-Why are some random things ‘ticked’? What does it mean, where did they come from, and how to edit?

-can you save/recall focus filters?

I’ll keep searching here and reading FAQs, but so far I haven’t seen these, unless anyone cane point me in the right direction?

I’m sure there will be more too!

Thanks
[1]: Finally the wait is over - first thoughts?

Hi there !
I think I can help with some of these after using Roon for a whole month !

Roon usually imports only the Tidal albums you have marked as favourites (star) in Tidal. You should be able to delete any unwanted Tidal albums by either removing them as favourites in Tidal, or right clicking on them in Roon and using the Edit menu in the top right to delete. There can be a delay of up to a day for that to take effect while Tidal and Roon talk behind your back about your abandoning this album.

Cant help with iTunes sorry.

Users can’t change the order of sections in screens at the moment. This might be something to suggest in feature requests. There was this thread about sections on the Tidal overview page which makes a similar point.

I can “heart” Tidal tracks. Can’t help here sorry.

An album is ticked if the reviewer thinks it is worthy of special interest.
Tracks are ticked as “picks” by the reviewer. The “Play picks” option will play these tracks.
The ticks are currently not capable of editing by the user.

You can bookmark any focus filter search and the bookmark will re-apply that filter to your library.

Cheers !

I ran into the issue with random albums showing up in Collection. Apparently a step during setup allowed you to import featured artists or genres from Tidal. I didn’t recall picking any, but there may have been a default that I didn’t deselect. I went through and manually deleted the albums from Collection.

Thanks for the info. I certainly didn’t choose anything - nothing was offered to me - I just put my Tidal login details in, and now have a collection cluttered with a load of inappropriate material to clean out which is the only thing that seems to have gone wrong so far with the seamless setup.

Any tips for selecting them all?

Thanks!

I was a new Tidal user on a trial - maybe Tidal force a load of stuff on you as a new member? If so, I don’t like that at all. Will have to clean them all out.

Thanks

I think its Artists and Albums I can’t heart. I need to double-check.

This and the ratings are very confusing to me. Why would I care about what someone else thinks about tracks in my own collection? Surely I know whether I like them or whether they’re worthy of special interest (to me). I’m struggling to see the logic in this. Perhaps on music discovery, but not my own stuff. So my library is now strewn with ratings and ‘picks’ according to someone else, which seems a bit crazy, maybe I’m missing something - still, its early days.

Thanks for the help.

Finally managed to clear all the Tidal stuff out. Took a bit of figuring out the Ctrl-Click first and Shift-click last to do them all, and the box top right for what to do with them. My instinct was to try and drag-select, which moved the pages instead.

It’s always a bit worrying getting a warning that files will be deleted form the hard drive! Just incase somethings been selected by accident. Is there an undo, or ‘never delete from local storage option’?!
I very rarely delete anything from my collection - just rather have it zero-rated or hidden. You never know how your tastes might change or a friend might want a listen. It shouldn’t be so easy to delete a file in my opinion.

Ok, back to exploring with a bit less clutter.

[edited to say I do remember now having an option somewhere in the Tidal signup process where I selected 4 genres - I assumed this was search preferences or something - but I guess it was a ‘do you want us to chuck a load of gumpf into your library’. So the issue was my understanding of how Tidal registration worked and not Roon]

[quote=“hifi_swlon, post:6, topic:2919”]
I do remember now having an option somewhere in the Tidal signup process where I selected 4 genres - I assumed this was search preferences or something - but I guess it was a ‘do you want us to chuck a load of gumpf into your library’.
[/quote]Other have been caught of with that too, I think a better explanation of what it does is required to avoid user misinterpreting it. @Kevin One to have a think about.

Hi @hifi_swlon – thanks for all the feedback! Let me see if I can answer a few of these.

You can turn on iTunes syncing at any time from the Storage tab of the Settings screen, and you are correct that right now we only support the default iTunes path.

Right now, you’re not able to customize the order, although our next release will make the Concert and Top Tracks sections collapsible. We’re considering allowing more customization on this screen in the future.

The heart icon denotes a favorite album, track or artist in your library. Once a Tidal album is part of your library, you should be able to favorite anything releated, just like you would for albums that are stored locally.

Since favorites are a way to denote your favorite music in your library, you can’t favorite anything until it’s actually part of your collection.

These are “pick” tracks or albums, as chosen by our editorial metadata providers (primarily AllMusic), and will be editable starting in our next release.

To talk generally about ratings and picks: One of the goals of Roon is to help you rediscover the music in your own collection, by putting everything in context (as opposed to simply showing it all as a spreadsheet of artists and albums).

I know my own collection really well, but I still regularly find albums I forgot about, and browsing highly rated albums from specific decades, genres, and labels has been really eye opening at times.

Having an “expert” opinion is just one more piece of context – it doesn’t bother me personally to know that some supposed expert gave a bad rating to an album I love, but we know some users have found this frustrating and these ratings and picks will be editable starting in our next release.

I think this was answered above, but bookmarks are the way to save focuses and other screens you want regular access to.

Sorry for the confusion here. The button you clicked during setup says “Add Selected To My Library”, but we’re still seeing some people confused by this feature, and we’re considering a couple ways to make this clearer. For now, you can remove the albums in just a few clicks by following the instructions here.

Hopefully that helps @hifi_swlon – let us know how it’s going!

I suppose in my case then, I can’t turn syncing on…
Is there a technical reason why you cant accept a path other than default (it seems like it would be a simple option to set an alternate path if not)? As a workaround, could I symbolic link my directory back to the default location, or does it need to be a true path?

Fair enough - looking forward to future updates… Incidentally in the next release would the collapsible state stay fixed (say, for all artists once one’s collapsed), or would it be uncollapsed on everything by default?

OK, understood. I think I had tried this after adding, maybe there’s a very slight delay before it becomes active? Anyway, it makes sense.

I guess I don’t see it like that i find it a bit confusing but hats off to you for the idea and innovation… and for taking onboard comments.

I guess this was in part answered, but also rather than have to tick a lot of boxes to select all the formats and sample rates, it would be nice to have a preset focus for say ‘HD’ and ‘SD’ which can be stored to save reselecting, which may be applicable across lots of ‘focuses’? (grammar, sorry). I’m thinking in terms of dynamic filters in another completely unrelated package. Anyway, it may be irrelevant as I haven’t used it much yet so please forgive me just throwing initial reaction stuff out there!

No problem, was probably also me rushing to get things setup - I guess I just never imagined anything would include random albums in my library…

Sure does, thank to you and the others for their help. I really like this forum and you guys come across really well, a breath of fresh air.

And it’s going very well thanks!

I (think) I read a comment where someone said ‘audiophiles’ don’t like the exploring aspect of music and just want to play their files. That couldn’t be further from the truth in my case (if I’m an audiophile). I like things to sound as good as they possibly can, but in my opinion that is best served up via a beautiful interface, and if it makes finding new music easier, then its even better. After trying quite a bit of software that sounded good but was a visual abomination or needed a degree in physics to setup and use, this is a real find. So far it’s exceeded my expectations, with only a few minor reservations

If you open roon, under Collections select Album, hit Focus. On the far right of the Focus screen select Quality, this will allow you to select by File Resolution. You can then save this as an overall Focus which you then can use as a starting point for other more focused Focuses.

Just a matter of configuration… ill have a work item put in for this.

Symlink will work fine on a Mac

Thanks @danny.

What would be the best way to do it as I’ve already imported?
If I setup a symlink, then change my config from a user defined path to the iTunes path, would it just pick up the ratings etc and leave everything else, or should I just start over with a fresh setup?

I’ve got around 12,000 tracks, so on my Mac mini it took about 20 hours to analyse on default settings, but didn’t seem to be bothersome or even get slightly warm.

Either works. It should notice the difference in iTunes library file.

Thanks @danny. I deleted the existing (empty) iTunes folder in the home directory of my music server (login ‘music’ just to confuse), and made a symlink:

sudo ln -s /Volumes/ssd_data/Music_Lib/iTunes /Users/music/Music/iTunes

I disabled the watched folder I had, and then enabled the default iTunes one.
It seemed to work, a box popped up with it chugging through the imports.

After it finished I did some checking. When I do a focus on duplicates in album view, it says there are 85 of 865 items, so it would seem I have duplicates? Yet when I go to that page of albums, I only see one. (Also hitting a bit confusion between search and focus here. If i search for an album while in album view, I get taken out of the albums screen. so I guess focus is used for everything here?)

There were also a few duplicates from Tidal albums against my library, so not sure what happened there? Previously I had ‘show hidden’ unchecked so maybe they’d crept in before. They were easily removed.

Sadly, it repeated the process of analysing the audio files. On 2/11804. It didn’t seem to give the machine any issues last time so will just leave it running.

I think I’d probably just start over if I continued after the trial, and setup from scratch, just to be safe…

Importantly, I do seem to have my ‘Added’ dates set correctly now, and I have playlists, which was the whole point of the exercise. Haven’t checked play history/ratings as its not so obvious.

Learning each day…

Unfortunately, I’m thinking v1.1 software, since that’s what I’ve been living with.

In v1.1, we have an option to clean up your library of old tracks in the db, which would kill the ‘duplicates’.

I’ll talk to @brian about the reanalyzing

No problem, I’m learning and playing so all good…. sorry to take up your time.

[edited to say, not sure what happened this time but the analysis not gone too well. Seems to take 12 hours to do around 30 tracks. Tried a couple of restarts of Roon, and overnight only done 48/11000. Am trying a reboot of the machine to see if that clears it out]

[no joy. tried a couple of times, rebooting machine and restarting roon. generally gets stuck around 38 or 41 of 11000ish and thats that. at least according to the status. I’ve turned it (analysis) off for now and will wait for v1.1 and see if that makes any difference….]

Set this off again yesterday afternoon, and this time it seems to be going through fine - is on roughly 5,000 of 11,000 which is about the same as the initial one. Maybe there was just some confusion behind the scenes when I swapped from my folder to the symlinked iTunes folder.

[edited to say, well, it wasn’t quite that smooth, its stuck few times since. Have just turned it off and on again several times. Its now stuck on 6/11 so I guess we’ve managed to get through nearly everything and maybe theres something in there it just doesnt like.

Weird how it went so smooth the first time round!]

OK, so a few weeks later, my analysis is still stuck on 1/10 - and we’ve had several restarts and 2 software updates since. So I’m guessing there’s something in there that Roon doesn’t like for some reason.

Question is, how do I find out what it is? Is there any way to see what’s currently being analysed, or what’s left in the analysis queue?

Is there a New User Guide or something that provides an overview to the logic around “Libraries” and “Collections”, etc? I have a decent sized library of files, but like most people I’ve been listening to a lot of Tidal lately, and frankly don’t really understand the need for a division between things “in my collection” vs not. I just want an easy way to bookmark the things I enjoy as I find them so I can find them later. Isn’t this how favorites should work? Why do I need to add them to a collection before bookmarking them? I have no doubt you’ve given this careful thought, so an overview of your solution may save me from getting frustrated. User forums are great, but overwhelming in terms of volume. Some basic welcome doc-type info would be helpful if you have it.

No user guide yet but there is a growing knowledge base with lots of useful information.

https://kb.roonlabs.com/

This one is probably most helpful for what you are interested in.

https://kb.roonlabs.com/FAQ:_Managing_Your_Library_and_Metadata