Observations on Music File Directory Organization

Roon Software Discussion
1

My music files are organized in sub-folders under a Prime Folder as follows:

Prime folder
—Music
-----Artist Name
-------Album Name
---------Disk Number
—_VA
-----Album Name
-------Disk Number
—Playlists
—RoonServer

If I designate the Prime Folder as the sole Watched Folder I have all of my music files and playlists available, but Roon seems to stumble on adding new music (I’ll need to force a re-scan). If I designate the sub-folders as Watched Folders, and disable the Prime Folder, I have all of my music files available, and Roon quickly recognizes added music (without a manual re-scan), but I have no playlists. So now I’m enabling everything to see what happens then. I imagine we’ll have duplicates of everything - maybe not. We’ll see.

By the way, the Prime Folder and the RoonServer folder reside on the server’s SSD boot drive. The _VA folder and the Music folder are actually on separate drives mounted under the Prime Folder. The Music Folder has all of my collection that can be identified by separate artists. The _VA folder has all of the albums which might be called “compilations” or collections of various artists. The entire collection takes up nearly 5 TB. I did this so I could have some space for future expansion. The Music folder is actually an entire 6 TB drive and the _VA folder is an entire 3TB drive.

2

According to your diagram, your Playlists is at the same level as _VA and Music. Did you try and add the playlists location as another watched location and see if your playlists are then picked up?

3

I did. It didn’t help. I manually re-scanned it too - but since it only has .m3u files in it, Roon found no music and no playlists appeared.

Maybe have the playlists folder as an "organized folder?

4

IMHO, Do not use Organized Folders. Roon will move all your music, re-organize and tag. Its a one way trip.

5

I’ll treat the Organized folders option as poison :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes: . Thanks. Will my designating everything as a watched folder result in duplicate files, or will Roon recognize that these watched folders are actually pointing to the same files?

6

I"ve never tried pointing to the same location twice. Roon by default hides albums that it finds as duplicates; for example, if you have a CD rip and a high definition version of the same album, Roon will hide the lower of the two resolutions. I’m not sure what it will do with duplicates… hold on let me try it now…

It will treat it as a duplicate which it will hide by default, but, it will also treat it as another album in terms of total album counts, track counts, etc etc.

What if you moved the Playlist folder under the Music Folder?

7

see here: Build 21 (&16) failure to import m3u playlists

8

If I did that (put the Playlists folder under “music”), then if the playlist pointed to a file which was in the in the “_VA” folder would the playlist work?