So, I’ve been kicking around options for organizing a very large collection of “old time radio” programs that I’ve recently acquired. While there is one purpose made program for OTR collectors, it hasn’t been updated since the early 2000s, so I’m thinking my best option is to try to integrate them into my Roon library (even though Roon won’t identify/pull metadata for them, obviously).
I just want to make sure I’m not overlooking something before I get too far into this process, so I’m looking for a bit of advice on the best way to approach this.
I’m considering two strategies at the moment -
The first way is I’d treat it similar to my multi-disc sets and have one “album” for each radio show, and then use the disc # metadata field for the broadcast year. This seems to be the neatest/least cluttered approach, although disc #'s have been kind of hit and miss in terms of whether they actually show up correctly or they get ignored and everything’s lumped together.
Other option, I guess, are separate “albums” for each year of the various programs, although that has the potential to get pretty cluttered quickly.
Any thoughts on best approach? Anything I might be overlooking that could help here?
For commercial radio series releases (where Roon can sometimes identify it), they are organised as multi disc sets, with the Album name being the series Title and number or year as appropriate. The number of episodes is usually one or two per disc (for radio programs). I follow this type of organisation for series that Roon cannot identify or where metadata is poor. Roon has always used the metadata and disc numbers where it can’t identify the set.
Try importing one series at a time to ensure that episodes don’t go missing and get split between disc sets.
You should also create a few tags and add them on import so that you can find them easily.
Thanks for the advice.
Unfortunately, in this case these aren’t commercially released. They’re transfers off of old radio transcription discs (and audio reels in some cases).
So somewhat more manual than if a Radio Spirits set were in the database.
I was just suggesting you follow the same format as commercial releases. How you want them to appear in Roon is up to you, especially as they are unlikely to be identified. Mass tagging is easy enough if you use mp3Tag or similar program to ensure top level album title is identical (so they all be grouped as an album, by year or series as appropriate).