PDF not always showing up in Roon

I’ve got quite a few albums with associated PDF files residing in the same directory. Most of them show up within Roon and I love this feature. But, I seem to have a few albums where Roon does not detect the PDF. If I go to the music folder, the PDF is there, named properly and displays properly.

Running Roon Server on an i7 Win 10 box. Any insights or tips to explore are appreciated.

In addition PDF files are not displayed on Android remotes. In my installation anyway. The icon is there, but the PDF’s does not show. One Android is a Samsung Note3, the other a 7" Samsung tab. Core runs on a NUC with Debian. It works as described by @mdconnelly above when I use Roon as remote on a win7 laptop. I briefly tried Core on the win7 laptop a long time ago, but can not say for sure if this worked then. Andriod’s are obviously wireless, laptop is wired. Same IP subnet.

The only consistency I’ve seen so far for those directories where PDFs are not showing in Roon is that they all predate Roon 1.3. No idea if that correlates or not since I don’t have that big a sample size of problems. I have tried hainv Roon rescan them but to no avail.

What happens if you move a directory away, clean the library then move it back and rediscover?

Here’s something interesting… I noted a typo in the folder name of one of the directories that had a PDF that Roon wasn’t seeing. I corrected the folder name, Roon instantly rescanned the folder and, damn, the PDF then showed up! I’ll try this on a few others to see if it consistently corrects them.

So question to @support … wuzzup? Why would renaming a windows music folder cause Roon to now recognize a PDF in the folder when simply rescanning the folder did not?

I can confirm that if I modify the name of the folder with the missing PDF - or any parent folder name - it forces Roon to rescan and find the missing PDFs. Interestingly, it also finds image (jpg) files that were in those directories that it didn’t see before.

@support - is there a way to force a rescan to find these missing PDFs and JPGs without having to rename directories? Or am I missing something obvious?

Hey @mdconnelly – can you zip up an entire folder (media files + PDF) that’s not picking up the PDF and PM me a Dropbox link (or similar)?

We can try to reproduce this and see if we can find a bug here. Also, can you let me know the details for the rest of your configuration, especially your storage devices and how they’ve been added to Roon.

Thanks!

My config is that I’m running the latest version of Roon Core 1.3 build 234 on an i7 64bit Win 10 box with OS on an SSD. All music is stored on an internal 4tb drive in that box. All of my music (~ 3000 albums) resides under a D:\Music… directory on that drive. I control Roon via multiple methods - laptop, iPad, iPhone. All work perfectly.

I’d be glad to share one of the folders but I don’t see how it will help… If I take such a folder and simply delete and paste it back, Roon finds it immediately along with the PDF and JPGs. It “seems” like me forcing a rescan in the Album Editor - Album Options isn’t doing anything nor does forcing a complete rescan from the Storage settings.

I’m away from my system at the moment so won’t likely be able to send the link until late today.

Hey @mdconnelly – we did some testing here and unfortunately we weren’t able to reproduce this, even if we load this content into an older 1.2 build and upgrade to the current release.

Can you give us a little more information about your folder structure and storage device? For example, some paths for albums that aren’t picking up PDFs, and the file system your drive is formatted with?

Also, if you take one of these albums and move it to a new folder (so it’s no longer watched by Roon), and then watch the new parent folder, does Roon pick up the PDFs?

With some more information here, we can try to reproduce this again and hopefully make some progress understanding what’s going on here. Thanks @mdconnelly!

In my own digging, the PDFs that Roon was not seeing were scattered across my collection - couldn’t find a common cause other than it seemed that only folders that hadn’t been touched in a long time seemed to be where the missing PDFs lurked.

My music is all stored on a single 4TB, NTFS formatted drive. Organized as follows:

D:\music\artist\artist-album\individual album flac files/jpegs/pdfs/etc…

I do have some music (e.g. classical) is a separate folder structure…

D:\music\classical\composer or artist…

In those cases where the pdf (and often jpg) files are not seen by Roon, any renaming of the folder name, or any higher-level parent folder name, is sufficient to get Roon to rescan the folders and find the missing PDFs. So, for example, Changing the parent folder “classical” to “classical albums” was sufficient to find all missing PDFs in all albums stored under the parent \classical\ folder. So note, that if I did the same at the top level (rename ‘music’ to ‘music albums’, Roon would undoubtedly rescan everything and find every missing PDF. So I can easily solve the problem, but I thought you might want to know about the issue.

Let me find a folder where Roon is not seeing the PDF and trying moving it outside Roon’s purview and then adding that folder. My guess is that Roon will then see the PDF but I’ll verify that and get back to you.

Thanks for digging in to this!

Great, thanks.

Can you give us a full file path for a track that’s part of an affected album?

The path to the PDF would be helpful too.

Just had an interesting test… the PDF that Roon wasn’t seeing was in an artwork subdirectory of the music folder. I moved that whole folder and subfolder to another drive and had Roon scan it. Still didn’t see the PDF. I then simply moved the PDF up one folder to where the music is and Roon immediately saw it.

Now that’s a different scenario than what I was reporting… just wanted to make you aware.

The full directory of the example I sent you is:

D:\Music\B&W SOCIETY OF SOUND\Cara Dillon\Cara Dillon - Live at the Grand Opera House (48kHz, 24Bit)

The PDF in that folder is:

Live at the Grand Opera House - Artwork document.PDF

Could there be an issue with full directory and filename length? Many but far from all the ones missing were in the same \Music\B&W Society of Sound… directory tree.

@mike - A bit more info… I’ve now found a number of albums where Roon doesn’t see the PDF because it’s in an \artwork subfolder, but I’ve also seen at least one case where Roon does see it in the subfolder. Would you expect Roon to find a PDF in a subfolder? Just curious.