Hi, I am thinking about purchasing Roon. I have approximately 13tb of music on a NAS right now. Unfortunately a lot of music is duplicated (i.e. mp3 to flac) and possible not tagged consistently or well. I did a great job tagging for a long time but real life gets ahead of these type of things. Does roon do any managing of folders? How about auto tagging and making artist names consistent etc… I have a lot of music from bandcamp and most of my collection tends to be in the more obscure independent rock/rap/folk/etc… genres.
Should I try to get my collection under control before utilizing Roon? I have similarity but I always end up having to reboot before it finishes scanning which looks like it will take 2 weeks to scan nevermind any maintenance.
Any suggestion to prep for Roon would be greatly appreciated.
Eventually I am looking to get a phasure DAC to connect to a ROCK server, which I already have most of the components for.
Mostly I was just looking to delete say an MP3 version of an album when a flac version exists or something ;). After 20+ years of collecting mp3s it adds up. “Artist - album” was how i used to browse everything in the winamp 2.x days.
And yes. I am actually looking at new NAS eventually and the new one will backup to my current one. too much tech to buy!
Roon is pretty good at identifying duplicates, and will show you what can be deleted in this respect.
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
5
Roon doesn’t write anything to your collection. It’s all done within its own proprietary database. The only exception is when you ask to delete something and then you have to confirm that like 7 million times to make sure that is what you really want.
So…I suggest you just point Roon to all the NAS addresses and see what it does. It does a decent job of identifying artists, albums, duplicates, etc. Chances are there will still be some clean-up work, if you want to do it (real life etc…) but I would not do it in advance of letting Roon see what it figures out for your collection.
If you don’t want the MP3s in there, then I’d say just don’t point Roon to that folder.
You can use a tool named “Focus” within Roon to locate all your all your MP3 files in your library.Then you can tell Roon to hide those files when doing searches without having to delete them. You can also permanently delete those files if that’s your preference.
Similarly, using “Focus” you can identify all your duplicate albums and hide them from searches or simply delete them.
Roon allows you to create “bookmarks” which you can think of folders. You can use bookmarks in many different ways. For example, you can bookmark all your files of a certain format (MP3, or DSD, or FLAC, etc.). It is similar to having a folder with tracks that meet a certain criteria but it has the advantage that it is dynamic, that is, it is always current as you add music to your collection. So you can have, for example, a bookmark that includes all your music by, say, Led Zeppelin.
But Focus allows you to use multiple criteria also. For example, you can find (and then bookmark) all your library tracks by artist Led Zeppelin in DSD and FLAC but NOT MP3. The larger and more complex your collection, the more that you benefit from tools such as Focus and Bookmark.
I have been using the folder management approach for many years. All my files in the NAS are stored in folders: “Artist - Album”. I still keep them that way in the NAS. However, I have gotten used to the way Roon manages music and actually enjoy using it.