I have a local library of a little over 25,000 tracks, with files organized like this: artist folder / album folder / tracks.
I used this convention for the name of the track files: DD-NN track_name. DD is the disc number (if applicable) and NN is the track number.
I saw that the path and file name are stored in the Roon database, so I wanted to see the impact of reducing the length of the file name. I removed track_name from the file name and left only DD-NN.
After that, the duration of the backup was reduced by 30%. Also, its size has decreased.
I suspect that something similar happened with the database size.
Note: I did the renaming of the files with Roon running and it did not affect the identification of the tracks at all.
@DanielAvasilichioaei — thank you for sharing this. However, can you please help me and describe how exactly you’ve renamed the file name for so many files? Surely not one by one, I guess. Which workaround for renaming files do you recommend?
Thank you!
Michael
I suppose there are several software that do this.
I used foobar2000 (www.foobar2000.org). After adding all your tracks to foobar, select them all, then apply these steps:
Right click on selected tracks → File Operations → Rename to → …
Set “File name” like this: [%discnumber%-]%tracknumber%
Click on “Run”
Obviously, first test the procedure on some albums cloned in another location.
I find it hard to believe that shortening the filename would have any effect on backup time or backup size, the size of the files is still the same.
Also by doing this you may find it harder to identify files with poor metadata if you remove the trackname from hhe filename i wouldnt recommend doing this.
Roon database does not contain the content of the files, but the path from the storage, the name of the file and information about metadata. Assuming that the metadata is the same in both cases, reducing the length of the storage path or the file name affects the size of the database.
In my system, I tested the effect of massive file name shortening and the effect is the one I described in my initial post.
I do not have the technical possibility to evaluate this percentage of the size. I don’t even know exactly what the Roon database contains. That’s why I decided to practically test the effect of this change in my system.
I guess the percentage varies from one user to another…