Description of the issue
I would appreciate clarity in how roon handles updated metadata that has changed in the filesystem. I apologize if this has been covered: I have looked and posted previously on this topic, with no help. In my opinion, this should be addressed in a document in the roon support library, but I have not seen anything like this.
Like many users, I have a large music library, collected over decades. Some was purchased as digital files from multiple sources, others are personal CDs I ripped myself.(I have used EZ Audio CD converter for many years, and I use mp3tag to manage metadata. I recommend both these products)
LIke many I have used public databases to populate metadata (discogs, musicbrainz etc) for my CDs, so of course the fields are not consistent across sources. My ideas for what I want in metadata have also changed over the years. As another use case, I also have a custom rating system for albums that is implemented using roonalbumtag, (previous post) so I edit metadata when I add or modify ratings.
The bottom line question is how roon responds to filesystem metadata changes. I currently have thousands of changes in my filesystem that are not reflected in roon.
One data point: if I use mp3tag to edit metadata for a single album, roon does not necessarily make the change on the next scan. Forcing a library rescan and even rebooting roon does not always initiate an update of the filesystem metadata changes in roon. If you change the filename or some file attribute other than metadata, this generally does cause roon to find the metadata change.
For individual albums, I have a workaround: for each album I have changed, I force a library rescan, then go to the page for that album, select āedit albumā and rescan. This picks up my changes. Obviously this is a poor solution for a large number of changes. I have explicitly asked in previous posts about what will initiate metadata rescans, and gotten no useful response from roon.
I have standardized the metadata for many albums, which can be done as a bulk process in mp3tag. Now I want the bulk changes reflected in roon.
*** Does roon have a way to do a bulk synchronization between the (changed) metadata in my library and the (stale) metadata shown in roon?***
*** what filesystem data does roon look at when scanning a library source for changes?***
if I canāt find a bulk solution, Iāll likely delete my roon library database and re-import my entire collection. I would think roon would prefer a more lightweight solution which uses less of its server resources.
A little more information about my configuration, since its possible that the matter is filesystem dependent (I think I discovered a few years back that metadata changes are not always reflected in file modification times in linux/ext4. I understand this may be a difficult problem). Iām running roon on rock, local USB to my benchmark DAC. My source music library is on a single 12 TB disk running ext4 on a raspberry pi/raspbian. The fileserver and rock are connected via cat6 ethernet. I have not tested to see how file metadata is reflected in ext4/raspbian in terms of the various flavors of file modification times and donāt know what roon is using when it does an incremental scan, which is clearly incomplete and misses changed metadata. Rather than research all that, I thought I would ask for a clearer discussion, one that I suspect many would like to hear.