Roon Rock
Intel NUC i7, 8GB RAM (not sure CPU, but it was one of the reccomended for Roon Rock when I bought it)
Networking Gear & Setup Details
CenturyLink Axon C4000
Netgear 8 port 10/100/1000 switch
Roon Rock is connected via ethernet
Connected Audio Devices
RopieeeXL on a Raspberry Pi 3b connected via ethernet
Number of Tracks in Library
25,000 albums
389,000 tracks
Description of Issue
Every couple days I have random albums added to my ‘Recent Activity: Added’ on the home screen. These albums are local files in folders that have already been added years ago – it’s as if Roon does a re-scan and all of a sudden sees some albums that it didn’t see before in these watched folders, so it adds a handfull of them. Weirdly for me, it’s usually been Christmas albums (although not exclusively so).
I use the ‘Recently Added’ to go back and listen to new music that I’ve added so having this list be randomly populated by random albums that Roon is recognizing right now when they were added years ago is kind of making using Roon less ideal. I can’t see a way to edit the ‘Added Date’ of these albums so they can sort the proper way, either.
There was a power outage yesterday, and it looks like since then about 40 random albums have been added between yesterday and today from my collection that should have an ‘added’ date of a couple years ago.
Apologies for the slow response here. Can you please confirm where the music files themselves are stored? Is it on a NAS, external USB, or internal storage on your ROCK? Do you notice the issue only occur when there is a Roon update and Roon rescans the library or do you notice it happen randomly as well?
Hi @noris Thanks for getting back to me. My files are located on 2 2.5" external USB drives attached to the NUC running ROCK. These drives are also backed up via another computer that runs rsync periodically to copy the contents of the drive. That shouldn’t matter, I supplse.
It hasn’t happened in a while (so hopefully it’s ok and won’t come back). I’m not sure if it happens exactly when there’s an update or not. Next time it happens I’ll report back and see if it happens with any Roon update or any other time that I can identify.
That’s a good question. It happened again yesterday, where about 200 albums in a previously added folder were “re-added”, so they now show up at the top of the list.
This happened after the Roon Rock NUC was updated to 2.0.10, and it re-indexed.
This happened again after the Roon Rock NUC was updated to 2.0.10 – I noticed it re-indexed for a long time after that update. About 200 albums that were previously added a couple years ago now appear at the top by “date added” in the album page, and on the front page under “Recent activity” under the “added” tab.
I do have a large collection. And adding to the complexity, I have 30 different storage folders added in Roon across 2 drives (many of the storage folders correspond specific genres of music that are either included or excluded from Roon). Both drives (one 4TB and one 2TB) are 2.5" external connected directly to the Intel NUC via USB. Other than adding music to one of the storage folders, no other process should be accessing those folders, other than a backup rsync via a cron process that runs every couple of weeks to backup the collection to a mac mini backing up to an 8GB drive.
I’ve checked the folders and files of a number of the falsely “recently added” albums (I’m looking through the Mac Mini finder window by accessing via SMB) and don’t see any change in any of the folder or files “Date Created” or “Date Modified”.
I can see that since the recent update that it’s also doing the background audio analysis (it’s about 1/10 of the way through 110,000 files).
Is there some where to check the logs, or other troubleshooting resources? It seems like this is only happening to music files on one of the 2 drives – which leads me to wonder if that drive is failing. Maybe a next step is to remove that drive and check it via Mac Disk Utility?
With Today’s Roon update, it’s now re-indexing, the spinning circle is going in the upper right hand corner, and it’s adding dozens more albums that were already in the library. hmmph.
@noris, I see there’s another support post here that has the same issue here called “after latest update my Library got mixed up” – also running an Intel NUC and Roon Rock. Sounds like the same thing.
I could supply my Roon logs or otherwise do any other troubleshooting steps to try to see if it will locate the issue. I am curious to make it stop, and to try to batch re-order all of these albums by their earlier date.
Thanks for the details. Can you please provide a few examples of albums that are exhibiting this issue? I’ve enabled diagnostics and I’ll ask the team to take a look at logs to see if anything is amiss regarding those albums.
Enclosed is a screenshot of the album view sorted to show just music that I haven’t physically added either by Tidal or by the folder that I usually add music to (which is a couple of albums). This is since the last Roon Rock update. Since this latest update, it’s been scanning my folders and it’s re-added over 500 albums here. The folders are mostly of MP3 and AAC files, and this time it’s been from 3 separately added folders (although in the past it’s been other folders).
@noris Thanks for having them look into this. I realize I sent you a screenshot, but didn’t answer your question on a couple specific albums and was going back to then list the first 2 in that screenshot:
Steve Wonder / “Where I’m Coming From” (originally added 29 August 2017)
Today I sorted the album screen again in this same way and these 2 albums are not at the top anymore. (enclosing screenshot below). These couple albums seem to have gone back to their original “added” date – so they’ve sorted back to where they were originally.
When I took this screenshot, Roon was still re-indexing, but today it’s finished. In today’s screenshot with the same focus-view there’s only 107 albums that are fitting the criteria. In the screenshot above post there’s over 500 albums that fit this criteria. The number of albums that are “out of order” has gone down since then. Is this a result of engineers troubleshooting in diagnostic mode, or just another clue for troubleshooting?
Hope this makes sense. Agaom. I’m able to see exactly what albums Roon is mistakenly adding because I only put newly added music files in one library folder (the terribly named folder “New Music 2021 On”) that I’m excluding in this focus.
Ben with the support team here stepping in for Noris while he’s out of the office. We discussed your issue with the team but aren’t yet able to pin down exactly what’s going on.
A follow-up question for you : can you confirm that there are no second copies of the albums in question, in your library or watched folders? Perhaps with different resolutions?
@benjamin It’s quite possible that there are but I’m pretty sure that at least some of the albums added here are single copies. Unfortunately I can’t check for duplicates quite yet as it looks like my Roon Rock server is completely down and not accessible. I may have to reinstall and restore the backup database at this point.
UPDATE: Roon server is back on and working OK. I don’t know why it was not starting before, but I restarted again, but I’ll take it.
@benjamin Checking back on if there are multiple copies. Looking back at the Album view I can see 355 albums re-added over the last 3 months (that I didn’t add myself), and 162 albums are duplicates. Almost half of them are duplicates.
Thanks for the update! If possible, it might be good to test out creating a new watched folder outside of the external drive you’re currently using. This does sound like early-stage drive failure. If possible, I would also run a disk check on the external drive to check the health of the drive.
How often are you running rsync? It could be the case where Rsync is backing up around the same time Roon is indexing your watched folder, which could cause confusion within your library.
Are they different resolutions? Or, exact duplicates that were created by Roon?
@benjamin Thanks for thinking about it and helping to troubleshoot.
I’ve shut down the Roon Rock NUC, and run Disk Utility’s First Aid in macOS. One of the 2 music drives won’t mount and gets an error when running first aid (and putting my ear to the drive it seems to be making repetitive noises that to me sound like the classic disk failure). So there’s that. Lucky for me I do have the music backup on a separate drive via that rsync, so I’ll swap drives this evening – hopefully the Roon database can pick up on those.
Otherwise to answer your questions, Rsync runs once a week (from an external Mac Mini) mounting the drives connected to the NUC running Roon. I will have to see if these somehow overlap with the database backup, but since it looks like this drive really is failing, I’d think that is the reason.
Some, but not all duplicates were on the failing drive, where I did have a couple folders of music with different resolution (One folder containing my old iTunes mp3 library that was ripped in long ago, and another folder of a smaller subset of music downloaded from iTunes Match as AAC format). I do have a big, messy mp3 library, and one of the things that I’ve been loving from Roon is how it’s mostly made sense of that – so I’m sure that, and the disk failure are what’s coming back to bite me.
By the way – having some kind of process that runs to backup the local music drives in Roon Rock would be wonderful – I figured out my own way by running Rsync as a cron process, which has worked silently over a couple years, and hopefully is helping me keep my music collection now. Having something like this would be great, and I’d love to see it added to Roon core.
