Roon has a ‘Delete Album’ function buried in the Album Editor/Album Options choices and a similar one for ‘Delete Track’. Yes, the UI does make it clear that it will permanently remove the album from your hard disk and requires confirmation, but that is of little comfort when I allow friends and kids to use my Roon Remote. I never want local music files to be modified or deleted via the Roon Remote interface. What I have now done is mark all music files as Read Only (under Win 10) and let Windows security block the delete. That seems to work.
It’s not clear why these function are there. Yes, they will remove the actual music files - flac files in my case. But it will then orphan the directory and any files left there such as jpegs, pdfs or misc log files. So it’s clearly not a good music management tool. Perhaps a more useful function would be to just have ‘Remove Album’ and ‘Remove Track’ functions that will remove from Roon but not touch the actual music files wherever they may be stored.
A more comprehensive approach would be to create a Roon Admin interface for these and other Setup functions such that the occasional friend, family member (or grandkids!) that should only be using Roon to listen to music won’t inadvertently mess things up.
Bottom line, it would be great if there was a way to protect my Roon setup from inadvertent screwups.