When I switched to Roon some 4 years ago, I had to abandon the hierarchical folder structure I used for classical music, but saved a copy. Now that it is supported again, I thought of trying it out, but I do not want to destroy what I have developed in the mean time, so I thought I might try the following:
-Add my saved copy of the hierarchical classical music folder to the library
-Disable the Roon classical music folder temporarily to see how well the old hierarchical folder is supported
If things do not work out, I hope I can disable the old hierarchical folder and enable the Roon classical music folder and all will be as it was. If things do work out, I will keep the old hierarchical folder and delete all music in the Roon classical music folder up to the day I switched to Roon. In the future I hope to convert the Roon classical music folder to a hierarchical structure again.
What do you think? Is this a viable approach?
Do not quite understand the problem with your hierarchical folder in roon. If roon is managing to identify all the albums therein, the folder structure is not a matter or interest as roon is applying its own metadata and browsing/focussing options on whatever it identifies.
If you disable the current folder and enable the hierarchical one again, the only question is if roon is managing to recognize all albums correctly which are stored in your database. It is simply worth a try. If successful, nothing would change and you can browse in roon´s standard browsing tools as well as in folder browsing.
If most of albums in the old folder are recognized and some are not, I recommend to activate both folders at the same time. If will create a lot of duplicates which roon should be capable of recognizing as such. In cases that is failing (for example because in the past you have identified an album manually), I found it to be best practice to group the 2 albums forming duplicates so you can be sure changes made in roon (such as manually corrected metadata) are applied to both versions and do not get lost in case you delete one of them.
One advice: deactivate background audio analysis while doing such experiments. It is just slowing things down and keeping the CPU busy if set to ´fast´.
Thanks for taking the trouble to reply. This is helpful. I guess what I am worried about is what sort of consequences disabling my main music source would have? For example, would it affect my playlists, and what about the playlists and music on my phone (Roon Arc). I did download all the playlists on the phone, but still.