Hello, I have a question about ripping CDs and them being automatically identified…
Last week I installed ROCK on a NUC and, after a few hiccups, all’s working well (although the iOS app crashes with disturbing frequency). Anyway, I’ve been using ROCK to rip CDs. That’s working well in terms of pace and in terms of identifying the CDs etc. However, I have one question:
Whenever I rip a CD which is part of a two-CD compilation (for example, Charlie Mingus Ah-Um which has two CDs in the pack) then it identifies the first CD fine but then gives up on the second. If I use the edit feature and Identify Album, it identifies the first CD instead of the second (and hence points out that every track is wrong). This has happened on every two or three CD pack that I have. Many symphonies span two discs and I have the same problem. Is there a solution to this? Am I missing something that I should do to create a compilation inside Roon? All thoughts gratefully received. Edward
Try selecting both albums, then Merge them.
- In the Album browser (sorted by Date Added, to make it easy to find them) right-click on the two (or the number of) albums.
- You’ll see a menubar appear at the top of the screen. Click on the “3 dots” menu, and choose Edit.
- This brings up the Album Editor - and click the “Merge Albums” button
- This brings up the “Edit track grouping” screen.
- You can manually adjust disc and track numbers here to create the correct box-set grouping, or let Roon have a go.
- Once the reorganisation has been done, Roon will try and re-identify the album set.
More info here:
Thanks Geoff… But I don’t think I’m doing it right. What it does it forgets the information of the first (correctly identified) album (albeit, it remembers the track names) and then interleaves the tracks of the second album (rather than keeping the correct running order 1-x (disc 1) followed by 1-y (disc 2). It doesn’t identify the tracks in the second disc etc. It clearly somehow knows the second disc is part of the first in that (prior to merging) it proposes that the second disc is the first disc (but then tells me the track listings don’t match).
I suspect that the above description is utterly garbled but hopefully you get what I mean…
Edward
On the edit track grouping screen, can you insert the correct cd number by each track as necessary?
Being able to tag a CD as CD1,2,3 etc helps a great deal. But I don’t think ripping with ROCK allows that.
Should be able to do it on the edit grouping screen - you can assign tracks to any cd number you want AFAIK. It’s been a while since I needed to do it though (and I use Roon OS’s CD ripping function)
I’ll admit I never got that far. I use SongKong to identify rips made using EAC. I put the title, artist and CD number into EAC and SongKong successfully identifies and tags 99% of everything I have. Importing into Roon then no longer trips up over multi CD releases.
Thanks for the input… @Geoff_Coupe I’ll explore the grouping screen further. To me, it’s far from intuitive. I guess the thing that I’m hopeful of is that, by grouping two CDs in a collection (like my Charles Mingus Ah Um album) into one album is that Roon will be able to name (and assign metadata) to the (currently unidentified) tracks. The reason I’m hopeful of this is that Roon is currently identifying the second disc as the first (and hence somehow realises that the two discs are connected). @Henry_McLeod apart from this issue that I’m battling with, I’m pretty impressed by the Roon ripping feature.
Edward
Yup, that is what is supposed to happen… 
Hmmm. But it’s not. I wonder what I’m doing wrong…
Ok - so a bit of jiggery pokery and I have it working. I’d say it’s certainly not intuitive but it’s working nonetheless. Thanks for your input!
All I can say is dont use Roons ripping it really is half baked. I stopped using it because it just stopped working efficiently and only rips one album then locks up. I always ended up adding my own metadata after ripping to using MP3 tag as Roon is not my only library. Back using EAC and windows handles mulitdiscs well with no addional tweaking necessary.
Fair enough. However I have found the Roon ripping pretty painless. I’ve only had a couple of issues for particularly scratched CDs but they do warn in the help files that they may be problematic. For all the rest (180 so far - which I know for many is not that big a library) I’ve had no issues. We shall see once I’ve waded through the rest of them!
As I’ve said, I do find the multidisc thing unintuitive but I’ve understood now how to do it. Of my collection, every disc except for one has had the metadata added and the album artwork etc. It does sound like you had a raw time of it though.
Roon is not adding metadata to your rips,its just quering Roons database to find a match it never adds it to the files this is why I did it myself. If you try to use these files elsewhere you wont have any metadata at all and will be in a bit of pickle its a one trick pony.
Oh. Thanks for the info. I hadn’t clocked that! Erm, I guess now I’ll just have to cross that bridge when it comes…
And that’s precisely why, if you want to use these files elsewhere, you should Export them from the Roon Library, so that Roon will write the metadata into the exported files…
Great! So that means it’s not been a wasted effort (not that I really think it’s a wasted effort…). Roon is working very well so all in all I’m impressed. That said, there are some niggles…
- The iPhone app crashes constantly - it’s nuts. On the iPad it’s much more stable so we generally just use that. Hopefully the iOS version will be improved sometime soon.
- Sometimes Roon curiously switches the filter - so, yesterday I had selected from my library to shuffle Jazz. But after about an hour it just started randomly playing a non-Jazz full album. Curious.
- As mentioned above, I do find the ripping of multi-disc CDs exceptionally laborious.
- I know this is mentioned in the KB but if a CD has even a few scratches, the ripping feature just seems to hang… I’m not yet sure how I’m going to get those CDs onto Roon. Frustratingly (and maybe it’s an obvious thing) the CDs that I’ve listened to more (and hence why I’m keen to get them onto Roon) are the ones with the most scratches!
But all in all, I’m very happy with it - I find the metadata, the filters, the interlinks etc. all brilliant.
No Roon should add the metadata at rip. Hardly hard to achieve as the software does it. I have used it for years in Vortexbox. They are already doing the look up. It’s just last half arsed attempt.
In your opinion. Not mine.
I suppose it breaks their rule of not modifying existing metadata and keeping all the metadata in Roon only. However in the case of ripping a new CD to create new files there is no existing metadata so it does seem more sensible to add some basic data.
Because of this problem I think you would be better off ripping outside of Roon using something like dbPoweramp, there are three other reasons to do this:
- Identification when ripping from a CD is easier then identification from ripped files because although CDs dont contain metadata themselves you can guarantee the track order and track lengths and therefore can use this to do a CD lookup that will identify the majority of your CD’s. So if you use dbPoweramp you can make use of their lookup and get some matches that Roon will not find, and then when adding to Roon you still benefit from Roons matching algorithm.
- Roon rips Cd’s to a folder structure based on date/time, this is not terribly useful. dbPoweramp will rip based on albumArtist/album this is better especially when yo have albums that could not be identified.
- You can also preprocess the files with tagging software (such as my own SongKong) to further improve the metadata to get a better Roon import rate. Note if the albums are matched to MusicBrainz and MusicBrainz Ids added that makes it much easier for Roon to import.