Fortunately this only seems to affect one piece but I cannot find any way of isolating where the problem is occurring with Steven Kovacevich’s Beethoven: The Complete Piano Sonatas; Bagatelles Op. 119, Op. 126.
Originally a 9 Disc CD Box, I bought it as an iTunes file, converted to Apple Lossless (using dbPoweramp). In Roon, Sonata #29 shows up as 6 minute 46 seconds. In iTunes, Amarra and Audirvana it’s 41 minutes 11 seconds (which matches online information about the length of the Kovacevich’s recording of the sonata).
I tried converting to a FLAC file, which produced three quarters of the full information (the fourth movement went missing and total time was 29 minutes 44).
How is it possible for Roon to chop up/omit tracks when the full information is provided to it by the files it’s supposed to be reading? I tried using the preferences to allow priority to file information but that has done nothing. Is it possible for Roon’s metadata to abridge a track on the basis of metadata from elsewhere (even if I can’t find a shortened version of the sonata anywhere, let alone one that just drops the more than crucial fourth movement)?
Any suggestions appreciated.
My copy is FLAC and looks fine so Roon looks it up properly
Have you tried re-identifying it
Do you have an alternative way of seeing the track timing, Amara I assume, 6 minutes doesn’t even match one movement
As a start would go back to the original iTunes file and make sure that metadata is correct
Thanks Mike.
I’d already tried the reidentification thing but it made no difference.
The track times were available on AllMusic and these were the same in Amarra and iTunes. Only Roon produced a difference and a pretty radical one at that.
I took your advice and had a look at the metadata in iTunes (I’d forgotten how idiosyncratic some of the choices can be with iTunes tracks). The only thing that looked like a possible anomaly was that the album is classified as a compilation, which in a sense it is but not according to the usual iTunes definition. So I got rid of this and reconverted to Apple Lossless. This time I lost movement 2 of sonata #2 (which became a separate album) and had the same problem as before with #29. So I deleted this conversion and tried one to AIFF. This is fine when opened in Roon. I still have no real idea about what’s going on. Perhaps there’s some additional data unpacked in a full conversion that the m4a and FLAC versions don’t include and this is throwing Roon off the scent, but I can’t see why that would be so.
Very strange. But I appreciate your help.