Roon core over riding original folder and track structure order
New user. My library consists of folders that were created with iTunes. Artists have Complete folders, where every recording is presented chronologically- i.e. 19600102 01 Album Name Catalog number 01234567.
Files have Artist, track name, date metadata. Empty album artist, grouping, track, and disc metadata. Folders are intended to sort in order of track name.
When I scan my library Roon is breaking up this order and trying to segment recordings by album name, and imposing incorrect track numbers imposed from the album catalog number.
How can I set Roon to respect the original track names and intention and just show these in order of track name? Thanks.
Can you please check Roon Settings → Library → Import settings and try to set the setting to Prefer File for the Title/Track’s title? Let us know if this helps!
Thank you. Yes, I did that previously, and it didn’t change the way the tracks are presented in the core main view. When I drill down to the folder view in Roon the tracks are in the correct order. I went back to iTunes and loaded the same files to confirm that track, disc, grouping, album artist fields were empty as well. When you look path the screen shots the first numbers are release date 19600102 and track 01 sequentially. If you look at the catalog numbers at the end of the file name Roon is applying track numbers inherited from the album catalog number.
Thanks for letting us know those additional details. We’re going to escalate this to the team for additional feedback, thanks in advance for your patience as we look into this further.
I appreciate that. As a new user that went right in with a with a year subscription, I want to make this work for my very large library and be converted. I’m happy to share any additional details you need.
I can see that you have already tried folder view and your tracks are organised as you expect there. That is as it should be. Roon is not overriding or altering your library structure on disk in anyway but it has its own way of organising the way it displays a library and that’s clearly not working in your case. So its not so much a known issue as just the way that roon works.
Roon folder view was only introduced quite recently and that might be creating a misleading impression of how the vast majority of roon functionality works. Roon works very differently from other players. It is not just parsing your data structure. It is trying to use that parsed data to match your albums to other versions of your albums available both in your local library and if you have a streaming subscription available on-line. In order to do that it needs to follow some standard organising convention that it applys to its entire user base. A big difference to your approach, for example, is roon uses file metadata for things like recording and release dates, not strings in the track and album titles as you are doing. Also it is unclear from your examples but if you have a lot of live bootlegs roon will in general not be able to identify them which is a key step in its library organization and display process.
Some roon users have managed to get roon to display similarly to what they are used to by a lot of trial and error. The basic idea is to populate various tags to see if it forces a desired behaviour. However, its a lot of work, there is no general advice really that could be given as each user-case is unique, is not supported, often breaks with a new roon release and usually means other intended roon behaviour doesn’t work.
It looks like you have used a consistent naming convention so it should be possible using something like mp3tag to rename and re-tag your library as roon is expecting in batches to reduce the migration effort. There is quite a lot of material on the roon knowledgebase about best tagging practice for roon and how to go about that.
I would try to see if you can correct the file tags as per the KB that @tripleCrotchet linked, there are quite a few helpful suggestions listed there. If you are still stuck after the article, let us know and you can send us an affected album or two for review to the below link, though do note that it may take some time until we are able to investigate due to the holidays.
I have 5 tb of alac files that were all curated and re-named with artist, title, year and album tags over the past 10 years - 100,000 plus files. Roon is deriving and implementing track and disc metadata that doesn’t exist and is incorrect. Library preference is set to prefer file for metadata and Roon doesn’t recognize it, making categorization issues where they shouldn’t be. The strings are consistent and methodical and I’m not going to go back and rename a library that large at this point. I’m suprised that a product for deep music lovers wouldn’t anticipate archive approaches and couldn’t be bypassed. It’s not intuitive, and the order and structure Roon is deriving from the filenames isn’t logical or consistent, which is what is confusing to me. If there was a method to it, I could understand the logic of the system and work with it, but the results seem random, and any changes I make to library preferences don’t appear to have an affect.
I don’t have any help to offer, but will make the observation that something odd seems to be going on. I have the “prefer file for metadata” setting and Roon is correctly using my artist names, album names, song titles, etc. My files are organized in folders as: ARTIST (or ALBUMARTIST)/ALBUM NAME/track number - track name. So each album is separate folder of tracks underneath the ARTIST folder. I have about 130,000 mostly FLAC files.
I checked our media uploader but I haven’t noticed any files from your end, if you’d like to continue troubleshooting this, please send a few files over, or use @tripleCrotchet 's suggestion of posting a few screenshots so that we can try to identify a pattern with the files, thanks!
Take all the time you need. We’ll remove any auto-close timers from this thread - please share a post here when you’ve had a chance to upload logging.
In the meantime, we’ll request diagnostics from RoonServer that will automatically report to our server the next time you login to Roon on the affected machine. This should help illuminate more of the issue.
