Roon Arbitrarily Re-importing my Library on its Own Accord

[Hugh_McMillan]

Hi Roon Support,

I am running the latest version of Roon (the full GUI app, not Roon Server) as a core/control/output on a 2014 iMac 5K running MacOS High Sierra 10.13.3 with an ethernet connection. My music library is stored on a Drobo 5N2 NAS with five 10 TB hard drives connected to the internet with one ethernet cable so as to avoid a link aggregation issue which I have read about in the Roon community forum. My Drobo is about 46% full with a combination of music, movies, and TV shows across different Drobo “shares” or directories.

My experience with Roon has been mixed at best. My main issue currently involves Roon “forgetting” my entire media library stored on my NAS. This necessitates a full re-scan and re-import of my music collection which can take days. (The music files in the MacOS finder are unaffected thankfully given the nature of how Roon works.) For instance, today Roon finished scanning and re-importing my ~250,000 track collection before dinner. After dinner, I returned to my computer to see Roon scanning yet again and only “seeing” ~1,500 tracks imported. What’s up with that!? I’m now seeing this pop-up when I click the animated activity ring in the upper left:

I read about the link aggregation problem in the following thread:

Adding new files - Roon loses files and rescans [Resolved - Removing switch and link aggregation]

By the way, rather than configurable rescan timing, I’d prefer the option of turning it off altogether and rescanning manually.

Initially, I set up my Drobo 5N2 to use network interface bonding (link aggregation) with two ethernet cables plugged into the rear of the NAS and connected to a Netgear ethernet switch. experienced this loss of tracks problem with this setup so I removed one ethernet cable from the Drobo and plugged directly into my wall ethernet outlet a few days ago. This seemed to fix the library loss problem until this evening.

Roon uses one “share” or directory on my Drobo. I have a second share dedicated to Roon backups and a third contains TV Shows and Movies used in a Plex setup.

Could my issue with the rescanning and loss of library files be related to an SMB or AFP connection problem? Roon connects to my Drobo using SMB followed by the Drobo’s IP address. As a Mac user, I’m not exactly familiar with the pros, cons, dos, or don’ts of either and am sort of intimidated by it. As far as I know, Roon uses SMB and doesn’t support AFP. To be honest, I’m not sure which I should be using while accessing my Drobo from the MacOS Finder.

Some other issues, which I imagine are related, have plagued my Roon experience. First, the Roon app (again. full GUI, not Server) seems to consistently crash at idle, during a library scan (which are frequent if not constant), and whenever I attempt to change the Automatic Scan Interval setting in the Storage settings. I have attempted to change my scan interval to prevent constant scanning and loss of speed when accessing my Drobo but upon changing the scan interval and clicking save, a pop-up with the animated Roon logo and “Saving” appears and eventually crashes the app.

The issue which I think is related to the crashing involves remotes (other installations of the full Roon GUI app, iOS apps) losing connection to the Roon core, either due to a crash of the Roon core app or for apparently no reason at all. Sometimes, the remote apps will recognize the Roon core after a few seconds/minutes while other times I need to restart the Roon remote apps and/or Roon core app.

I have paid for a year of Roon and am eager to purchase a lifetime subscription to the service. It’s a brilliant system on paper and when it works properly. However, most my time spent with Roon gives me absolutely no reason to do so. If it isn’t clear, navigating and troubleshooting these issues hasn’t left me much time to listen to music.

Feel free to request any and all log information. I am still hopeful that my issues can be remediated.

Thank you for your assistance.

Regards,

Hugh

[JWC (Jim)]

Flagging down @support here for a more detailed look.

[wizardofoz (Mr Fix It aka The Wiz)]

@Hugh_McMillan You might like to try running the roon server app on the iMac and user the remote as just remote. I do this on my iMac.

That said do you close the roon app or quit it? If it’s running as a server you can have it run in background all the time the Mac is signed in…set in the server options menu pull down. I never sleep my iMac, but do sleep the display.

Could you perhaps detail some of your iMac settings like power / energy saver / sleep as this could influence what might be happening.

[ronfint]

@Hugh_McMillan

At one time I thought this issue (in the thread quoted above) was fixed, but I was mistaken. I don’t think that my problem had anything to do with link aggregation. I got rid of the switch, but not the problem. Rather than persist, I found it easier to adopt a simple work around. Before adding files to my NAS, I close Roon Core, and reopen after files are added. This way there are no problems.

Even with this, I find Roon to be worthwhile.

Best of luck,
Ron

[Hugh_McMillan]

@wizardofoz Thank you for suggestion to run the Roon Server app on the iMac. I haven’t run the Roon Server app on this iMac before but I will attempt to transition from a “Roon” install to a Roon Server install as I don’t need to use my iMac for Roon control or output. The iMac is set to sleep the display but not its hard drive.

@ronfint Hmm, I suppose I’m glad the Drobo isn’t necessarily causing this issue and port aggregation may not be the problem. If I’m able to re-import my entire library, I will attempt to add some music with Roon Server off and see what happens. Thank you for suggesting the work around.

[wizardofoz (Mr Fix It aka The Wiz)]

Try this page for info

https://kb.roonlabs.com/FAQ:_How_do_I_move_my_library_over_to_RoonServer%3F_How_do_I_run_headless%3F

[Hugh_McMillan]

I have an update on this issue but would still appreciate any input @support might have once the work week begins.

I have transitioned my Roon installation on my iMac 5K to a Roon Server installation on the same computer. Thank you to @wizardofoz for providing the support link. I also moved my Drobo from its wall ethernet connection to a direct connection to my computer. I have an ethernet cable running from the back of my iMac into one ethernet port on my Drobo 5N2 and a second ethernet cable running from the second ethernet port on the Drobo into the wall. Network interface bonding/port aggregation is off and, interestingly, my port speed on the Drobo is now 1000 rather than 100 as in my previous setup. Drobo offers link aggregation/network interface bonding in order to consolidate the 5N2’s two ethernet ports into one ethernet connection with increased bandwidth/improved read/write speeds.

With wi-fi on my iMac off, the computer cannot connect to the internet (through the Drobo) but it can connect to the Drobo flawlessly. I can access the Drobo shares through the Finder. Consequently, I turned on wi-fi on the iMac in order to access the internet and this didn’t affect the Drobo in any adverse way as far as I can tell. My MacOS network settings are as follows:

I turned on Roon Server for the first time using this new hardware setup and, using a computer other than my iMac 5K, assigned my Roon watch folder on the Drobo using smb://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx/Roon/Artists (IP address format) as opposed to smb://Drobo5N2/Roon/Artists (local format). I rescanned and reimported my entire music library on the Drobo back into Roon in a little less than 24 hours versus about a day and a half on my previous hardware setup. Everything seems to be working properly and all of my music has been imported with no apparent loss of tracks or connection to the NAS. It’s been a couple of hours since the re-import finished and Roon still looks healthy. Roon has since rescanned and imported some new music that I added to my watched folder today seemingly without any issue. I would like to set my library scan interval to be 12 or 24 hours rather than the default 4 but I haven’t changed this setting out of fear of crashing Roon as described in my original post.

To be fair, I’m not sure how or why this new setup is working properly. I have since read a number of Roon community threads on Roon forgetting tracks, scanning too frequently, and having issues with NAS/Drobo configurations. As a Mac user, the NAS connection issues don’t provide me with much confidence. That was part of the reason I tried direct connecting my NAS to the computer running Roon Server/my core. I will provide links to these threads below.

My only guess is that by hardwiring my iMac 5K which is running Roon Server, and by extension my core, communication (presumably over SMB as Roon doesn’t use AFP) between Roon Server/my core and the NAS has improved. As an aside, I have another share on the Drobo for my Plex media auto mounting at log-in (over AFP) which my Plex server (also running on the iMac 5K) is pointed to for TV shows and movies. This new hardware configuration seems to be more reliable with Plex as well.

For reference, I have been reading the following threads which contain similar issues:

Roon forgetting 100k scanned files

Hi All, Short version: after “force rescan”, and waiting, roon scans then forgets a large part of my library! System: roon 1.3 (262) stable (64 bit) roon core on dedicated mac mini (8GB memory) library stored on QNAP TS-251 Netgear R7000 router wired to both the mac mini and the QNAP Symptom My music library is split over 2 directories on the QNAP. One of them is fine, the other one keeps having the “Tracks Imported” count drop back to near zero, and roon forgets all that music. [curre…

Roon on macOS not working with huge library

Hey guys, @eric just brought this to my attention, so I thought I’d come and explain where things are. Disappearing Tracks We’ve investigated this about half a dozen times over the past year. It’s actually more of a problem with OS X than with Roon (which is why Roon on other platforms does not suffer this symptom), and it is relatively rare, meaning we have many users using network storage on Mac without this symptom, and only a handful who see it. This suggests that it’s in some way correlat…

Roon saves its scanning until I want to use the stereo

Not Linux, but the ever confounding OSX (mac mini) with library on a Drobo 5N, connected via ethernet. I’m one of the people who has from the beginning (well, coming up on end of my 12th month), and continuing through build 200, had disappearing libraries. I had hoped this was fixed for me in 1.3, but it is not. Fortunately, the new backup approach has meant that the four or five times I have seen my tracks dwindle rapidly, I could restore from a backup…still, is this a good thing? (There is …

Recalculating/adding tracks at every restart + splitting albums

Thomas… let’s drop once more a flag to @support My Mac mini shuts down every night and I reboot it every day and… never seen this issue wait… it actually happened here too once, with one multi-disc album, after updating to 1.3 found that album to be the one and only, in my whole library, to be splitted by disc in sub-folders everything else, here, is organised by 1folder=1album so, usually, path is “music/File Format/Album” whilst for that one is “music/File Format/Album/Al…

[Hugh_McMillan]

Update Number 2…

I’ve just lost my entire library again using the hardware setup I outlined in my first update post above. Roon now has 0 tracks imported and is scanning yet again. I’m planning on quitting Roon Server on my iMac 5K for the time being. This is frustrating to say the least.

[WiWavelength (Andrew J Shepherd)]

Hugh, research the forums for a few existing threads on large library issues. Some good reading in those threads. macOS is not the best OS at handling large Roon libraries. That may be part of the problem. If so, Roon recommends Windows.

AJ

[wizardofoz (Mr Fix It aka The Wiz)]

Does the Drobo possibly go to sleep?

If you need your Drobo to be seen by the rest of the network you should be OK dual homing it I would think with a connection to the router via the other LAN port on it.

You could also use internet sharing from the wifi on your iMac to the Drobo via the LAN on the iMac.

@support will likely want to take a look at things so I am flagging them again now the weekend is over.

[Rugby (aka Daniel or Big Dan)]

I want to follow up on @WiWavelength comment and post a link to the thread I think he is referencing.

https://community.roonlabs.com/t/my-experiences-with-rock-and-a-500k-tracks-library/27385/10?u=rugby