I recently moved my USB HDD from my Airport Extreme to a WD My Cloud NAS, due to bandwidth issues, and now Roon is not seeing all the albums stored in this HDD anymore.
My setup is:
Roon Core
Boon 1.2 (Build 157) on a Mac Mini Late 2009, Core 2 Duo (2.26 GHz), 4 Go of RAM, OS 10.11.6 Network
Mac Mini connected to an Airport Extreme (AE) through an Ethernet cable. The WD My Cloud NAS connected to the Airport Extreme through an Ethernet cable. The HDD containing all the music is connected to the WD My Cloud NAS via an USB 2 cable Roon connection to the HDD
The entire HDD is attached to Roon as Watched Folders
When the HDD was connected to the AE (via USB) all the songs were seen by Roon. As written above, I had to move this HDD from the USB port of the AE to the USB port of the NAS as Roon did not have enough bandwidth to read the audio files with higher bit depth and bitrate than 16/44 without stopping.
So, after moving the HDD to NAS USB port, I specified its location as a Watched Folder to Roon. Now it can read HiRez audio normally, but Roon does not see all the songs anymore. For instance, I have 7 albums of Brandi Carlile stored in one folder and Roon only sees two of them. I tried Force Rescan but Roon still does not see the remaining albums of Brandi Carlile.
If it pickups up the majority of your file then the basic infrastructure should be ok.
Try checking for “odd” / “special” characters in those file names also double the imbedded tags are correct.
You mentioned you moved the HDD from the AE to the WD My Cloud NAS due to bandwidth issue and then speak of a USB2 cable. Ouch that’s very slow … is it the drive that is USB 2 or the USB port on the NAS? If possible use USB3.
Also have you consider attaching the drive directly to the Mac Mini? (I appreciate that may not be desirable if the Mac MIni is located in your Music Roon).
I just checked the file names. Below is an example for Brandi Carlile’s albums:
Album/Song seen by Roon
smb://192.xxx.xxx.xxx/HDD_Musique/Music/Brandi Carlile/Give Up The Gost/01 Looking Out.m4a
Album/Song not seen by Roon
smb://192.xxx.xxx.xxx/HDD_Musique/Music/Brandi Carlile/XOBC - EP/01 All You Need Is Love.m4a
could the “-” be an odd character? If so, why did not this cause a problem when the HDD was connected to the USB port of the AE?
How do I check the imbedded tags?
Regarding the USB2 port, in fact the one from the AE was shared with another HDD and the one from the NAS (USB3) was not used. So the easiest thing I had to do was to move the HDD from the AE to the NAS, and it worked. I intend though to move all the songs to NAS in the near future (after all the songs are seen by Roon).
Also, I don’t want to connect the HDD to the Mac Mini, as this will introduce noise in my main room.
I would be tempted to move (copy) the songs to the NAS first, and then see if that solves the problem. I have sometimes found that USB drives attached to a NAS don’t always behave quite how one would expect.
Thanks for the advice, but i would rather not move part by part, the directories are also shared with iTunes.
Also, I don’t know all the missing albums, the only ones I know are from Brandi Carlile.
I did a repair of the HDD this afternoon (by connecting it directly to a laptop, and it seems that number of files indicated in the HDD table (sorry if this is not the right vocabulary, I did not write the sentence provided by the Mac OS Disk Utility) did not match the actual number of folders. I did a repair, than force a Rescan and the Brandy Carlile’s albums are still missing…
I am starting to think that a HDD connected to the USB port of my NAS is not a good thing after all. I will copy the files from the HDD to the NAS and see what happens.
It is HFS+, I think. The NAS is based on a Linux OS, and I think the problem is coming from the fact that their might be an incompatibility between the HFS+ file system and the OS of the NAS.
I copied all the content of the HDD to the NAS, and set the new directory as a Watched Folder in Roon. Now I can see all of Brandi Carlile’s albums. So, to me, the problem is solved.
If this can help anyone, if you want a fast way to copy a large amount of files from a HHD connected to the USB port of a NAS to the NAS, it is a good solution to use the cp command through a ssh session. In my case, it divided by about 4 the duration of the copy.
That was also my guess, as It should not make a difference for a NAS if the drive is internal or external.
It should be possible to format the usb volume to ext4 filesystem if you would still like to have all Roon music files on that drive. But the process will erase the disk…
Also you will not be able to read ext3/ext4 filesystems on OS X by default. I bought Paragon ExtFS to enable Linux filesystem reading and writing capabilities.