And what’s so clever about it is no one will do it by accident.
@Jesper_Molgaard You can use YATE to manage and organize your music files/folders. I use it on my Mac.
Let me know if you have any questions.
You can use XLD for ripping on your Mac.
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I already use XLD and love it. For DSD rips I use Sonore’s ISO2DSD.
I have tried YATE. But the point of this thread is that I don’t wan’t to manage my library, I want Roon to do it for me, because I’m a lazy bastard.
For now I think I will stick with my current method of importing/exporting since that seems to require the least amount of effort on my part, which is the point, no effort would be optimal.
I proudly demonstrated my ROCK system to a friend who was visiting, she’s a musician and often assists me by recommending new stuff to listen to. She was really interested and asked me how it works, I went on to explain and told her I’d happily build the NUC and setup the wifi stuff at her house. She went on to ask how she’d maintain the library, hence I was reading this thread, I explained the drag and drop and she asked where stuff went, so I showed her. With a bemused expression, that’s very similar to my German shepherd puppy when she confused, she just asked “Why?”, I had no response. She then explained to me it was another of my toys designed by men, for men and devoid of basic logic, how was she going to find that song for band practice or put stuff on her iPhone to listen in the car. I did mention she could search the directory at which she suggested I put on some music and we’ll have a coffee, I’d lost her.
So I put it out here, how do you guys, she was sure it’s only guys, find tracks and copy stuff to iPhones etc?
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Truthfully? I maintain a completely separate AAC library, managed with iTunes, for use with my iDevices. It’s cumbersome, but I’ve been doing it this way since before I started using Roon, and it works.
In fantasy Roon-land, the Roon app on my iDevice will play back whatever I want from my Roon library in the Cloud, regardless of where I happen to be … but we’re not quite there yet.
Yeah, I don’t drag and drop to Roon. I us a windows machine to rip and download the stuff, and then drag and drop to the Roon machine from windows.
I have been saying that the organization of the directories isn’t really important to Roon. But that doesnt mean I have chaos.
The different sources (dBPoweramp, HDTracks, HRA, band camp, artist sites) have different default directory structures, and I leave them be because I’m not a librarian, but I keep different directories for those sources so I don’t get chaos.
So tell your friend that a Roon does what it does really well, but she can/must manage the content on disk separately.
(That said, @danny, the behavior on drag and drop should mimic the export logic.)
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That’s the only thing I use iTunes for at this point. For anything other than Redbook, I convert to Apple lossless via XLD. The FLAC file lives in one folder, the ALAC file lives in my iTunes library. I mark the ALAC files in Roon as duplicates, so I never see them there. Sure, this uses more disk space, but spinning platter storage space is cheap (and solid state storage space is getting cheaper). Having started in iTunes from the day it existed, this works for me.
I do so hate it when she’s right, it’s a great system but for non techies or people who just want to use it to control their music library it’s got a way to go. I get that not everyone will always be happy with the way software organises your music but the way drag and drop is now setup is just deliberate vandalism. Why not use artist/album/track structure, it suits 99.9% of people, I’m guessing the current structure suits no one.
I suggest that if a configurable organise option isn’t provided at least make drag and drop do artist/album/track on processing.
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Hear hear 
I purchased roon about two weeks ago. During installation roon found my iTunes library and downloaded it into roon. Since then I’ve purchase three CDs and are waiting for them to arrive. I’m expecting, when I rip them to my iTunes library (using iTunes) that the watch folder in roon will pick them up and display the albums in roon no different than the initial download.
I think (hope) that that is correct but the posts above lead me to doubt that (don’t follow the above that well). This should all be seamless. I believe roon will lose a lot for users if not the case.
Russ
PS- to clarify, I just expect to see the new CDs in album view; behind the scenes I don’t care.
I don’t use iTunes but any files I add to my watched folders is immediately available in Roon.
Another Russ
Thanks Russ. We’ll see what happens.
Just out of curiosity do you rip files to lossless ALAC?
You’ve got it - that’s my strategy for CD purchases as well.
AIFF. Storage is cheap these days.
Russ
Like Russ, I also use iTunes to import music (AIFF format) and have Roon watch the iTunes library folder. iTunes handles all the organization of the files based on your tags. Seems like that could be a solution for you.
That’s how I used to manage it until DSD came into the mix, then I relied on Roons organized folders, until they went away with 1.3.
Right now i’m testing Bliss as a tagger/organizer working directly on my Roon library, it works, sort of, but draws quite a lot of ressources scanning a large library, so having it integrated in Roon, would in my opinion still be optimal.
I am with Jesper. Clearly most users would like to have some organization built in and not having to use two systems. I am still in the trial period but I am somewhat dismayed at the lack of folder organization capabilities.
FWIW, over a decade back when I imported my carefully categorized music into iTunes and it moved everything around to where it wanted to, I considered buying a plane ticket to go wherever the person was that decided it would do that, so I could give them a nasty bitch slap.
I kid. But I was furious. Whenever i setup iTunes again, first thing I’d do before i pointed it to my music, was to turn this management off. Whew. (ITunes no longer plays any role in my life)
So, if Roon screwed with the physical directory structure of my carefully organized library, i wouldn’t care if it made me coffee and breakfast every day, i would never use it. If it had the option to do it and people opted to use it but I didnt, that would be fine. Head scratcher it was categorically removed and not made optional.
I bet it’s a “lowest common denominator” thing. The same way they don’t get platform dependent to do thing -properly- to set things up as a service specific to the way it should be done on the platforms it runs on, removal of platform dependent filesystem management simplifies things for them too.