I could have written the same. Kind of regretting last year’s Nucleus purchase because playing through Roon is really so frustrating the last few months. I e reverted to using the native streaming apps or the WiiM app.
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I’ve just checked using the above method and I have a vast number of albums unidentified, and they all seem to be from the last year or so. I don’t know why this might be as most are standard albums which have all the correct details in place and reviews and credits attached, where available. They also show up using various search methods.
Has Roon just given up “identifying” the albums or is the unidentified albums report simply mistaken? For what it’s worth I also suffer from slow searches etc, and have to reboot Roon server every few days as it crawls to almost a standstill.
Hard to say without knowing any details about which albums these are for you.
Mostly just standard jazz and classical albums, stored on a NAS but of a kind you can find on Qobuz.
I just checked and I have 91 unidentified, with nearly all of them being the same that always were (bootlegs, tiny releases, …) but a few are new and are Qobuz albums which have become unavailable on Qobuz after I added them to the library. They don’t show a cover either.
One is actually available on Qobuz in some way and does play, but still has no cover and there is a different version as well. Probably some kind of Qobuz corruption I guess
Perhaps I should explain: I do have many albums that are off-air recordings, bootlegs, vinyl rips, and the like. These probabaly wouldn’t be identified by Roon using an external database, but are adequately identified through metadata, including cover art, which I make sure is in place before Roon imports them.
In that sense, the albums are identified and added to my Roon database, and are included in more granular search results. I don’t see why their nominal status as “unidentified” would make any difference to the performance of Roon.
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Oh, and one of my “unidentified” albums is Peter Gabriel’s recent “i/o”!!
Sure, but this does not make them “identified” in Roon. “Identified” is a specific term in this context meaning that Roon has metadata from an online source. Most of my “unidentified” are also manually tagged (with artist, title, credits) but if you go to Edit > Identify Album (or click the Unidentified text link) you get nothing. (edit: Or you get something as a manual choice when you do this, but Roon wasn’t able to pick the right one for some reason, like the I/O case shown below by @Arindal). This is what “unidentified” means in this context.
Because Roon will try to find data on them. Occasionally, such albums may become identified, e.g., if you or I added them to Allmusic or MusicBrainz. People would also not be happy if such additions weren’t found after adding them. This one might be (partially) fixable by giving users a manual switch for “don’t try to identify” for cases we are sure they won’t be. (My personal drunken taped DJ mixes that I ripped will never be on MusicBrainz 
) but there may also be other causes in Roon’s code that are less easily fixed.
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It can be anything stopping roon from identifying an album properly. I found most cases being due to inconsistencies of track durations for the particular version of the album. If roon knows the track durations via MusicBrainz for the digital download version, it might fail to identify a ripped CD or DVD until some user is uploading the exact metadata of the CD/DVD version to MusicBrainz. That might be an explanation why albums being recently released have a higher failure rate.
It takes some time going through every album initiating the ´… > Edit > Album Options > Identify album´ and search for it. In most of cases it is giving you a reasonable suggestion, showing the inconsistency in track durations and you just have to confirm. In some cases (especially classical and ripped DVDs) you might have to be a bit savvy when it comes to artist and album title as they might not be tagged according to standards.
Typical example. The primary version known to roon is the 3-disc-set and the track listing is following the blu-ray despite from being listed as CD (which is indeed identified if you tag it using MusicBrainz, see example in the screenshot). Several other versions of dark and bright side mix exist, mainly vinyl rips lacking track duration - voila, roon gets confused and refuses to identify the CD.
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Thanks, that’s very helpful as to what “identified” means in Roon and how it goes about it.
What I’m still unclear about is why an album’s unidentified status in this sense makes any difference to performance. If I search my library for something, aren’t I searching my local database, not some external database?
Since the number of my unidentified albums exceeds 19,000 I won’t be making any manual changes to alter their status to identified!
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It would make a difference as all the metadata plus audio analysis results are on your core in your database solely. They are not available to roon´s cloud search algorithm or servers. So every time you perform a search or compile a list or set focus filter or whatever your core has to manually crawl and calculate this data. With 200 or 500 albums it is not a big deal if the machine is powerful. But I can tell you that 2,000 unidentified, mostly well-tagged albums are slowing things down. In my case their metadata structure (several multi-disc boxsets, some bear 2,000 tracks and 300 discs per album, a lot of classical stuff with zillions of references) and file format/size (DSD128 and alike) might have contributed to the problem.
I have gotten rid of all this by sorting out problematic items and trying to optimize identification rate and roon is snappy and a pleasure to use again (okay, a more powerful CPU might have helped, admittingly).
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Oh-Oh. Sounds like some serious work ahead.
Are these 19,000 unidentified albums all based on local files or streaming? Is there any way to deactivate a big chunk of them temporarily by disabling one or two folders?
When I encountered similar problems I disabled my folders one by one noticing that those with classical music in general and boxsets in particular as well as unidentified DSD albums were causing the most severe slowdowns. And just by the number of albums you problems seem to be tenfold bigger
Roon runs at seemingly random times (which I am sure aren’t random at all) a background process on your Roon server, matching library content with its metadata sources. This process is heavily impacting the server’s performance while it runs. And from what I understand, all unidentified content is checked again and again… As has been mentioned, the benefit of this is that eventually unidentified releases may become available on Roon’s metadata sources TiVo or MusicBrainz, so previously unidentified content becomes marked as identified.
There is content which in all probability will never become available on the metadata platforms, and it should be be possible to mark that content as such in Roon and avoid it being included in Roon’s metadata update process, to reduce the recurring load on the server and cut the impact of this background process to a tolerable level.
On the other hand, most users will have tagged their unidentifiable content with their own file tags, which by all means should be used by Roon to index this content in the users’ databases and make it searchable.
Users with large collections of commercially not available content should really not be aggravated by being told that ‘Roon wasn’t designed as a file management system’. It isn’t, but why indexing the non-identifiable content’s file metadata to make it available in the database is seemingly considered as a edge use case is not immediately obvious to me.
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That’s not good news, and frankly, although I’m no expert, not how I would expect a database search to proceed. And as I’ve said, manually tweaking at this stage is not an option.
I suppose I’m the victim of having a large library with many non-standard “albums” and therefore not the kind of user Roon is too bothered about. I have a Nucleus Plus, and maybe my problems will be solved by the more powerful Titan when it arrives. Then again, perhaps I shouldn’t expect too much from a product named after a submersible that imploded.
Yes, you’re right, when the background process is running (rotating circle in the top right corner) this has a huge impact on performance. I assume there’s no way of turning it off or reducing its impact.
After I add an album I check if it’s been identified and if not I look for a match manually.
I just focused for unidentified -bootleg and have 510 unidentified albums.
I started going though them and of the first 7 I checked I was able to find a perfect identified match for 4 of them.
This seems to indicate that Roon isn’t (always) identifying albums when metadata becomes available later.
So perhaps this is a factor in the issues we’re having?
That is absolutely the case, but the reasons can vary. From improperly tagged artist and album title to differences in track number or duration, inconsistencies in disc numbers…
You have to decide whether you want to invest a fair amount of time into manually trying to identify albums. In my case it was pretty successful as I managed to identify more than 90% of formerly unidentified albums of my core collection (the boxsets and alike I had sent to be exiled).
Right. But what I’m trying to say is that as I now try to match albums that did not appear at all before I’m seeing those albums appear and all tracks match - as opposed to where I need to move some tracks into place etc.
(Although in some cases there is more than one version showing on the identify screen and I have to select the one that matches)
I’m not disagreeing with you here I would just expect that if a match now exists where Roon doesn’t require any intervention from the user should it not identify automatically?
Anyway, the point was just that having many unidentified albums does appear to be a common variable in addition to the 100+ track albums and artists with 100+ albums
With 19,000 unidentified albums I think you are on “a hiding to nowt” as Northerners would say , that is an enormous library on it’s own let alone the ID’ed ones , but having that many un ID’ed albums is not going to help Roon Search. Many users commenting on OK search responses are at worst in the 2000-3000 album range often the low end of that and mostly ID’ed at that.
Any search engine will depend on a degree of structure to base it’s search , your collection is hardly structured no matter how well the internal metadata is groomed. Roon is NOT Google.
That’s not to mention the processor power required to search such a large library.
With that many un ID’ed albums I suspect Roon is not the product for you , or if it is it is likely to dissatisfy on a metadata front. A lot of the “Magic” depends on Roon ID , thinks like hyperlinking , lyrics etc.
If you manually attempt to ID an album you will see a listing of track timings that Roon things match your album
I think any more than 2 match failures on tracks results in an album fail, that doesn’t stop you from accepting the errors when Roon will complete the ID.
Vinyl rips will have LP track timings which may well not match the timings of a CD derived from source. The track timings will be determined by the software used to rip the vinyl they may be seconds out which is enough to cause ID failure.
Bootlegs are bootlegs , Roon uses 2 sources AllMusic and MusicBrainz , if an album cannot be found in these auto ID will fail
My Peter Gabriel i/o ID’ed fine. Try manually IDing it
I believe Roon periodically goes through non ID albums and tries to ID hence the slowness discussed
This is a good idea , especially if you isolate the un ID’ed ones as they are likely to give most trouble.
I suspect this will continue to frustrate. I have <200 non ID albums as most of my albums are “conventional”. The unID ones I can normally explain, things like an odd pseudo CD extracted from a box set.
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