Roon server is duplicating my albums

I recently moved from Roon to Roon server. Everything worked fine including the library and database migration.

But today I added some new albums and Roon server started to re-scan the full library then things go wrong; it starts duplicating albums on the iOS app viewer side - means my actual music files stays intact, but viewer recognizes it as two identical albums, the only difference is that one has my tags, or has been edited manually, the other one is clean from Roon’s match result.

As a result, now I have 1000+ albums duplicates that cannot be deleted, if I tried to delete the duplicates - whether the original or the duplicate, it will delete my local track files. The only thing i can do now is using “hide” function and to hide 1000+ album is not fun - so does a clean install and re-tag my 1500 albums, but I guess we don’t have any other tools for a messed up album list on the viewer side.

Anyway I still would like to thank you for the effort to make Roon come this far. I’m a UX lead from another startup company, totally understand how hard the development process could be. Hopefully this experience would does some help and make Roon a better one.

Keep walking : )
Ethen

Hi Ethen,
@mike will see your post on his next pass through the Support tab. It may assist him if you can post a screenshot of your storage tab and provide some details of your hardware and OS.

No one should have to hide 1000 duplicates by hand ! Firstly try closing down your remote, restarting RoonServer and using Settings- Clean up library. Its down the bottom of the Setup tab. A further restart after that may also help.

If you do have to hide albums you may be able to view the duplicates only using Focus/Inspector/Storage location, the Focus/Added tool or the difference with tags you have referred to. You can then select all with ctrl-a and hide them as a group.

Cheers,

Andybob

Edit: Hmmm, if you have only the iPad app as a remote then you may not be able to use ctrl-a to select all for a group edit without a bluetooth or docking station keyboard.

Thank you Andy. I just had a quick attempt before I read your advise and recovered from this issue by a clean install with a backup patch, still have some tagging/editing works to do but surely better than start from nothing. Still I’m wondering why Roon Server actively re-analyzed my entire watched folder (instead of looking for changes only) and treated any mismatched album (mostly because I had edited it locally so it looks different from Roon cloud database) as another album.

I should have said “another” album instead of “duplicate”, because they mostly don’t have that “duplicate” notification tag, just contain the same tracks. The original album has my modifications like album title, track name, tag, star ratings etc. The “another” album has only metadata from Roon. They are treated as different albums and even different tracks because in the overview panel not only my count number of albums but also tracks, lyrics, images are boosted accordingly.

Regards
Ethen

  • Setup details
    Roon Sever 1.1(built 55) on Mac mini - 2.5GHz Intel i5, 4GB ram, OSX 10.9.5
    Roon App 1.1()built 51) on iPad Air 2

Audio output to external DAC via USB

Music tracks are stored in an external drive via thunderbolt.
Default watched folders like [Itunes Music Library], [Music Folder] (user/username/music) and [Roon Folder] are disabled.

Hi Ethan,

It sounds like Roon thought your files were new albums and then preferred its own metadata to your tags; just a wild guess on my part. I expect you have used the album editor to prefer your own tags ?

If this behaviour repeats then @mike will be all over it. Otherwise it might be one of those unreproducible gremlins that you’ve probably seen on your own project !

Cheers,

Andybob

Hey @Ethen_Lu,

Sorry for the trouble here. I’m going to send you a PM so we can grab some logs – in the mean time, we’ve seen a restart fix this in a couple of cases, so feel free to give that a shot.

We’ve seen a few different causes for this class of issue, and when we’re able to identify reproduction steps, we’ve been able to address it. Hopefully your logs help here as well.

Talk to you soon!

Hi @Ethen_Lu , just a heads up if you do find that you need to edit a group of albums in iOS. The new build 57 now on the App Store has a Select All menu item at top left when any album or track is selected.