Roon stopped playback and failed to restore library from backup (ref#06YO7F)

Support Nucleus Support
1

What’s happening?

· Other

How can we help?

· None of the above

Other options

· Other

Describe the issue

While listening to some music last night, in the middle of a song Roon just stopped for no apparent reason and presented me with a home screen containing 0 items in any of the categories. I tried adding the files as instructed (over 92000 tracks). Unfortunately, the metadata infomation was not correct. Therefore I tried a restore from the most recent backup on my desktop computer and that doesn't seem to work properly either. I have tried several restores without success.

Describe your network setup

Asus AX-6000 router. Nucleus Titan and Trinnov Altitude 16 connected to the same switch (I use the Roon Ready ethernet input on the Altitude 16).

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Hi @Jim_Ridgway ,

Thanks for reaching out. I’ve activated diagnostics for your Titan and what this does is upload a log set for review to our servers, but looking over this log file I am not seeing anything that is indicative of an issue. Can you please share a few screenshots showing the specific issue that you saw with regard to the backup / home screen?

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Hi Noris,

I am currently in the middle of “adding music” yet again (it takes an hour or so).

What I am seeing already with the metadata is:

 1. It says "Added today" for everything.  That is probably normal but that has not

been updated properly with previous restores.
2. I looked at various classical composers. Some of them are alright but for example
with Prokofiev under overview there are a number of albums that should not be there.
For example: Bach: Suites for solo cello.
3. It often does not display Album Artistt properly e.g. Fritz / Reiner. Over time I have
curated all of these (they are mostly classical albums) to be in the format
“Fritz Reiner / Chicago Symphony Orchestra”.
4. It has ungrouped all the alternate versions of an album.

I will try an older restore later today. I don’t know why this isn’t working as I have done
this before fairly recently.

One thing I forgot to mention in the previous post is that I had upgraded the ethernet cables
for both the Altitude and the Titan. The Altitude was not on at the time but the Titan was ON.
I wouldn’t think that this would make any difference. Anyway Roon worked fine until the
event that I described in the previous post.

I had this same problem relatively recently. I can’t remember how I “solved”. I may have tried
another “Add music” and somehow everything was displayed properly or perhaps I just edited or
added another item.

I am not sure what you mean about screenshots “with regard to the backup / home screen”.

Edit: The home screen I was referring to is the one where the Number of Tracks, Number of Compsers, Number of Artists, etc. is given. At the time of the event, all the numbers were 0.

After I do a successful restore, Roon prompts me to “relaunch”. At that point, I have to go
to storage and make sure the correct folders are “added”. I try to remember to do Library Maintenance and “clean up the library”. Of course, all the home screen numbers are at 0 before I start.

Perhaps I am not doing the restore correctly and need further instructions on that.

Also, my media files are on an 18 TB drive attached to port 1 of the Titan whereas the metadata files are stored in 2 locations connected to my Desktop upstairs, C: Drive and an external drive attached to the Desktop.

​​​​​​​
Jim

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Hi @Jim_Ridgway,

We’ll need just a few more details here to completely diagnose this problem. Can you share a screenshot of your Watched Folders?

An important point: if you’re relying on files hosted on the Windows machine as a network share location for Backups, metadata, or Roon files, you’ll need to ensure that the migration hasn’t changed any of the access permissions:

In your Import Settings, have you set your metadata preferences to “Prefer Files” or “Prefer Roon?” Sharing a screenshot of Settings → Library → Import Settings would be ideal.

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Hello Connor,

Attached are several screenshots of the import settings and the watched folders.

My media files are attached to port 1 on the Titan so networking shouldn’t be an issue.
I am sure I created network shares for the metadata files when I migrated from the Nucleus +. I did recreate them just now to be sure and the various backups that I had saved were there. Besides, I backup my media files attached to the Titan (Q: drive) to an external drive on my desktop (X: drive) via network sharing so network sharing shouldn’t be a problem.

What seems to be happening is a vicious circle:

  1. Files are Added but metadata is not correct.
  2. A “Restore” is made from a backup folder located on my desktop.
  3. Roon declares the “Restore” to be successful.
  4. Roon asks to do a “Relaunch”. There are no options.
  5. The Relaunch is done after the “Restore” but the metadata is still incorrect.

I looked at some of the files in detail and it is obvious that the “Relaunch” is simply reidentifying the albums while ignoring the metadata provided by the Restore. An example would be the Prokofiev file that I mentioned before. The album was reidentified as part of a very large collection of albums with numerous other composers. In reality the “offending” album was a singleton album and should have been filed solely under Bach and not Prokofiev.

I really don’t know what is going on. This should be working although I did have problems with a similar problem fairly recently. I still don’t really know how I got it working other than it was a bit strange.

I hope this helps. This is extremely frustrating.

Jim

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Hi Connor,

There is good news, not-so-good news and other news.

The good news is that I was able to solve the problem. The not-so-good news is that I am not exactly sure how I solved it although I have a pretty good idea.

I was on the right track with what I said about a “vicious circle”. I worked out that it had something to do with the sharing permissions. In spite of the fact that all the permissions looked fine, I redid them.

First, I shortened the path (although I doubt if that made a difference).

Next, I went deeper into the permissions level then is shown in the link you gave me. Although the permissions looked fine, I clicked “OK” and then “APPLY” and then completed the sharing.
At least I think that this is what I did. Perhaps I clicked “APPLY” and then “OK”. Hopefully, you can tell me.

In Roon, to be on the safe side, I went into Settings/Library/Library Maintenance and “cleaned” the library.

Then I did a restore from my most recent March 4 backup. While holding my breath, I did a “relaunch” and withing about 10 seconds I knew it was working properly.

However, a couple of other problems have cropped up since I received my Titan in late January.

The most annoying of these is that since I got the Titan, I have had problems copying file to the attached external hard drive attached from my C: drive where I do the tagging. Especially with classical music where there are long file names that can only be shortened so much, often some if not all the files, will not get copied.
The solution I have used is to create a _Temp folder as shown below and copy the files to that folder from my C: Drive. Then I cut and paste from the _Temp folder to the appropriate folder.
This works but is very cumbersome. Before I had the Titan (I had a Nucleus +) it was extremely rare that this would happen.

This is definitely a path problem. The relevant directory structure is:
Q: (\NUCLEUSTITAN\Data)
Nucleus_ST18000N_E000-2YY101_RANDOM_81E359879645_2CF2-4410-p1
_Temp

The obvious culprit is the incredibly long drive name: Nucleus_ST…

Several questions arise from this:

  1. Can the drive name be renamed to something much shorter without buggering things up? I have not taken the risk for fear of doing just that. (Note: I did try it in a different context when I was doing some backups/synchronization with my GoodSync program. It would work once for a job but now more so I had to put the path back to the original one.).

  2. If the drive can be renamed, could you suggest a name that is guaranteed to work?

  3. If the drive can be renamed, why wasn’t a more useful name given before my Titan was shipped to me?

The other problem began even before I got my Titan. When searching for recordings for a particular composition I will receive the message “Composition not found”. I can get it to work by randomly going elsewhere in the Roon listings (including other compositions) and after a few clicks, returning to the original composition.

Although I would imagine this is coincidental, it almost always seems to produce the “Composition not found” message for the composition that I am looking for.

I am speculating that this has something to do with the increasing number of tracks in my library (now over 91,000). Nevertheless, I would not have expected this to happen, especially with the considerable increase in processing power provided by the Titan.

Thank you for your help and your patience.

Jim

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Hi @Jim_Ridgway ,

If you are able to import the files after changing the names to something shorter, it does seem like the length of the name is at play here. I believe that the Nucleus gets the drive name from the drive itself, so something shorter should theoretically solve the issue, but I have asked the team to confirm this. Once they have looked this over, we will reach out once more, thanks!

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Looking forward to the reply. The main thing is that the major “restore” problem has been solved (hopefully).

Thanks.

Jim

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Yes, we will let you know when we hear back @Jim_Ridgway !

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Hi Noris,

While we are waiting for a reply from the Roon team, I thought I would mention some very strange behaviour that occurred while using Roon last night (March 12-13, 2025). This may or may not be related to the other problems that I have been having.

The problems mentioned below began about 7:00 p.m. local time last night (note that we are 7 hours behind the U.K.—we are one of the few places in North America that does not go on Daylight Savings time).

For a little project that I am working on, I needed to listen to Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 (Karajan version on a 24-96 rip of a blu-ray audio).

I had got a few minutes into it when I realized that it didn’t sound right. On checking the
onscreen display on my Trinnov Altitude 16, I saw that I was only getting the front two channels! After spending a considerable amount of time checking all the settings and connections and doing various reboots, at various times I got 2 channels, 3 channels, 5 channels and last, and least 1 channel (!) (from the left front speaker). Eventually, I figured out that it must be something in Roon. The problem did not seem to be in the settings so I finally went into the Roon OS, reinstalled the operating system and then the Roon server software and that did the trick.

However, afterwards a couple of interesting things occurred. Somewhat to my surprise, Roon wanted to re-import all the albums. While this was happening, I decided to try playing the Mahler 5 again right from the start. It got through the first three movements alright but about 40 seconds into the fourth movement (the adagietto and the one I wanted to listen to the most for my purposes) it would only play in fits and starts every few seconds so I gave up. I am guessing that there was not enough processing power to do the import and the listening simultaneously. Indeed, when I looked at the playback path (the blue icon) no processing figures appeared at all and I think that something should have been there, perhaps in the order of x80.

Eventually, after it finished the import, I went back into Roon. It all looked fine except for the
Jethro Tull I added the other day (created 2 albums which I was quickly and successfully able to
merge) and, interestingly, the aforementioned Mahler 5 for which it did not retain the metadata properly but which I was also easily able to fix.

At this point, I decided to do a backup. It would not do it at first but once I got it to reconnect
to the server, somewhat to my surprise, it started doing a scan. Luckily that does not take long and so when that was complete, I was able to successfully do the backup.

Returning to the original problem, it seems like something happened to the operating system and it got corrupted. I would like to find out why to prevent this from happening in the future.

Thanks,

Jim

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Hi @Jim_Ridgway,

Thank you for your patience. We have several updates to share concerning the issues reported in this thread:

We’ve pinpointed the dropouts you reported with the Trinnov in diagnostic logging. Based on the logs, RoonServer loses sight of multiple remotes and endpoints all at once before the RAATServer instance in the Nucleus Titan abruptly loses the handshake to the endpoint. If there’s a managed switch between these components, try bypassing it. What is the make/model of switch involved? Depending on the spanning tree implementation, packet scheduling or route optimization features in managed switches can inadvertently interfere with device announcements or audio transport with Roon’s uncompressed protocols.

We also need to ascertain what DSP you’re applying to the Trinnov Zone during playback, since logs report some bit-depth upgrading. Can you please share a screenshot of the Signal Path to the Trinnov, in the configuration with which you’ve most often encountered the dropouts?

The good news is that we see no evidence of corruption at the BIOS or RoonServer level in logs.

The storage-related failure is possibly due the EXT4 255-character filename limit. This would be unnegotiable within RoonOS, unfortunately, since it’s just a facet of the file system.

Just to be clear - are you referring to the Search feature (upper-right corner), or the Focus :mag: feature within the Recordings page?

We’ll watch for your response. Thanks!