I have a problem that looks like a serious bug in the database and content import function of Roon.
I found it in the migration to a Nucleus, but it is Roon functionality, seems unrelated to the OS or hardware.
Of course, we should try it on a regular Roon installation, but that is laborious.
Btw, I discussed this initially with @Danny, he suggested it is temporary behavior and will clear itself up. And at first I thought so, it was partially cleared up. But now we are several days into the life of this box and it still isn’t cleared up…
So here it is.
I got my new Nucleus. Installed a 2 TB SSD in it. Restored from a newly made database backup. My library is about 1.2 TB. I started copying the library from my Windows machine. I took quite a long time, several days, so I did it in chunks.
But I found that several albums were imported in pieces. Most of the time, track 1 was one album, and the rest was another album. Sometimes it was track 2 that was separated, and in rare occasions it was two or three albums. In most cases, the albums had the same metadata and cover, but not always.
One curious thing: the larger fragment, with all but one album, had the correct import date, but the single-track fragments all had the date of the copying.
I suspected that the copying, slow as it was, overwhelmed the database processing. And @Danny pointed out that it was probably a long time since I did a complete load, so I wasn’t used to how it behaved. He said it should clean up. And it did, partially. But I installed the albums in alphabetical order chunks, and while I have messed with things a bit, cleaning things up manually, merging albums, I did leave a few albums in the As as a test case, and they never got fixed.
But one strange thing: lots of errors in the A-B-C section of the library, the part I copied first; those partially cleaned themselves up but not fully. But there were many fewer errors in the rest of the alphabet. Not zero, I had a bunch in Vijay Iyer, but much fewer than in the beginning.
This is very troubling. Manual repair is of course cumbersome – I had many hundreds of bad albums. But also, when I do merge them, they lose meaningful metadata, tags and import date and other stuff.
By now I have it nearly cleaned up. Of course, I have impaired any scientific experiments because there were other errors in the database and content library, my own mess, so while repairing these broken albums I have also cleaned up the other stuff. So it will be difficult to do forensic analysis.
I have thought of one thing: I could take a database backup, then restore the original backup I made from the NUC. In this case, the content library is still there, instead of being slowly streamed in, so it would be interesting to see how Roon would handle that situation, if it could import stuff better in that order, content first and then database. Unconventional approach, but might be useful. And then if that causes a mess, I could restore my most recent backup. But I am a little bit worried that more things will go wrong… Plus I would lose other metadata edits I have done.
Please ponder this. It is a pretty serious problem.
I like the Nucleus otherwise. But this was painful.