Should I keep my audiobooks in Roon?

Roon Software Discussion
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Hey fellow Rooners! I using Roon for a few months now - and at the beginning I imported every audio file I had in my iTunes Library, but iTunes contained a lot of “Spoken” audio files like audio books and podcast files.

I’m not sure whether I should keep them in my Roon library:

  • Normally I only want to see the “Music” files when browsing my library and it is annoying that for this I always have to set some filter to get the audio book clutter out of the way.

  • However (very) occasionally I might want to listen to an audio book through my HiFi system, so for that situation it would be good to keep them in my Roon library.

Can I put them in a second library or in a hidden part of my library or something like this?

Thanks for any pointers!

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I am preparing for a period when I will not be able to read so I have done exactly what you suggest. I have also loaded them on my SD card in my phone so I can listen via BT

I made the Author = [Artist] so the artist view will contain the various authors . They often come set up this way

Then I created a Tag of Audio Books so I can navigate to them quickly. Once other albums have been added they will just “merge” into the mass of albums and not really be obtrusive.

The other option is to keep them on a separate Drive or Folder and to “Disable” that folder. It takes seconds to enable it should you wish to listen

This is my Storage settings, I keep the clutter down by disabling my ROCK USB drive

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Further to the excellent solution presented above, online metadata is not as good for audiobooks and the like so Roon may not be able to identify them all leading to a lot of Unidentified files (this bothers some users…). Metadata in supplied files may also vary so ensure that once imported you can see and find the files based on what you are likely to search for them by (tag on import as suggested above).

On import, ensure each audiobook is grouped as one ‘album’. If metadata is not consistent Roon may split them up leading to a lot of work to fix (and swearing).

EDIT: One thing I forgot, if you have a lot of these fies, remember that you don’t have to import them all in one go. That could lead to a lot of frustration and missing files. Pick one author at a time and import and tag that one author folder (under a top level Audiobooks folder). That will make it easier to see what is going wrong and enable you to fix further imports before importing them into Roon.

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As well as the above points,

Unless I am mistaken Roon doesn’t handle picking up from where you left off or ID3v2 chapters markers.

Roon will also mix your spoken audio files in with your main listening stats and given their length will therefore skew your listening stats on the home page.

Similar issues also also affect Podcasts and long form audio content like DJ mixes and archived radio shows.

So, while you can use Roon for audio books the current user experience is severely lacking compared to a dedicated audio book app.

Whether Roon should improve its feature set there is, like Podcasts and other non album centric audio content, another question.

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And is a long standing feature request.

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In addition to using tags you can also make bookmarks using focus or the tags to easily switch to the view you want. If you do the separate storage location you can use the focus/bookmark method to isolate be location too instead of disabling it (which may have interesting effects on your DB).

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Keeping audio books in a separate top level folder sounds like a great solution!

Thanks for this suggestion, @Mike_O_Neill.

Some people (@j_a_m_i_e, @bearFNF) mentioned that disabling/enabling a file loaction might confuse the Roon database. Anything to worry here?

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Not really

Roon keeps track of what is in the drive, the only problem is if you clear the BOTTOM section of Library Maintenance. You can clean up the top section with no issues this is the main attached library

Leave the bottom option as is and Roon keeps the track references and all library entries but inactive. An external USB Drive on ROCK is read on startup but not analyzed . It takes a few minutes max.

I keep a lot of old tracks / duplicates / big boxes etc out of the main library but can just enable that drive and its up and ready in a few minutes. I have done this repeatedly with no issues

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