BTW, concerning Roon Album tags and my problems… I don’t think those tags are causing my slowness. Why not? Because I re-scanned everything with Song Kong’s “Roon profile” (which I didn’t know existed before) in an attempt to resolve the problem months ago. Yes, the problem was there before the Roon Album tags for boxsets. I’ve deleted those tags from Roon and still have the slowness problem.
I have removed all Roonalbumtag tags that were inserted by Song Kong’s Roon profile, using Song Kong’s Meta Grater, as suggested here. I then restarted the Roon server, just to give everything a fresh start. Sorry to say, that did nothing to speed things up.
How does this:
Relate to this:
I can shut off or truncate the background audio analysis, but I don’t know if there’s anything that can be done about the adding music to library. Truncating the background audio analysis doesn’t seem to speed up this process. It certainly would be nice to be able to turn off “adding music to library” temporarily so you can sit back and listen to music without long delays between tracks.
One more observation. A repeating one. I restarted the server to see if I could get things moving. As in the past (and I’ve done this many times over the past months - yes months), I get this every single time:
Is importation of your VA directory even feasible until you have addressed some underlying way in which it is structured?
According to your screen shots (in both threads) roon has added just 14 tracks (4358 - 4344) in the last 20 hours (1d - 4h). At that rate it will take 16+ years to add 200k tracks. Now, the importation process is probably not entirely linear and the calculation of elapsed time is also probably much more complicated but it is clear that it is going to take a very considerable and unreasonable amount of time.
The number of VA albums you are having to manually merge sounds very odd to me. Are you sure that all tracks in VA albums and box sets have the same album titles? Maybe you have a switch set in Songkong which is adding the disk numbers to album titles or there is some other reason why the album titles are not identical? Occasionally I have to manually merge VA albums and box sets but it is quite rare or I just want to add qualifying identifiers to the CD1, CD2, CD3 . . . etc. directories and prefer to manually merge.
It’s very slow, yes. But I restarted the Roon server and that reset the numbers. I’m assuming that which had been added will not show again after a restart.
Here’s how I put songs on the server. I run Song Kong and Foobar 2000 (the later only for Replay Gain information). I then run MP3Tag to be sure the album names are correct, the disk numbers are correct, the album art is correct, and the artist names are correct. I then upload using MP3Tag to the server, and tracks are placed under the artist’s name (except for “various artists,” which have their own directory), then album name, then if there is more than one disk the disk number and last, the track name. That’s it.
Are you able to make an mp3tag screenshot of one of the albums you have had to manually merge? I use mp3tag as well but don’t have your issues. Maybe there will be a clue there. One difference is that I do not add replay gain with Foobar.
I’ll take you through the process. Here’s a screenshot of the “recent activity” in Roon:
I guessed that the items with check marks were actually part of the same multi-disk album. I asked Roon to merge them. Here’s the screen I got:
As you can see, I was right about these all being part of one album. I merged the disk entries so that there were just three disks - corresponding to their sub-directories -
and then saved the project. Here’s the result:
Now to show the MP3Tag screenshot (for which you first asked):
And in MP3Tag you can see that you still have Album Artists that are not Various Artists, which causes issues (screen cut below).
I do not do any of this kind of editing in Roon, I use MP3Tag. Highlight all the track in the sub-dir where all the tracks that you want Roon to see as an album, and make sure that…
- All of the tracks have the same Album Name and that Album Artist is only “Various Artists”
- All the tracks are named the same disk number
- All the track numbers on the disk is unique 1 thru x\
Various posts have been done over the years to how the metadata for compilations should work… here’s one I did awhile back…
Interesting observation. One of the first things I did - months ago - was to load all of the various artist tracks in Mp3Tag and make Album Artist “Various Artists.” Since then, when things did not improve, I used Song Kong’s Roon Profile on all these same tracks and, of course, I have allowed Roon to “do its thing.”
I’ll re-do that with Mp3Tag now (but not running Song Kong on everything again).
I have to agree with @rugby. You really need to tidy up that directory before you make any attempt to import.
It is very important that all album artists are “Various Artists” and also that all album titles are identical. Once you have done that you can renumber the tracks and disk numbers also in mp3tag using the auto-numbering wizard. Don’t use roon for any of these operations. Roon will then auto group your imported albums without any need to retro-merge within roon. Almost certainly what is causing your performance problem is the chaotic track and disk numbering you appear to have in such a large 70,000 track directory. You cannot expect roon to have any clue that disks 16, 17 and 18 are part of a 3CD set. If this is being replicated all over the directory any wounder you are having problems.
There are a lot of switches in the mp3tag auto-numbering wizard so you can probably re-number your entire VA directory in one go. I have personally never done that, just renumbering one box set at a time. So you will have to experiment. One thing I do know is that you have to be very careful in “View” that your tracks are ordered by “Path” and then “Track Number”. Do not use the auto-numbering wizard unless you have done that or you will end up in a far worse mess than you are now.
A couple observations. (1) None of this was a problem with the speed of adding tracks before the major “upgrade” of Roon. I’m not new to Roon - been with it ever since Logitech abandoned Squeezebox - and before. (2) If we are supposed to dump all of a multi-disk box set into a single directory, shouldn’t we be warned about this someplace? (3) Shouldn’t there be a way to tell where Roon is in the process of “adding music” - where it is stumbling? I’m ready just to delete any troublesome albums or tracks if I could determine what is causing the slowness.
I’ve made it all the way up to “S” in my various artists directory, and all of my named artists have been added and analyzed (214,000 tracks).
I think I’ll try doing all of this with MP3Tag:
- Name all album artists “Various Artists.” I am in the process of doing this now. After this is complete…
- First order everything in accordance with track number, then order everything by path. Then use auto-numbering for everything.
- See if there’s a way to name every album in accordance with the first sub-directory name. (When each album was added to the drive the tracks were placed in directories with the correct album names.)
- Should I get rid of the sub-directories for each multiple disk album? I can do that with MP3Tag - and then delete the empty folders.
I wouldn’t do that if you mean the sub-directories CD1, CD2, CD3 etc.
1 Like
#1 accomplished. Now working on #2. Don’t see an easy and quick way to do #3. Will skip #4.
I am sure there is a more elegant way of doing this using regular expressions but I have no idea and I couldn’t find any tips on the mp3tag website.
I usually take a more plodding donkey approach. If your directory structure is just a simple:
Various Artists
Album name 1
CD1
CD2
CD3
etc.
Album name 2
CD1
CD2
CD3
etc.
Album name n . . .
Then the following two step procedure, or similar, may work for you. Select all 70k tracks. Then “Convert” → “Tag-Tag” and make the following little macro
This will convert all your album titles to what ever the directory name is. Of course the CD1, CD2, CD3 directories now have CD1, CD2, CD3 album names which you do not want. But if you sort the result by album then you will be able to highlight all the album titles that are CD1, CD2, CD3 etc. and replace them with the “Parent directory” like this:
Then all 70k tracks are done in a few clicks. You can see that I usually add the release year to my directory names. It is a simple job to trim that off using the “cutLeft” function if necessary. But if you do not follow that convention then that additional step will not be necessary.
Although I don’t use Mp3tag, I’m sure you can achieve #3 and #4 in a single operation. Most taggers provide a pattern folder folder and file naming, and also provide a move function (while preserving existing tags.)
Someone on the Mp3tag community forum may be able to provide you with the relevant format string.
It would be an extremely bad idea to do #4 so the OP has already decided not to. Better not to to confuse matters.
Good luck with #3. I have spent a great deal of time on mp3tag forums. There are regular expression experts there but my experience is they are using other players which tend to share certain naming conventions and assumptions that roon does not. This is a good example. It is quite easy to find solutions that add disk numbers to album names as that is a common request on the forums but doing the opposite as roon requires recursively, I never found. Maybe there are experts here? I would be interested to hear from them.
Ron , might be useful if you run Status Report and then use Create Support Files so I can look at the report.
Problem is that somewhere along the line album names were changed on many files. They went up with correct names, and got placed in subdirectories with those names, but somehow the names of the albums for of many tracks got changed.