Song titles with diacritical marks are importing into Roon but NOT showing up in playlists

Song titles with diacritical marks are importing into Roon but NOT showing up in playlists in Roon:

With Roon watching my iTunes library and showing my iTunes playlists, whenever a song title has a diacritical mark over a vowel (accent, umlaut, etc.), the song appears in the album in album view in Roon and plays fine; however, the song does not appear in the iTunes playlist when viewed in Roon. Since I have a rather international music collection, this means that in most of my playlists when viewed and played in Roon (again, these are iTunes playlists that Roon is watching), many tracks that exist in the original iTunes playlist are missing.

The only way I’ve been able to fix this so far is to use the iTunes interface to add an extra standard character, an “x” say, at the end of the song title, save it, and then delete the character again. Then, a few seconds later, Roon suddenly wakes up the song’s existence, even with the diacritical marks, and it shows up in the playlist as viewed in Roon. So it doesn’t seem that the diacritical marks are a permanent problem, but somehow they are blocking the song’s initial entry into the playlist in Roon until manually refreshed. (If the album title also includes a diacritical mark, I have to do the same thing with the album title field as well, for it to show up.)

But this is really labor intensive and time-consuming; I would love a better fix. Any suggestions?

Hi @tc4972,

Thanks for reaching out! I’ve passed this along to the technical team for investigation. I’ll be sure to let you know when I receive their feedback here. We appreciate the report!

Hi @tc4972,

I spoke with the team about this and wanted to follow up with some questions they had about what you’re experiencing.

On what machine is your iTunes library located? Is it added to Roon as a network watched folder or is it local to the Core?

Thanks @dylan, I would love to get some help with this; after many hours of tweaking song titles as described above I have succeeded in getting many songs to show up in Roon, but I still have hundreds of songs missing from playlists.

To answer your question, I recently moved to a Nucleus+, to which I added an internal SSD. The iTunes library is a watched folder on the internal SSD inside the Nucleus+. I copied the iTunes library there from an external HDD where it used to reside, which had been plugged directly into a Mac Mini. At no time was the iTunes library ever watched by Roon over a network connection; it was always directly attached to, or now inside, the core computer.

Please let me know if I can provide additional details. Thank you for your help.

Hi @tc4972,

Thanks for the details here! I’ve passed this info along to the team for their investigation, I’ll be sure to let you know ASAP when I receive further feedback.

Hi @tc4972,

Apologies for the delayed response here. The team has been trying to recreate the behavior that you’ve been experiencing but, unfortunately, they have not been successful. They’ve asked to gather some additional information that may be relevant to why you’re seeing this behavior.

  • How were these files created? Were they ripped? Downloaded? What OS were they originally on?
  • How did you transfer them to ROCK’s internal storage?
  • You mentioned that editing the track name can get it to become visible. Can you elaborate on the exact steps you’re taking here?

Thanks @dylan. My iTunes library is a combination of files added over the years under various iterations of MacOS using the following methods: ripped directly in iTunes; ripped with dBpoweramp and then added to iTunes library; downloaded files added to iTunes library. Many of the files have also gone through format conversion at various points over the years, using either iTunes or dBpoweramp, from AIFF to ALAC and in some cases back again, from FLAC to ALAC, and that sort of thing. When I recently migrated my iTunes library from an external disk attached to a Mac Mini to the Nucleus+ internal SSD, I just copied the entire library over the network from the disk to the Nucleus+ internal SSD, if I remember correctly.

As for the editing technique for getting the tracks to show up in Roon, it’s not more complicated than what I described in my first post above. With the iTunes app open on my Mac, accessing the iTunes library on the Nucleus SSD, I use the Edit menu command Song Info to access the metadata for the track, then add a dummy character to the end of the metadata entry that has the diacritic, then delete it. For example, if the song title not showing up in Roon in the playlist is “Héi” I edit it to say “HéiX” then click “OK,” then open it again and change it back to “Héi” and click “OK” again. A few moments later it now shows up in Roon in the iTunes playlist when it didn’t before. If the entire album title has something like that, I do it for the album title and it affects all the tracks similarly. But it’s not fool proof, and I haven’t had the time to do this for all my hundreds and hundreds of songs in different playlists. So still, the number of tracks showing up in my iTunes playlists in Roon is in almost all cases still some number less than the number of tracks that are in those playlists in iTunes. In some playlists that I haven’t tried to fix yet it’s dozens or a hundred tracks; in the playlists I have tried to fix, it’s now often only a few tracks that are still missing, but it would now be incredibly painstaking to try to go through every playlist album by album to try to identify which few tracks are still missing because of a diacritical mark I didn’t notice.

I hope that helps, thanks for your efforts. The only thing I can think of to do at this point would be to copy all my music files out of iTunes, save them on my Mac, clean the entire iTunes library out of everything, and try to re-add everything back into iTunes, but obviously I’m hoping to avoid such a big and scary job.

Thanks for the thorough details here, @tc4972.

I’ve passed this along to the team for their investigation, I’ll be sure to reach out ASAP when I receive any further feedback.

Hi @tc4972,

I spoke with the team about this and wanted to follow up with some next steps. We were hoping you could send us:

  1. The iTunes XML file
  2. A sample file that is not appearing in the Roon playlist (pre-editing)
  3. Send us the following:
    1. Connect Core as a network folder to your MacOS machine (Connect as guest)
    2. Open Terminal
    3. Run cd /Volumes/Data/Storage/Internal\ Storage
    4. Run ( ls -la ; file -I * ) >~/Desktop/lstest.txt
    5. Send us the lstest.txt file

If possible zip all of these into a zipped folder and send the folder to us via a shared Dropbox link.

Thanks!

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Hello @tc4972,

I wanted to reach out and let you know that we released Roon 1.7 Build 571, which includes some improvements that we believe should help here. Please give the update a try and let us know if it helps!

You can read the full release notes here:

Thanks,
Roon Support