Here is a tricky question that I couldn’t find the answer by search.
I keep 4000+ albums in a single folder “Music” in a USB HDD. This seems to be inconvenient as everytime I add new contents the backup process is slow. Furthermore, I suspect this could be potentially a cause of delay in Roon’s play action.
So I would like to split the “Music” folder into 3-4, e.g. “Music1”, “Music2”, etc. so each folder contains only 1000 albums instead of 4000. How do I make this change without having Roon to “newly add” the music. It is important to keep the original added dates for each album, but the moment the folder structure changes, Roon seems to lose track of the memory of albums found in a different folder.
I hope the question was clear. Hope to find a simple solution.
Thanks. But it’s hard to believe. Can you be sure that this will not change the “dates added” for all the files in a newly added folders? I tried a similar experiment (but without deleting the existing folders), and they were read in as newly added.
The whole purpose of this sequence is to prevent Roon from seeing them as new files and hence losing the metadata.
Personally I have moved (importantly: not copied) album folders to different folders on a single disk and Roon never lost any metadata or created need database entries for them. Instead, it kept everything as at was, just with a new file path.
Thank you again. I wasn’t sure if the “date added” information is part of metadata.
So you created a new “Music2” folder on the same disk, moved part of the contents in “Music” folder, and newly added “Music2” as storage (without deleting “Music”)? Is this still ok?
I use ROCK with internal storage, so it’s not possible to add separate folders as storage in this case, it’s all considered the one „internal storage“. But I have several top level folders on the drive and occasionally moved albums from one to the other, there’s no issue with this.
The linked page specifically deals with this. The important thing is to not let Roon see two copies of the same files at the same time. As it’s the official instruction, I guess there would be continuous complaints if it didn’t preserve metadata.
It’s easy to try and confirm what it does with one example album.
In any case, create a Roon database backup before doing anything.