How about, when viewing an individual album screen, there is some kind of visual stereo or mono indicator? This way, the user wouldn’t have to enter this data manually under the album version, and could see it at a glance - nice.
Great idea.
I suppose there will be something like this once multichannel support is added.
+1
Hello @extracampine, when viewing an individual album screen under the bottom left corner of the album cover you should see something like this:
FLAC 192kHz 24bit 2ch
where 2ch means stereo, 1ch means mono.
Hi Vova,
Are you sure? I think mono recordings will still say 2ch, because they do still use 2 channels - it’s just that each channel is the same!
I checked with a couple of mono albums I have (e.g. Beatles mono remastered), and they all say 2ch.
Most likely ripped them in stereo but since they are mono tracks it doesn’t matter and will show up as 2ch. Therefore I’m not sure a mono/stereo indicator light would even be right half the time.
Interesting thoughts guys.
Ensure you have the “Show format information for albums” option enabled in the General tab of Roon settings.
This seems like it would be a pretty easy thing for their analysis engine to detect when it is calculating the waveforms, dynamic ranged, etc. of the track.
I do have it enabled. It shows the format (CD, 24/192, etc) on the album thumbnails, and shows the same information under the album cover when you go to the album page. But it does not give the number of channels. Does it show on yours?
It does, but only on the album’s page itself. In thumbnail overviews, it only shows the CD/etc you are reporting.
Would you mind posting a screenshot?
So it looks like Roon is hiding the “2ch” when an album is 2ch. For anything not 2ch, it displays it. So they probably consider “stereo” the default and from a UI perspective, hide it now… But on multi-channel albums, it still shows up for me. I don’t have any true mono recordings to know if it still shows “1ch” or not.
I have a few real mono flacs (ie they have a single channel). See below. For this example, the browser shows “CD, MONO”.
Unfortunately it’s not always trivial to detect a mono recording automatically. Most times the tracks are not identical (there’s a number of reasons that might be). In fact I’m not sure if any of my “mono” albums had identical left/right tracks.
For now I’ve used foobar2000 to convert the stereo rips to mono (I’ve of course kept the original files). And yes I know that the mono conversion potentially generates a 17-bit result and I’m throwing away a bit. I’ll be coming back to this some time in the future, and I’ll probably have to write some code to do it properly.
It doesn’t seem to show “1ch” for my mono recordings. If it’s too difficult for the software to work it out, it would be great to have the option to set this manually.
In the Album/Focus/Format selector, are you not seeing “MONO” as one of the options? I’m seeing it, because I do have mono podcast recordings…
Great point Geoff - 70 mono albums show up when I do that. Many of my mono albums don’t however. Maybe it’s an issue with Roon’s algorithm?
What happens if you re-analyze one of the mono tracks that are not showing up as mono in Roon?
I’m never sure if re-analyse does anything, as after you click it there’s no indication that anything’s happened! I tried it with one of my mono albums (Pink Floyd - Piper at the Gates of Dawn, PFRLP26 Mono vinyl rip) and it still doesn’t say mono (other than where I entered it myself in the version info);
