Storage reorganisation and consequences

Roon Software Discussion
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Hi everyone!

I have my music stored on a Synology NAS, and my Core on a Small Green Computers Sonic Transporter. This system works really well. To date, I have simply pointed Roon at one Music folder on my NAS. The folder does have lots of subfolders: those that I used to organise my music preRoon (so pre-2016), and then a yearly folder for new material since - with all other music organising done inside Roon.

Roon enables you look at music you have added in previous years - but this ability only goes back 4 years. It is useless to someone who has been with Roon since 2016 and wants, for example, to review all albums added in 2017. See [here](Focus "added in the last" to go back all years, not just 4. Since Roon @support has not responded to requests to address this, I have done this myself in my own system.

So - bare with me, this complaint is not the point of this story, I will get there shortly lol - instead of pointing my Roon Core at one Music folder on my NAS, I changed things up and pointed Roon to a collection of different folders on my NAS, including individual ones from 2016 through to 2022. Now, of course, I can use Focus to look only at each folder storage location, including my yearly adds. Excellent!!!

HOWEVER… in this process, everything becomes a new add to Roon. So now everything was added last week. However, there are some weird anomalies. For example, a whole lot of albums retain their “heart” status, and typically, these ones also retain the stats on how often they have been played. At the same time, for apparently no reason, a whole lot of albums have lost their heart status and lost all stats.

I wonder if I’m also detecting a pattern here with albums that Roon is able to easily re-identify (something I had not thought about and had not realised it would need to do!!) and those albums that Roon needs help with manual identification before getting it right (this is really tedious; if I’d realised I’d have to do this again, to the roughly one third of albums that Roon does not get by itself (I have a large collection) I would not have gone down this rabbit hole…

But I am still left wondering: why is Roon only losing data (hearts and play totals) for some of these albums, when all of them have been subject to the same remove and re-add procedure for their storage location.

Any ideas?

And - seriously Roon - only being able to search by date added back 4 years is so lame.

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Did you try this:

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Hi, thanks. I didn’t really do this, no: mainly because I did not actually move any files. Actually that is not quite true. I did change one part of the file/folder structure, but most of the files and folders stayed in exactly the same place. What I changed was the storage location as listed in Roon. One storage location (“Music” on NAS) became about 12 (including; 2016, 2017, 2018 etc). Because these changes are being made inside Roon, the whole “turn it off” aspect doesn’t apply.

One question that does arise here is about backups, and perhaps @support has a view on this. I have not touched the backups in this process, on the assumption that part of what is backed up is my configuration of the storage locations. I don’t want a re-install from backup to return to the old storage locations. However, if the backup data were somehow able to be re-applied to the music info now (at least for those which have lost it) that might be useful!

Thanks!

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Roon, and its backups, don’t change your storage locations, they are pointed to them and Roon ingests the music files and adds its metadata. This metadata, as well as the file locations, play history, playlists, and account information are what is recorded in the database and backups. You should be able to point Roon to your new storage configuration with the 12 directories and the music should be found without a loss of the information above.

As @glc650 noted, what may be a better way to try this is to perform a backup of Roon using the old directory structure of on your NAS. Then follow the steps he posted (I was about to write the same thing but the Roon team’s steps are well written and clear):

  • Be sure you have a current backup of your database before proceeding

  • In Roon’s Settings > Storage, remove all old storage folders that contain the files that are being relocated.

  • For performance reasons, if you are adding a large amount of music (1000’s of tracks), quit Roon (or stop RoonServer on Nucleus). The best experience will come from letting Roon look at the folders when the files have settled.

  • Move/Copy the files to the new location

  • If you stopped Roon in Step 3, start it again.

  • In Roon’s Settings > Storage, add the new watched folder location.

It’s best to turn off Roon’s Core until the backup is restored.

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I am adding this message from @noris which I believe provides additional clarity that may help you. Post #58 specifically:

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Thank you all for the kind advice, but you don’t seem to understand the situation.

Essentially, I am NOT moving anything to a new storage location.
What I am doing is getting Roon to moving from using the top level directory “Music” as the storage location, to using the next level down directories (2016, 2017, 2018 etc) as storage locations. In this change, I am not moving any files. I am merely changing the folders which Roon is looking at. (And in a sense I am not even doing that, because the folders are staying the same).

In any event. Let me tell you what I have done. I backed up the current arrangement. Then I restored to a backup from 10 days ago. Now, what happens then is what I feared, and why I had not done this: because the old backup only has me pointing at one folder, the restored version now does this too. So all the effort I have gone to since telling Roon to look at the multiple NAS folders (and its re-importing all of these from scratch) is wasted - or presumably would be, if I did not a have a new backup from this morning. So, I will now try to restore from this mornings backup!

In all of this, the basic question I asked has not been addressed. Why is it, that some of the metadata, but not all of it, carried over when I first started down this road? Why is it that some of the hearted albums and their play stats carried over, whereas others didn’t?

Anyway, thanks for trying to help, and lets see if I can now get back to the way things were a few hours ago!

If Roon were to fix the problem that it doesn’t allow you to go back more than 4 years in the “date added” focus, then all of this would have been unnecessary…

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Anthony, you’ve been quite clear about your situation. I would think, though, that for Roon there’s no difference between pointing to an altogether new storage location (as in another disk or physical medium) or to a ‘new’ folder structure on the same old disk. You know that the newly exposed folders are the same as before, just being pointed at individually, and thus becoming the new top-level watched folders. Roon will just recurse through every top-level folder it is being configured to watch, but won’t recognize the new structure as being essentially the same as before, as the path to each music file definitely has changed.

I have never been through a comparable experience, but I certainly would try to go through the steps recommended in the Roon Help Center.

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Thanks Andreas - yes, I do usually find the Roon Help info useful, but in this case its not really, since I’ve managed to sandwich myself between two scenarios!

But the puzzle is still there: it seems that Roon is able to remember metadata about some of my albums even when from its perspective they have moved - presumably because it has a positive ID on the album and is able to port the metadata when it relocates the ID. Or some similar mechanism. it’d be nice if some @support person could chime in and explain whether I’m right or wrong about this - and, especially if I’m wrong, provide an alternative explanation to the part-saved metadata puzzle!

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I hope this is helpful, and it sounds like a lot of work, but I wonder if some kind of tag manager where you can change “date added” on the files themselves would work?

I suppose it’s possible Roon would just treat it the same, but maybe manipulating data outside of Roon would help Roon see it more correctly.

Again, not confident, but hope that might be of use.Good luck.

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Oh - and another aspect of the puzzle has emerged. I had presumed that all the albums would now lose their old added dates, and would get a new added date (12 Sept). And indeed, it seems the vast majority have. BUT, when I go to focus and “added in the last”, then I discover that whole ranges of albums still retain their actual added date. SO - how is it that some retain this metadata and some don’t, along with the other scenics of metadata that some retain and some don’t? @metadata_support ? thanks.

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Did you look at the import settings