Eric and @support, I was able to fix this!
It turned out to be either a corrupted file or a bad character in an album name. There was a bad file in The Cars album, “Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology.” Getting rid of the file and renaming the album without a colon fixed things. My additional 9,000 tracks are now all indexed and analyzed, and all of my artists and albums are showing up in Roon.
Here’s a bit more detail in case anyone else finds themselves trying to sleuth out a problem like this.
Before zeroing in on the problem, I tried completely uninstalling and reinstalling Roon Server and Roon on all my devices. This now looks like a waste of time, by the way. I don’t think it had any effect.
The reinstall did get me thinking about how to zero in on any corrupt files. I had noticed a possible pattern to the “missing” files that were not showing up in Roon. Many of them were by artists whose names started with “Th” or later (U, V, W etc.) in the Windows Explorer file structure. I decided to try and use that pattern to find the root of the problem.
My music is in two folders on a NAS, a folder labeled “Sonos” that has all my CD-resolution FLAC and ALAC files (files I can play on the Sonos) and a second folder labeled “HiRes” that has DSDs and Hi-resolution FLACs.
To zero in on the alphabetical location of my problem, I started looking in Windows Explorer in both the Sonos folder and the HiRes folders at every artist beginning with “The” - The 5th Dimension, The 1975, The Animals. (Windows Explorer includes “The” in alphabetizing, so “The Animals” are in the T’s not the A’s.) As soon as I got to The Cars, I saw a problem: From The Cars on, all of the albums in my HiRes folder were showing up on Roon but NONE of the albums in my Sonos folder were showing up on Roon. This made me think a) the problem was specific to files in my Sonos folder and b) it might be something in the Cars folder.
Once I realized this and verified it by checking more artist folders against Roon, I zeroed in on the Cars albums in my Sonos folder. One had a colon in the title, the album Just What I Needed: The Cars Anthology. I assumed that must be the problem so I quit Roon Server, moved that Cars album off the NAS, restarted Roon server and voila, Roon started doing its thing and all of the missing albums and tracks started showing up. Within a couple of hours they were all analyzed and my spinner finally stopped spinning.
That solved the problem but the colon may not have been the issue. (I have colons in lots of other album titles and they all work with no problem on Roon.) When I looked more carefully at the Cars album, I found a file that had no tags and would not play, track 19, “Gimme Some Slack.” I couldn’t tag it or get it to work in Mediamonkey. I’m thinking now that this file may have been the culprit. The album “Just What I Needed” works now on Roon, but I put the album back on the NAS without a colon in the title and without that corrupted track, so I can’t say for sure which caused the issue.
Finding a corrupt file in a library of 50,000+ tracks is not easy, so I don’t know if this situation will help anyone else. I got lucky, since the alphabetical nature of the problem helped me zero in on the folder with the issue. It was still hunt and peck at a certain level.
One thing I learned is that Roon appears to import albums using the alphabetical structure you see in Windows Explorer. So if you get an endless spinner and suspect a corrupted file may be the culprit, I recommend spending some time analyzing which artists are not showing up in Roon to see if there’s a correlation to the Windows Explorer file structure. You might get lucky like I did – if you can call 12 days trying to figure the thing out “luck.”
Recommendation for Roon: Build in some way of letting people know what the problem file(s) are that are causing the program to get hung up. That would have saved a lot of time and anguish here.
Anyway, I am so relieved to have this fixed, so I can get back to enjoying my Roon experience instead of wondering where my 9000 missing files are.