I have been enjoying Roon for over a year and hope that I can keep the many hundreds of edits I have made to Roon’s supplied data, as well as my tags, as I set up a new NAS.
I am afraid that my Roon backup will not be able to be restored to a new set of audio files on a new NAS even if I make a direct clone of my current NAS.
Am I right to be concerned? What is the best procedure?
To clarify, I have a very large music library with a vast number of corrections to the standard data. The library is stored on a NAS. I am buying a new NAS onto which I will copy my music library. How can I assure that Roon will pick up my tags and edits?
That is encouraging! I am more hopeful!
By the way, I imagine this has been discussed in the Community but my
reading has slacked off ever since I got Roon working on my system
without frequent crashes and data losses (a few months of blissful
perfect use, fingers crossed):
Any thoughts on crowd-sourcing improvements to the data? For
example, I have manually added credits to hundreds of albums.
We are already crowd-sourcing translations, and we will probably do Internet Radio stations somewhat soon as well. What you’re talking about is something we’re absolutely thinking about and laying the groundwork to do properly in the future.
And as Roon scans the new library (an copy of the previous library though with new “last modified” dates) it displays a second, duplicate version of each album without any of my edits or tags. So now I have duplicates of every album, one of which is connected to the new files
(but has no tags) and a duplicate which is pointing to an empty file (actually it is looking in the new location for the file but when I try to play the duplicate tracks I get the “Transport: failed to load media” error).
I tried just restoring from backup but the newly restored library in
Roon is just pointing to the old location not to the files in the new
location.
What do you mean by this? Roon scans your files in the locations you specify and ‘builds’ a library. Do you have both old and new storage locations specified in settings? Settings–>Storage.
That would be bad, or at least explain the duplicates.
I have two identical collections on an Old and New NAS. I backed up my Roon library from the Old NAS.
Then I disabled the Old NAS in Storage Settings. Then I used Edit in Storage settings and Browsed to find the new New NAS and its directory with my new music files. At no time do I see the Old and New libraries live in the Storage settings, just the New one.
Roon starts scanning the New drive and just adds a second copy of each album into the library (not duplicate files, of course, just listings in Roon.) If you look at file location for each of the two copies, both point to the New NAS. But the one that came over from the old drive with all my precious edits and tags…that file can’t be played…Transport error. The file that can be played has none of my edits.
I have over 320,000 tracks so it is taking a very long time to scan, analyze (just for metadata, I have the audio analysis off), and add all these tracks…but at the end I am going to have 2x the number of actual tracks I have.
At one point, I stopped and tried to restore from backup…I thought perhaps that would then associate my new files with my old back up…but, no, it pointed to the Old NAS.
The file that can be played (but lacks my edits) seems to have the proper file path:
/Media/Music/Keith Jarrett/My Song/01 Questar.m4a
The duplicate file that can not be played (but retains my edits) has a duplicate folder in its path (here called Music) that does not actually exist:
/Media/Music/Music/Keith Jarrett/My Song/01 Questar.m4a
First, an apology, you are using the term ‘library’ correctly. I incorrectly referred to Roon’s database as it’s ‘library’. Got mixed up with JShiver’s terminology.
The above all sounds good.
Before I make a suggestion, you should understand that I am just a user, like you. You have, of course, backed up the database that has all your edits. If that backup remains intact, then you can’t do any real harm.
That’s a real clue, although I don’t know what it indicates except that something went very wrong.
Support will eventually get things sorted out, but until then is it a big deal (probably is) to start the process from scratch?
Slim, thanks for your ideas… yes, I’m backed up and I’m not worried about destroying my edits! Yes, I can start all over again…that is what I tried to do when I tried to restore from backup… I wonder if Roon’s instructions on the page @mike posted are incomplete…it makes a big deal about backing up (twice mentioned)…but there is no mention in the instructions of using that backup. So is the backup just a Good Idea, or does one need it to associate the previous collection’s edits with the files in the new location??
At this point if you can/want, while waiting for a Roonie to help, try starting completely from scracth.
Remove new NAS in storage section, delete any files on the new NAS, etc., etc. That path description sounds really f***ed up and something weird happened.
BTW - I didn’t like the instructions either. What is the ‘extraction’ process that is being referred to. Does it mean the backup. Dunno. A little unclear.
Still try to take it back to the beginning as far as you can.
The fact that the files have a new modification dates troubles me. Although Roon doesn’t say they use that for a criteria to determine new files, it seems like it might be.
In cases like this, I never copy files. Instead, I use a syncing program. That way all the dates and times remain as the originals.
My hope (likely not to be realized) is that once the scanning and analysis of the new files is done, I will “Force Rescan” and these phantom files will disappear…but even if so…where will my edited data be?
I used a syncing program too (Carbon Copy Cloner)…and the music files themselves don’t have new modification dates…it’s the folders they are in. This happened when I created a new itunes library on the New NAS and imported all the music into it. (Yes, though I am a Roon user I still like iTunes for its organizing principles).
This sounds really strange. When you follow the instructions and disable the folder in step 2, you should end up with an empty library, correct?
And then when you edit the location, it should be pointing to the new folder, which contains one copy of the media, correct? And you’re saying that when you scan that, we’re picking up a second copy? Are you able to see that copy on the NAS using Finder (or Windows Explorer, or whatever)?
The reason we ask you to make backups is that since Roon tracks files using their audio content, if you add your library twice, your database could end up tracking two copies of every file, which could potentially affect playlists, edits, etc.
Unfortunately, that may be what happened here, so let’s figure out why you’re getting these dupes, and then assuming you made a backup, we can roll back to that and do a clean migration.
I think the most important thing here is to understand where these bogus paths/files are coming from, so details of the new storage configuration (and the answers to my questions above) are the next step, then we can move forward.
Also,
If this is the case, feel free to start fresh, but either way we’re going to need to understand where the dupes are coming from.
My old NAS is a Drobo 5N; the new NAS is a Drobo 5N2.
Let’s pick this up once it’s finished the first pass and I try doing a forced rescan. It’s really strange since there really is only one unique file on the new NAS per track!
But one question…I assume I should be able to restore from backup…but why does it still want to point to the old NAS when I do?
