Transitioning from JRiver to Roon: Custom Tags, Metadata Workflows & Lessons Learned

Support Metadata
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Roon Core Machine

Late-2019 16" MacBook Pro, Model: MacBookPro16,1, 2.4 GHz 8-Core Intel Core i9 processor, 32 GB 2667 MHz DDR4 memory, 8TB of storage, wirelessly connected to a NAS with 14TB of storage

Networking Gear & Setup Details

1.2 Gbps download speed thru Xfinity and a Synology NAS DS1621Xs+ with a switch and ethernet connection

Connected Audio Devices

I wirelessly connect from my computer to my network and play my music from my computer. I currently use my MacBook Pro’s audio device.

Number of Tracks in Library

My library is 166,000 songs and is roughly 4.3TB in size

Description of Issue

Hi all,

As a follow-up to my previous post about external tags being recognized by Roon, I’ve successfully mapped many of my custom metadata tags from JRiver into Roon, and I’m now in the process of refining my workflow.

Since I’ve relied heavily on JRiver’s tagging system to organize and enrich my music library, the shift to Roon has been both exciting and complex. I’ve set up this thread to document issues as they come up, share what’s working (or not), and hear from others who have made a similar transition.

If you’ve done something similar—using custom tags, external metadata sources, or creative ways to get Roon to play nicely with a JRiver-style setup—I’d love to hear about your experience.

Some themes I expect to touch on in future posts here:

  • Custom tag mapping quirks or limitations in Roon
  • How well Roon preserves or displays externally managed metadata
  • Strategies for syncing JRiver and Roon libraries
  • Workflow comparisons (tagging, playlist management, etc.)

Feel free to chime in with any advice, tools, or ideas. I’m especially interested in edge cases or clever workarounds.

Thanks in advance!

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I’m a long term JRiver fan, adding Roon in 2016, I’m thinking your not gonna like my ideas, perhaps try it for a bit and see if in makes sense.

I’ve customized JRiver a lot, adding many custom metadata fields, custom panels, playlists etc. I load all new music into JRiver, and spend hours customizing each album, i research each album using Allmusic.com, lastfm.com, wikipedia and musicmap.info, I try to map all my albums/artists to Musicmap.info, if you expand the map a little bit you see a Super Genre map at the bottom, so I created metada fields for Super Genre, Genre, Sub Genre, Style and then have several other custom fields to link albums/artists together with all my fields being hot links so from any song you can list all other albums, artists or tracks with common fields.

I have too much customization to list here, but the idea is I spend a lot of time customizing my music in JRiver.

When I got Roon, I too spent years trying to customize Roon to work a bit like JRiver.

So heres my final strategy, after years of doing this. JRiver is fantastic at customization, regex searching, custom panes, etc and Roon is a different animal, Roon is gorgeous, sophisticated, smart and will perform many tasks for you.

So a few years ago I decided to stop trying to make Roon work like JRiver, I deleted my library and started over loading music into Roon. In JRiver I have music organized in folders, Artist, Album Genres etc, but for Roon I decided to let Roon do all the work for me, I have 1 music Directory, by the way I am windows person, what i do now is goto JRiver, locate an album, then just copy the single album folder into my single Roon Directory, Roon sees it, inatalls it and i let Roon use its metadata, then if needed I identify it.

The bottom line, learn about Roons features, let it do things its way. And of course there are always a few exceptions where you have to edit an album to fix or clean things up, but i try to just let Roon do its magic.

I spend my time in JRiver slicing and dicing my music, and I use Roon probably 80% of the time letting it find new music, find similar artists or albums, find other artists that have the same song, go look at the album Vixen by Gloria Jones, click the disc symbol for track Tainted Love and you’ll find 638 versions you can explore, by the way I have Tidal & Qobuz, again letting Roon be Roon and use the features of Roon to explore and play my music.

1 Like
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You and me too , I started with Roon in 2016

Your advice is SPOT ON, Roon and JRiver are 2 completely different animals, you will never force a JRiver structure into Roon.

You are paying a lot of money for the metadata integration aspects of Roon, a lot of the subscription fee goes to paying for the external metadata, images, lyrics etc so why have a dog and bark yourself.

The tag name mapping is OK on one level and the tags supported are detailed in the Knowledge Base. Renaming JR tags so that Roon maps them is a worthwhile exercise but beyond that sit back and let Roon do it’s magic.

I follow a workflow much like @geoB , I import to JRMC , sort out metadata and when I am happy I pass to Roon. Roon metadata editing is lacking , it’s simply not designed for it as JRMC is. This really applies to classical where the metadata is inevitably poor, and I maintain a structure of Composition and Movement that needs to be manually adjusted

I have a desktop PC running JRMC with internal HDD and a NUC running ROCK with an internal SSD. I treat the desktop as master and sync the HDD with the SSD after any files additions .

As to my folder structure , I started in Digital Audio with a streamer + USB external drive so it forced a structure , what was on the disc is what you navigated , I have never changed it , but neither Roon or JRMC care where you files are , I simply keep them logically sorted for my own ease

Simply let Roon do the heavy lifting and don’t try to mould it to your ways I think you will have a more pleasurable experience

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I also gave up about 7 years ago trying to migrate my JRiver tagging and customizations to roon. Then about 5 years ago I even gave up trying to migrate my JRiver local library to roon period and just mothballed whatever was left and used JRiver or foobar to play unmigrated content instead. Other players have advantages over roon but I must admit I haven’t upgraded my JRiver licence in quite a while.

Mostly, I just consume content in a very different way now and these days mostly I add Qobuz content via roon’s Discovery features instead of migrating my remaining local files from JRiver. So my library is now about 50/50 local and streaming including the JRiver files I did get around to migrating.

This approach has not been without its issues, mostly with Classical I find. Streaming content is in a constant state of licencing changes so Qobuz files periodically become unavailable and have to be replaced with alternatives. Roon never provided the same editing features for streaming content either so a surprising number of Qobuz albums are essentially unnavigable on import due to either an outright composition identification failure and/or messy hierarchical grouping of multi-part compositions. On occassion I have a forgotten local version in my old JRiver library and as a one off migrate that if it gives better results than Qobuz integration. All in all, there are a lot of annoying loose ends with roon’s Qobuz integration I find, but I have just learnt to live with it. I found I also lost interest in versions and remasters a long time ago as I really can no longer hear significant differences I cannot fix with DSP so that’s no longer a motivation either to systematically continue with the JRiver migration.

This is the first thread of this nature I have seen since the early days of roon so I would be curious how many users with substantial JRiver libraries actually successfully migrated before giving up?

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There are a significant number of “Converts” but I agree I doubt may users even bothered , I use a common file base so I suppose I am one of the ones who did. That said I normally let Roon do it’s thing unless it makes a mess of it.

I actually have 2 libraries one which has all my really big boxes in it that is only JR, until Roon comes up with the promised Box Set solution (Xmas is coming ???). In Roon the big boxes are split to individual albums where I can

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I too find it hard to believe that the box set issue has not yet been resolved. this has been a request since 2015. JRiver, Audirvana and Jplay all handle box sets in a usable way. Come on Roon. You’ve had plenty of time to fix this!!

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I reckon the big issue is how Roon can automate lookup. Everything in Roon is automatically sourced.

Box sets often have little or no metadata to display, where do disc subtitles come from, it would mean introducing a feature that effectively relied on manual metadata input which is not the Roon way.

Shortly after the acquisition 3 features were promised, Folder Browsing, playlist enhancements and box set improvements, at the behest of Harman . The other 2 have been delivered

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