Trouble migrating playlists to Nucleus

Support Nucleus Support
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HP Laptop with WD Easystore external hard drive 5 TB size.
Migrated to New Nucleus purchased from Best Buy Premium services (Magnolia)
They also did the installation
(Note: Playlists that are used in Roon were originally created in JRiver and had to be imported to Roon on my laptop some time ago.)
Nucleus set up has WD Black external hard drive. I think it is 8 TBs in size attached to Nucleus by a USB cord.

People from Best Buy Premium Services (Magnolia installers) migrated the Roon information (meta data, etc.) from the C drive of my laptop to the Nucleus by attaching the lap top to one of the USB ports. This took less than an hour.
They then copied the music files from my external WD Easystore (attached to the laptop) to the Nucleus external drive (8 TB WD Black attached to Nucleus by a USB cord).
This took about 12 hours and was completed this morning (long after they left).

At first Nucleus only recognized my Tidal music. I rebooted the Nucleus by unplugging it. Roon then found the rest of my music on the external hard drive.

Roon now recognizes all of my music stored with the Nucleus.
It however only recognizes the music from Tidal on my playlists.

My theory is that Roon did a scan after the information was copied from the laptop C drive to the Roon internal drive. It recognized that most of the songs on the playlists didn’t exist (since the music on the hard drive hadn’t yet been copied to the Nucleus external hard drive) and Roon deleted the entries in the playlists associated with missing music.

My plan is to go back to my lap top and re-copy the data for the meta data and other information from my lap top C drive over to the internal drive on the Nucleus. If necessary i can get this from a recent back.

Does this sound correct?
Where is the data stored I need to re-copy?
Where are instructions on how to do this (since the people at Magnolia did the original migration for me).

Will I have any trouble with music locations (currently F: drive on the PC) vs. metadata info or will this be taken care of automatically by Roon software? Will Roon be able to find the link between the playlist info and the music on the external Nucleus hard drive?

Thanks,

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You might want to read the FAQ on migrating music. https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/faq-how-do-i-move-my-collection-to-a-new-folder-hard-drive-or-nas-will-i-lose-my-edits.

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Do you have any questions about redoing the migration as outlined in the FAQ?

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Thanks Daniel, I read the article. We are in compliance with those instructions. Information following is more information, detail and latest status based on our debugging thus far.

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[problem-with-playlist-migration-to-new-nucleus Possibly related to scanning?

Roon Core Machine

Migrated from HP: laptop, Windows 10 with a 5TB WD easystore external hard drive which was attached to the laptop and housed my music library
Best Buy Premium Services Team (from Magnolia store) moved Roon from the laptop to the Nucleus, along with the music files and playlists per Roon instructions.
An external 8TB WD Black hard drive is attached to the Nucleus via USB cord. This is where the music files reside along with the Roon backup which was done just before the migration to the Nucleus.
Roon is pointed to both the Nucleus internal drive (which doesn’t have any music) as well as to the external hard drive.

Roon core is being controlled from old laptop or several Amazon 10 fire tablets pointed to Nucleus internal and external drives.

Networking Gear & Setup Details

Magnolia team also upgraded my home network to a hard wired network with endpoints designed to help with whole house music to be streamed from Roon

Connected Audio Devices

McIntosh Audio C50 preamp with MC452 amplifier, JL audio crossover into B&W 802 speakers via ethernet cable from Luxul SW-10005PD gigabit compact switch and then by USB cord to preamp

Number of Tracks in Library

160,000 songs in mostly flac files and itunes lossless files mostly ripped from music CDs.

After migration to Nucleus from the laptop only a small portion of the songs in each of my playlists are shown. I have about 50 playlists. Many with thousands of songs in each playlist.(say 8,000 songs in a particular playlist). I believe all of the music files were successfully moved.

At first only Tidal songs appeared in the playlists.
I’ve been using Tidal since Oct. '21.
In trying to diagnose the problem I did a restore within Roon backup to Oct. 11th, 2021 and Roon did a scan. I noticed that it now shows about the same small quantity of songs in the various playlists but it is now showing non-Tidal (older) songs in the playlists.
The largest number of songs in a particular playlist is 319 songs (out of thousands which should be showing). It looks like it has identified all of the playlists but not all of the songs that belong within those playlists.

My hypothesis is that the scan stops before it has picked up all of the playlist information. I estimate the scans are taking no longer than 45 minutes. I notice that if I reboot the Nucleus from the on/off button it takes longer to scan (45 minutes or so) than if I simply bring up the Roon Core software which a scan takes about 15 minutes I’m estimating.

I checked the watch folders as described in the Roon instructions. They are pointing to both the Nucleus external and internal drives.

If I add one song from the external Nucleus drive to a playlist it does now show properly on the playlist. (but doesn’t help with existing, missing songs)

Note: Playlists were originally (back in Oct. 2021) moved from JRiver software into Roon as instructed within Roon help information and worked fine on the lap top including additions from new music and Tidal etc. The problem seems to have begun with the migration. However, soon before the migration I did notice that the drives on my laptop were remapped. The external easystore WD drive that held my music changed from a G: drive to an F: drive. Don’t know if this might have caused any problems soon before the migration.

What are your thoughts?
How can I get Roon to recognize all of the songs in the playlists?
I believe I have good backups if required.

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Thank you Dan,

Yes. I’ve reread this again. Thanks for your help. Would it be helpful if I try to do a full reinstall from scratch? I would use the backup which was done just before the original install a week ago yesterday. The backup (from the PC version of Roon) resides on the external drive attached to the Nucleus.

There is a note I see in the instructions that is puzzling me:

“1. 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.”

How do I accomplish this instruction? I suppose it is referring to the copying of the music files to the Nucleus (not the backup files of Roon). The import of the music files, I believe were done as a copy and paste through the PC to the Nucleus. So the Roon User Interface could be shut down during this process. Let me know if I’m understanding this correctly:
I would use the Roon interface to to do a restore / import of the backup files then close down the Roon interface while importing the music files as a copy and paste.

Would there be any advantage to reimporting the music files? Or do I just reinstall Roon’s Backup files?

During the music import the Tech did a demonstration of Roon on the stereo though the Roon user interface. This may not have been a best practice. Could this be related to my problems?

When doing the original import/install on the Nucleus from the PC the tech from Magnolia (Best Buy Premium Services Team) attached the PC directly to the Nucleus using either a USB cable or an HDMI cable. This must have been to import the music files as I believe he did a restore (import) using the backup on the Nucleus external drive. I think this could have also been accomplished by attaching the PC’s external drive (which holds the music files) directly to the Nucleus and copying from the old PC drive to the new Nucleus external drive. Advantage or disadvantage to either method?

Since the the Roon back up files are a “black box” to the users like myself, how do I know if the backup properly picked up the playlist files from the PC version of Roon?

Definition of “Roon Core”? Is this the Roon User Interface? Is this the metadata files? Both?

Thanks for any ideas on how to proceed.

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Log into the Nucleus WebUI there will be a Roon Server Software button, click on the down arrow and choose Stop. This will shutdown RoonServer. See pic from a ROCK interface below as a reference point.

image

The backup that should have been restored to the new Nucleus is the backup taken of the old PC Core.

Roon Core is the PC which is running RoonServer or Roon in server mode. The Core was your PC and now is the Nucleus. The Nucleus is running RoonOS as the Operating System and then the Linux version of RoonServer. See this Faq for detailed info: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/architecture

If you go to one of the playlists in question, go to the 3 dot menu and choose File Info, does the returned information contain the File Path or not? See example, below:

image
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Usually, I have found that if a local track in a playlist is listed as unavailable, it means that the storage location that track was located on is not now accessible by Roon.

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