I’ve successfully pointed Roon(Server) to multiple watched folders on my headless Mac Mini. For the most part – as far as I can tell – most albums have been seen without a problem. But, there is one issue, and one behavioral question:
I have missing tracks from an album that definitely exists in the iTunes folder structure. Roon brought only one of the tracks, #9, into display. All other tracks from that album are missing from Roon, even though I can see them in iTunes.
I’ve seen this problem reported before, but I haven’t seen any suggestions as to how to bring those files back into Roon.
Running RoonServer 1.1 The files in question are ALAC 96kHz 16bit
It appears that some multi-volume albums come across ‘combined’, or seen under one album label. In other cases, multiple albums are split, so that you see two (or there, or four) album covers. The data is fine… album1 has all the correct tracks, as does album2, but the way these are handled is, umm, inconsistent.
Is there a way to take ‘split’ multi-volume albums and combine them?
We have a couple importing fixes for ALAC files coming in our next release, but I’d still like to take a look at a file or two that’s not importing.
Would you be able to upload one or two to dropbox or similar and PM me a link? If not, I can give you instructions for uploading them to our server.
We have a tool for doing this (Album > Edit > Fix Track Grouping) but it’s going to be redesigned soon because IMO, it needs a little work.
If you’re up for it, it’s easier to swt up your file tags and folder structure in a way that Roon understands, so the albums group how you want. Give this a read and let me know how it works out.
Actually, I was about to answer my first question:
The missing files are in a folder that, inadvertently, was not being watched. The culprits are two FLAC albums in a separate folder, kept there because PureMusic wanted to point to them, and they were not to be moved.
I set up a new Watched Folder and they came in well. Now, the question remains as to why I had one song from each album imported when I first set things up. Perhaps they’re duplicates in my iTunes library. Still chasing that one down.
As for problem 2, I’ll likely wait for the redesign unless I get ambitious before then. It doesn’t bother me too much that multi-volume albums are split; I just couldn’t figure out why some came in combined, and others not.
Followup: I got “ambitious.” It wasn’t at all difficult, although I could agree that the Fix Track Grouping could be improved.
For Alison Krauss and Union Station - Live, Roon had split Disc 1 and Disc 2 into two separate covers. Using Fix Track Grouping, I searched down to 2-1, 2-2,… and swung them over to the first album.
Poof. They’re together now, which is handy when you want to queue up the entire two-album set.
This is moving along more smoothly, and I’m really beginning to appreciate the interface.
We use a variety of clues as we figure out how to clump files into albums, but file tags and folder structure are the biggest ones.
If the album and album artist tags are all the same, and the folder structure and disc numbers are reasonable (1 of 3, 2 of 3, etc for the disc numbers) things should group properly.