"Unavailable" music in playlists

[alwayslearning (Jon Meier)]

@Mike: Ok, we have some results:

The good news: All of my playlists appear intact with all tracks listed.

The bad news: Roon can’t find my music. Only a few hundred tracks have been scanned/imported, and I think those are some tracks that were on the Core machine, not on my external hard drive. Here are the screen shots of Storage after the update to 1.3 (there are two screen shots since the Storage window was bigger than my laptop screen):

This actually makes sense to me. I think that Roon is looking for the old folders I had listed a month ago when I made that backup and before I moved my hard drive to a new location. So it would seem that we need to point Roon to the new locations of the folders (i.e., the locations you see in the screen shots that I have sent you over the last few days). That would be:

\192.168.0.6\Music
\192.168.0.6\DSD

And I should probably remove the three folders that say DirectoryNotReady before I type in the new locations, right?

BUT HERE’S THE $64,000 QUESTION: AM I THEN GOING TO LOSE MY COMPLETE PLAYLIST INFO WHEN ROON SCANS AND IMPORTS THE TRACKS FROM THE NEW LOCATIONS? DO I NEED TO MANUALLY COPY THE INFO I SEE NOW IN MY 50 PLAYLISTS TO ENSURE THAT I CAN AT LEAST RECONSTRUCT THOSE PLAYLISTS IF AND WHEN ROON SCANS AND IMPORTS THE MUSIC FROM THE NEW LOCATIONS? IF SO, IS THERE AN EFFICIENT WAY TO DO THIS?

@Mike: This is where you can be really valuable!

[AMP (Andrew P)]

192.168.0.6\Music
192.168.0.6\DSD

How exactly do these new locations correspond to the old folders?

I’m assuming that the last storage location shown in your screenshot corresponds to the new DSD location. Is that correct?

Does the second to last correspond to the new Music folder?

Did the first folder in your screenshot (native dsd free downloads) get moved into the new DSD folder?

IF that’s the case then do the following:

1. Remove the “native dsd free downloads” location
2. Click the three dots menu next to the last storage location (DSD) and click edit, then browse.
3. Use the file browser to connect to your NAS and browse to the DSD folder
4. Select that folder and click save or done or OK (can’t remember which)
5. Repeat 2 - 4 but point this one at the new Music folder on your NAS.

Roon should now match up what’s in your database with the new file locations on disc and preserve your edits. There may be some casualties with content that was in the “native dsd free downloads” folder but if you just moved the files over then they should be OK.

Here’s the “why”…

Editing the storage location tells Roon to go looking in a new place for the same files and once it starts locating files within those new locations it should match those up with the entries already in your database. You want to remove the third location first to tell Roon to be on the lookout for those files somewhere else.

[Rugby (aka Daniel or Big Dan)]

I want to offer a different opinion than @AMP.

Given that your files are on a usb drive and the new location is attached to another mac, I think it makes more sense to me to finish the upgrade to 1.3 which includes the audio analysis with the storage in the original location attached to the core. When the update and analysis is finished and everything is verified, then I’d do a new Backup first and then move the storage as a separate post update process. Trying to do multiple things at once is a recipe for … challenges.

@mike certainly would know better, and I would wait for him to weigh in before doing anything.

[AMP (Andrew P)]

Trying to do multiple things at once is a recipe for … challenges.

Very good point!

I have had to do storage location moves as part of the migration and it works fine, but there’s a lot to be said for taking things one step at a time given the challenges faced to date.

[alwayslearning (Jon Meier)]

Hi @AMP:

Thanks for the guidance. I’ll wait for @Mike to chime in but what you say generally makes sense. As for your questions, yes, the last storage location in the current screenshot “corresponds” to the 192.168.0.6\DSD location and the second-to-last location “corresponds” to the 192.168.0.6\Music location. And yes, your are correct, the native dad free downloads location does not contain any new additional music (it was all moved to the DSD folder) and so it is not useful anymore. So the first step is probably to remove this particular folder.

As for the next step, I’m wondering if it makes more sense to simply remove the old folder locations for DSD and Music and then add new locations where I simply type in the new locations that correspond to those old locations. I’m not sure I want to “browse” to the new locations when I can type in a firm IP address that Roon will recognize. Is there any disadvantage to doing this?

And my question for @Mike still remains: Once we have Roon looking for the new locations for the Music and DSD folders, is Roon going to keep my playlists intact? This is where we’ve run into problems in the past: Roon will import all the music but my playlists end up missing quite a few tracks. So I’m thinking I’d rather be safe than sorry and, if I need to manually copy down every track on all of my 50 playlists, so I can reconstruct them later if necessary, then I’m prepared to do that – pain in the ass though it may be. But maybe, just maybe, Roon will see everything and the playlists will emerge intact. @Mike?

[alwayslearning (Jon Meier)]

@Rugby, I appreciate your suggestions but will wait for @Mike’s guidance.

[mike (Mike Fass)]

The good news: All of my playlists appear intact with all tracks listed.

Awesome, I’m taking the rest of the week off ;)[quote=“alwayslearning, post:21, topic:19940”]
And I should probably remove the three folders that say DirectoryNotReady before I type in the new locations, right?

BUT HERE’S THE $64,000 QUESTION: AM I THEN GOING TO LOSE MY COMPLETE PLAYLIST INFO WHEN ROON SCANS AND IMPORTS THE TRACKS FROM THE NEW LOCATIONS? DO I NEED TO MANUALLY COPY THE INFO I SEE NOW IN MY 50 PLAYLISTS TO ENSURE THAT I CAN AT LEAST RECONSTRUCT THOSE PLAYLISTS IF AND WHEN ROON SCANS AND IMPORTS THE MUSIC FROM THE NEW LOCATIONS? IF SO, IS THERE AN EFFICIENT WAY TO DO THIS?
[/quote]

Ok, in all seriousness, I think we’re through the hard part.

At this point, my recommendations are basically to follow what’s described in this Knowledge Base article.

More Info

A couple key points to reiterate, for those who want to understand this:

The most important thing to remember is that Roon is tracking every file in your library, and so you need to make sure Roon isn’t looking for the same file in two locations at once.

So, imagine you have a directory with 10 files. Then, you move that directory somewhere else, leaving Roon looking at a folder that is offline (DriveNotReady). In that state, Roon is still looking for those 10 files in the original folder, waiting for them to come back online.

If you leave that directory configured and then add the new location as a new folder, Roon will now be tracking 20 files, since the 10 files in the original location are still being tracked there.

Now, you’ve added 10 new copies of those files, and with 20 files in the database, you’ve gotten yourself into trouble. Playlists, edits, etc are tied to the files in the original folder, and the files in the new folder are considered “new”. Bad news.

On the other hand, if you follow the steps in the KB and simply edit the path, you are taking Roon’s understanding of the original folder and simply updating it to point to a new location. As soon as the path is changed, those 10 files are considered to be “missing”, and when the new path is scanned, the missing files are matched up to their signatures. 10 files in the database, all edits and playlists intact.

@AMP’s suggestion would also work, since the files would be marked as missing when you remove the original folder, and would be matched up when you add the new location. However, because 1.3 allows for the editing of paths, this should no longer be needed.

If you have consolidated a few of your folders over the last month, just make sure you’ve removed the deprecated folders from Roon completely before adding the new location, because again, the key to all of this is making sure Roon isn’t looking for the same file in two locations at once.

[AMP (Andrew P)]

@AMP’s suggestion would also work, since the files would be marked as missing when you remove the original folder, and would be matched up when you add the new location. However, because 1.3 allows for the editing of paths, this should no longer be needed.

Hey man, that’s what I said

2. Click the three dots menu next to the last storage location (DSD) and click edit, then browse.

[Danny_Jorgensen]

I’m using roon mostly as a flac player at this stage, with the core on an iMac.

I had my flac files on the iMac hard drive but as it was getting very full I copied them to a 1tb external hard drive.

I created a new path to the external drive and all my music seems to be present, but playlists I have created dont seem to play. There is an “unavailable” note above each track.

If I search the track, find it and play it, the playlist still wont recognise it from the new path. I manually added the tracks to a small playlist and removed the old tracks and that seemed to work, however some of my playlists are large.

Is there a way I can get the playlists to recognise the tracks using the new path to the external HDD?

@support

[eric (Eric Stewart)]

Hi @Danny_Jorgensen ----- Thank you for the report and my apologies for the troubles here. May I kindly ask you to verify where these playlists were created (in Roon or by another application like iTunes)?

Furthermore, what exact steps were taken (inside and outside of the application) when you migrated the content to the external drive both.

-Eric

[Danny_Jorgensen]

Hi @Eric , no need for apologies, these things happen.

The playlists were created in Roon. I do not yet have my core linked to iTunes, Tidal or any other 3rd party.

I imported a heap of flac files from an external drive to my imac drive, created a path to the folder and then created the playlists. All was well. More flac files were added to the folder and due to its size I then copied them all to a formatted external drive and created a path to this drive.
Thats when the playlists stopped working.
After Roon rescanned the new external drive all the tracks/files are present and play when selected manually. Its just the playlists dont seem to be recognising the same tracks on the new drive.

I then updated to Roon 1.3 (was 1.2) in hopes the problem would rectify itself, but to no avail.

@alwayslearning, thank you, I will look for that thread. Would you have a link as I’m still finding my way around the roon community?

[eric (Eric Stewart)]

Hi @Danny_Jorgensen ----- It looks like you might have had the content added in Roon twice, as Mike discussed above. In the future, this can be avoided by following the storage migration instructions here.

We should be able to figure this out, but the easiest way may be to revert to a backup from before the storage confusion was introduced into the database. Do you have a database that proceeds this:

“More flac files were added to the folder and due to its size I then copied them all to a formatted external drive and created a path to this drive.”

-Eric

[alwayslearning (Jon Meier)]

@Mike:

Yes, you can now take the rest of the week off – I followed the instructions in the Knowledge Base article on moving a collection to a different folder and – presto! – Roon scanned and imported all of my music from the newly located folders and, best of all, my playlists are completely intact. Well, intact as of Jan. 5, which was my most recent backup before I moved the folder locations. So one lesson is: make a backup just before you move to a new hard drive, or move your hard drive to a new location on the network, or basically do anything to change the location of a folder. Another lesson: patience is required in this situation. It’s been a full week since problems appeared and about five days since I sent this query to Roon.

One final note: when I was editing my storage settings and chose Browse to get to a new location, I couldn’t just select a folder that appeared on the screen, as all of these folders were contained in the internal hard drive of my Core machine. Instead, I had to click on Add Network Share, and then I typed in the IP address location of my newly located folders. This worked, I presume, because the old folder locations had been disabled and replaced by the new folder locations. So Roon wasn’t confused by attempting to look for folders in two locations. Hopefully I got that right. Anyway, this lengthy thread may prove useful to others having similar problems.

@Mike: THANK YOU!

[Danny_Jorgensen]

@Eric I see where I went wrong now. Thanks to all for the help on this, I’ll know what to do next time and I’ll start doing back up’s.