Maybe, but CD singles and 12“ singles can be problematic (also depends on where they are from, and which genre, of course.)
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Too funny. My tags are fine. Promo single are not found, especially for CDs that have edits or remixes instead of the B-side that is on the vinyl version.
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I’m in the process of moving all the unidentified tracks to a new Storage Location and deleting them from the main Roon Library.
ask claude man - he will make you anything you need to sort
Your premise that Roon is good with organizing libraries that need to be well organized before Roon gets to them is a bit ironic. Roon is suppose to create order out of your library, not reflect it.
Roon’s main problem with unidentified albums is not in their presentation or organization, it is in repeatedly grinding itself to a halt trying to identify them, which is why you can now schedule that process for the middle of the night.
[moderated]
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It’s true that Roon can’t carry out miracles on badly organised, labelled or presented files. And yet people still insist that it isn’t working as it should because a few of their rare, poorly ripped and unorganised files aren’t showing up.
My point is that 5 minutes sorting your files out makes the entire experience better. There is less need for Roon to find every single release in your collection if the tags and album art are up to date anyway.
Thank You for your suggestion. I will check that. Mainly the problem seems to be in Classical Recording.
Essentially if you have your songs organized as albums each within their own folder, and the metadata within an album is inconsistent/or have no metadata then Roon can do a decent job of identifying the majority of albums, but it wont identify all of them.
But if you have:
- Incomplete albums
- Duplicate files
- Songs from different albums in one folder, albums where the metadata is contradictory (e.g album artist not consistent for all songs in album)
- Self released albums (e.g Bandcamp/Souncloud)
then it will struggle with these.
I think the question is, after the initial identification process is complete, does roon, periodically in background, attempt to identify unidentified albums after that initial scan? Everyday, once a week, once a month, once a year? Depending on library size, library type, that is something you probably don’t want, especially if it is affecting performance.
The dialogue during a manual identification does seem to imply that but I don’t really see any evidence. I have albums that were unidentified years ago and during a manual tidyup I am subsequently able to manually identify them but they were never auto-identified in the intervening period, often for years. So the question is, if there is a background identification process going on that is rarely successful, is that a source of playback instability? Can it be switched off? Should it be switched off? Is it now part of the scheduled background process?
About two years ago there were all these discussions about the number of unidentified albums causing performance issues, with support staff weighing in on these issues in many threads. I can’t easily find the relevant posts but I know that the many discussions eventually l led to this poll:
as well as to many pleas to add a button that could mark albums as „don’t identify“, e.g. for albums that we know will never be identified.
If Roon didn’t try to periodically identify, I don’t know why the number would make a difference to performance. And the frequent idea, back then, for adding such a button leads me to believe that people were quite sure that it would retry - most likely, I believe, based on the things support staff had said.
My experience is that I have never, not once, not a single time noticed a successful auto-identification after an initial identification failure in 7 years. Maybe it happens, and I have just not been notified, but I conclude its extremely rare. So if there is some kind of background identification process taking up cpu cycles and network bandwidth I would like to be able to switch it off, especially if it is a very active but largely unsuccessful background process with an extremely marginal payoff. It’s also possible that there is no such background process, which is the point of the OP’s post, and I would like a definitive answer to that as well.
I can’t vouch for the reidentification working, I just think that it tries, based on these old discussions 
You are aware that you can now schedule background maintenance tasks to a time slot where you don’t use Roon? Maybe that helps.
There won’t be a definitive official answer here in Roon Software Discussion, most likely, so the OP or you would have to ask in Support. Or maybe you can find something with a forum search that is limited to a time frame before the poll I linked above. I think that should be possible, and IIRC the support staff said so in these threads, but I’m too lazy to search and so I can’t prove it.
There is definitely a background id process. If I add an unidentifed release to MusicBrainz then, in due course, it will be identified by Roon. I’ve currently added 113 albums to MusicBrainz and, in most cases, they have been identified automatically.
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Any idea of the frequency? I have never successfully added an album to MusicBrainz and gave up trying a long time a go. So in my case its a background process serving no purpose.
Roon tends to download from MusicBrainz about once a day. You can then wait for an automatic re- identification, or re-identify manually. Automatic seems to vary in terms of time taken.
The background process is a full metadata sweep. In other words Roon updates everything at the same time (credits, genres, re-identifications etc). I understand that having lots of unidentified albums can put a strain on hardware resources, hence the new scheduling option. Because of my MusicBrainz activity I don’t have any unidentified albums that remain unidentified for more than 48 hours 
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Interesting. I would say that 75% of my unidentified albums are Qobuz albums I deliberately unidentify so they are navigable compared with the identified versions. Hopefully, the new scheduling improves the instability I get from this.