What does Export actually do?

If your local machine has access to the drive where your files are located, you could just copy your files from there to any folder using finder/explorer, so I don’t get what the point of the Export feature. I tried a few exports and they all seemed to do nothing other than copy the files from the Roon library to a folder on my local machine. I looked at the files, and they didn’t appear to have any metadata that originated with Roon – they just had their original metadata. If I could export to mp3 or iTunes like Sooloos, that would be great, but I don’t think Export does that. Am I missing something?

Nope, that is all that it does. It just copies the original files and does not merge any Roon originated meta-data.

There are some aspects of export not yet 100%. I am pretty sure that early alpha builds did apply meta correctly on export. We’ll get some clarification in this.

If I were to venture a desire, it would be for export to allow you to:
1- Export in a format of choice (eg export anything to ALAC with bitrate 88KHz or lower)
2- Attach the Roon metadata to it

Why? Portable player.

Yes, exactly. One of the great Sooloos features that is missing from Roon is that you could export your CD and higher resolution files into MP3 directly in your itunes library and then sync to your iphone. And you could create an automatic native resolution duplicate of your library that would automatically receive all new material on the system.

I do get the Roon business model and how a feature like this would undermine it. So I am not keeping my hopes up really, to be honest. It’s not the transcoding obviously but the metadata that’s the crown jewel for Roon…

However, I do see how one could do this:
1- You’d have a Roon music player for iOS/Android.
2- Original metadata would be unchanged but Roon metadata would be encrypted in each file with a personal key - so Roon can trace files to the original owner if they are found in the wild.
3- The player would decode and use the Roon metadata. It would also have a cut of the global metadata (I assume such exists).

With the above you’d get a lot of the Roon experience in your mobile device.

Or maybe just keep the files with it’s metadata but Roon would have a subdb from the one on the core for it’s own metadata - that’s a lot easier! Duh!

Hi,

Just wondering whether the thinking on this has changed at all since these posts? I’d love to consolidate to Roon but am stuck with keeping on MediaMonkey to manage syncing and format conversion for mobile devices (primarily phones and car). Ideally I’d be able to export anything I select, or have as a saved focus, in a format of my choosing and then resync as needed.

As for the metadata debate, I’d be happy if it was just taken from the FLAC file, rather than needing to include the Roon added value.

Just test it on a few albums and see if it gives you what you need.

Hi,

Thanks - not unless I’m missing something obvious - perfectly possible! I can’t see any way of changing the format and/or bitrate? Basically, most of my music is in FLAC, some of it Hi-Res and I need to be able to export in the right format and appropriate bitrate for the target device.

Here’s a KB article: http://kb.roonlabs.com/Export

We do not currently do any sort of format conversion for export, although I believe we did at one point, and we probably could in the future. As with all things it’s a matter of balancing the work required against all the other stuff we’d like to do, and I can’t say how likely it is.

We do do a bunch of work in the export code to make sure it can be used to reliably synchronize subsets of a library without duplicating tracks even as album or track metadata changes. I think it would be a great fit for your use case if we did do format conversion, but obviously we don’t at this time.

Thanks for the pointers, and good to hear about the synchronisation code. Will keep my fingers crossed that the format conversion makes it into to a future release.