What is a good directory structure for music files without id3 tags?

[hallo_leo]

I have some mp3 files of local recordings of our choir. They do not ahve id3 tags embedded.

I know what songs they are (title + composer) and I want to group them in one album.

In what directory structure on the Roon server should I put these files, so that Roon picks up title, composer and album?

[Paul_Williams]

It is unlikely that these will be ‘recognised’ by Roon. Their system is based around published recordings and (even for Classical music) is driven by artists and not by composers or compositions.

[hallo_leo]

So how can I integrate music which is not “published” into Roon?

[Paul_Williams]

The easiest way to do this is using the album title for example in your case it might be Handel Messiah choir name. I actually amend the title name even for published ‘recognised’ albums to separate out different performances of the same composition. This, in the example I have already used, I will have titles such as Handel Messiah Beecham, Handel Messiah Christie etc.

You can then use the filter facility to find your particular albums.

[Geoff_Coupe]

The key point to understand is that Roon considers a bunch of tracks in a directory folder to be an album.

So first create a folder named after your choir. If you just want a single album to hold all the recordings of your choir, put the mp3 files into that folder.

If you want to group the recordings by the date of the performances for example, then in the choir folder create subfolders named after performance dates. That way, if for example, there were four separate recordings of pieces sung at the same performance, you would put those four mp3 files into the relevant performance folder - and this would then be the “album”.

Or you could group the recordings into performances of specific works - each folder would then hold the recordings of the work, and these would then be shown as albums.

Personally, I always use a metadata editor to prepare my recordings - it makes things so much easier for subsequent slicing and dicing of my library, because Roon knows so much more about the content and can include works in the Composer and Composition browsers and artists in the Artist browser…

For example, with metadata, I have made an album of some of my personal recordings, and the Composers are known to Roon (and with a little more care on my part, they would all be recognised as Compositions - as is the case for “As Time Goes By”)

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

File Tag Best Practice

And put the files into folders as Geoff described.

Roon will show these „albums“ as „unidentified“ nevertheless, because they are not known to online metadata sources. But this doesn’t really matter -Roon will still use the metadata that you put into the file tags.

[Akimo]

You can also use a tag editor to add the tags. There are many tag editing apps available. I can happily recommend “Yate” as a top notch one. I use it to clean up every album I rip or download.

[hallo_leo]

@Geoff_Coupe @Suedkiez Thanks for chiming in!

Does this mean, to add title and composer info I have to write tags into the files?

There is no folder scheme applying these metadata in Roon when no tags are present?

[Geoff_Coupe]

Without metadata, you will get a very poor Roon experience.

As an example of what will happen, I created a folder called “Test Album” that contains three audio files: one a mono mp3 and two stereo FLAC files. None of the files have any metadata in them.

I then copied the folder and its contents into my Watched Folder of my Roon Server, so the folder was in the Internal Storage folder of my ROCK/NUC system like so:

This is what Roon was able to do with this “album” folder:

As you can see, Roon has created two “albums” with the same name - one containing the mp3 file and one containing the FLAC files.

Opening up the second album reveals this:

As you can see, Roon has used the filenames to create the track titles, but both have a track number of zero, because there is no track number metadata in the files. It has not found any album artist metadata, so it has set the album artist as “Unknown Artist”, and decided that this album contains tracks from “Various Artists”. There is no composer metadata, so no composers are associated with the pieces. There is no cover art either, because the cover art metadata is missing.

As I say, this is (IMO) a very poor Roon experience, and that is why I use a third party metadata editor to prepare my files and folders before copying them into my Roon system.

I have found both dBpoweramp and Mp3tag to be excellent metadata editors for my Windows PC.

BTW, the “Serenade to Music” and “When Soft Voices Die” tracks were taken from a personal recording I made from the broadcast of the First Night of the Proms, 2021. Here’s what a full album looks like when Roon is able to use the metadata:

[hallo_leo]

Very clear. Thanks heaps for creating this test case.

(I have had similar experiences, but was hoping there might be a way to better it through some sort of directory structure. – Now I’m pretty sure that only internal tags help.)