Hello, I am new to Roon.
Before that I was using Jriver and Itunes. Today, when I import my music library from Itunes to Roon, I find a lot of albums are split. In itunes and jriver, songs will be moved into the same album when
But it seems this does not work for Roon? Can any body tell me the rule of roon? Thanks.
Sorry to say but Roon is pathetic when it comes to album identification. It’s one of the most basic expected functions from software of this sort, but they can’t seem to get it right.
To make things worse you can’t merge from all devices such as phones. You have to go through the frustration of trying to enjoy a listening session and somehow remember which albums were split, then go back and merge them.
Pathetic.
Roon expects that all tracks of a single album to be contained in the same, single, folder. It will not, as you seem to imply, aggregate files from different folders into a single album for display.
There are slightly different rules for box-sets, described here:
In addition, Roon will examine file tag metadata in the tracks being imported, and will expect to see metadata following the rules described here:
$700 for lifetime membership and Roon expect users to have a PhD in tagging just to get their software to work. Seems a bit arrogant?
Fact is this platform has lost a lot of its earlier functionality and has become a rather poor implementation when organizing music collections. The hardware and bit perfect implementation are still good but really that’s it.
The Roon team have said, on more than one occasion, that Roon is opinionated software. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to use it.
Arguing that the software implementation and initial agreed offering changes due to the Roon teams opinion, and then not affording me my own seems a bit of an opinionated contradiction no?
I knew I had a challenging collection - in addition to all my well-groomed FLACs (organized in folders with well-behaved, well-organized tags) I have a lot of MP3’s, some well-organized and others not at all. The FLACs were mostly from a period of ripping about 10-15 years ago, and 99.5% of the 8,000 albums imported / identified perfectly, and the process of going through the remaining .5% was about 2 hours worth of annoyance.
The MP3s were a whole different kettle of fish. Many were single tracks, often with the wrong tags. Think from the Napster days. Most I never wanted to see again, because I had the equivalent recordings in FLAC or it was available on Tidal, or because my tastes have changed so much since my college days in the early 90’s that I no longer cared if I had a good recording of Cyndi Lauper. Some however were “archival recordings” I took of CDs I no longer have or have access to or can find for sale anywhere - lots of gypsy jazz and Romanian folk music and Central African folk music etc. Wish I’d ripped in FLAC, but back then I hadn’t heard of FLAC. These albums I want in my Roon database, but the vast majority of them are not in MusicBrainz or any other tagging DB. So that was a vast manual effort of days to filter out the ones I no longer wanted, move the files / folders out of the library to a “.old” folder. And then to go through and improve the tagging for the whole albums I wanted to keep / identify the ones I could.
So I personally view the 99.5% hit rate as perfectly acceptable- any recent rips I’ve done have gone perfectly smoothly. And the rest of the complexity I brought on myself through having a very strange collection.
Don’t know if that’s your situation / experience - if you have a well-groomed library like my FLACs were, especially if it’s very large, and you’re getting much lower correct identification rate, well then I’d be frustrated too.
Can you give us more specifics on what your library’s like and what’s not working?
I had similar experience to Johnny_Ooooops. It’s been so long I don’t remember the details, but my library of about 3K albums (almost all FLAC) imported perfectly. A handful of off the wall albums were not identified such as compilation albums from music festivals. A couple of hours work set them all right. All the CDs I’ve added since have been identified appropriately and added to my library with no fuss.
Of course, I’ve spent a lot of time since refining my library, mostly adding artist’s images and correcting artist’s names so the albums sorted properly. Not Roon’s fault, but there’re major inconsistencies in artist’s names. I use last name first so all the albums are sorted by artist. When a band is the artist’s name I’ll use a sort name like this: Metheny Group, Pat. That way, all of Pat’s music is sorted together with Metheny, Pat; Metheny Group, Pat; Metheny Trio, Pat; Metheny Unity Group, Pat.