A couple of days after installing Roon I noticed that my album art had all disappeared from my Sonos system. I had remounted the music share on my NAS several times while setting up Roon (and Spark which arrived at roughly the same time) and suspected that somehow it had just fallen out of the Sonos metadata cache.
However as I started to investigate a horrible reality began to dawn. There was no album art in any of the album folders on my NAS. The 6000 album covers that I had spent hours, no days, searching for, trimming to the right size/shape and in many cases even scanning from the CD cover booklet were ALL GONE!
Then I noticed a folder nestling between Caroline Sageman and Cecilia Bartoli called CD_Resolution. Hold on, isnāt that where I had all my ripped discs? Lo and behold here was my original music folder, with itās artist/album structure fully intact, containing only the album art.
Slowly I figured out what had happened. I had selected a āorganizedā folder when I set up Roon and Roon had duly moved my entire library to new folders in the root directory, but not the album art!!
So the good news is that my album art is intact, it hasnāt disappeared. It is now just in a completely different place to the corresponding albums, which are sitting in a similar, but non-identical, directory structure one level down. Thanks Roon!
Trying to think of a clever way to back myself out of this predicament that doesnāt involve back-to-back all-nighters, harmful quantities of whisky and a nasty case of RSI but not making much progress. Suggestions?
Firstly, did you not have a back-up of your original music folder, complete with artwork in their original folders? Secondly, you donāt need the artwork with Roon, it automatically finds a decent album cover (at 1000 x 1000 I believe). You can, of course, make edits to artwork and introduce your covers on selected albums, but you should not have to do them all.
Thirdly, the managed Roon folder makes it very clear that Roon will re-organise music in that folder.
If you have a back-up of your original folder with artwork, copy it over to the core machine and make it a watched folder. You should then be able to delete the music in the Roon managed folder.
Thanks @allenbretao, but if I had a backup I wouldnāt really be in this predicament. I have been researching cloud backup options but not yet pulled the trigger. This will certainly help focus the mind!
I know I donāt need my own artwork with Roon, although Roon canāt find quite a few of my covers as some of my music is quite obscure. Also, as I might have mentioned I have two other media players (Devaliet Spark and Sonos) hitting the same library and they both expect to find album art in the folder with the music.
The fix I would like to see is that Roon changes their āorganizeā routine to move associated album art as well as the music. Then I just might be able to reunite albums and covers by turning my original library into an organized one again. Otherwise it looks like Iām in for a few unproductive days over the summerā¦
No backup WOW ā¦ tell yourself āmust get an offsite backup doneā donāt bother with cloud too expensive and quite slow presently for large amounts of data ā¦ a portable USB drive should do it.
[quote=āstruts, post:3, topic:1570ā]
I would like to see is that Roon changes their āmanageā routine to move associated album art as well as the music.
[/quote]Thatās sounds like a reasonable requirement, why not post it in the feature Request section of this site.
I know, I know. I used to have an old NAS with a copy of the library that I resynched sporadically and kept at the summer cottage, Offsite backup and plenty of music at the cottage - the perfect twofer. But then the power supply died and I realised that to be really safe I needed something completely transparent and automated (think Time Capsule) and started researching online options.
As far as being expensive goes, well thatās changing fast (how about $59.99/yr for unlimited?). And since the library is fairly static the performance thing shouldnāt be an issue. After the baseline image is created the incremental changes should be small and infrequent.
Anyway, this sort of thing certainly serves to focus the mind.
Hi @struts ā sorry about that. Definitely seems like this feature hasnāt worked as intended for you
During the initial import, we import cover art thatās adjacent to your files into our database, so it shows up in Roon. Once your music is imported, we start organizing the media itself ā other files stored near your music files are not moved, so I can see how this might have separated media from other files in the directory.
Keep in mind that the point of an organized folder is to organize the media based on the metadata in Roon. I know many of us have well groomed libraries on disk but at the extreme other end of the spectrum, keep in mind this needs to work for someone importing a single folder with 1000s of tracks and all kinds of stray images, PDFs, etc.
In that case, itās not clear where the other files should go, and they would be left in place. This is pretty tricky stuff, since thereās nothing to say that every folder of media and images is going to end up as a single folder once its been identified and organized.
As mentioned, we display a popup during the creation of an organized folder that notifies you your music files will be moved, but Iām going to work on making that language more clear. And red
Again, very sorry for the inconvenience @struts! Now go get a backup!
Iād say move everything inside the folder with the music. Might be a special cover, maybe a .txt with lineage infos.
As seen above it might lead to some mean issues if files are left behind.
Thanks @mike. I donāt suppose Roon creates any kind of log file of what it moved and where that might help me create a script to roll them back (or redo them but with the covers)?
Iāve not got round to letting Roon organise my music, but this would be a big turn off for me. At present Iām still exporting native files from my Sooloos. This embeds artwork in the music files, which of course is very wasteful of space when you have large artwork file sizes, so Iām going to have to strip the embedded artwork to a single (or multiple in the case of multi disk sets) file to save space.
Is it possible to set Roon to create a duplicate artwork file but leave the original intact in its correct folder? Iām using my Roon library to populate my Pono, and it would be a PITA to have to hunt down the artwork in an entirely different folder for each album if I let Roon organise my library.
Just to be 100% clear before I close this thread ā organized folders are an advanced option that needs to be configured manually when setting up your storage, requiring a confirmation that you want your files moved.
Weāre going to make the confirmation clearer/scarier, but by default Roon uses watched folders, which do not move or modify your files in any way.
Most users probably want to use watched folders and leave their files as is. You can organize your collection in Roon, and hopefully forget about touching the files completely.
Anyway, @struts, Iāll discuss with the guys if thereās anything we can do, and shoot you a PM. Sorry again that this didnāt work out for you ā Iām not optimistic, but Iāll look into it.
To each his own, but if it were me, I would be much more worried about unexpected consequences from stripping out the artwork. Hard drive space is pretty cheap these daysā¦
Mea culpa, I guess speed reading let me down again. I saw āiTunesā (which I donāt use) in the top section and ā+ Add Folderā and assumed this section was for adding other iTunes libraries. I saw the second section below and assumed it was for āall other musicā and just went for it without reading the fine print. You make something idiot proof and then a better idiot like me comes along My suggestion would be to put the Organized Folders section on a second page that you have to click through the warning to get to.
Great if there is anything that can be done about this. Iāll hold off for a week-or-so before diving into the manual fix.
I stripped out the embedded cover art on my own media library a few years ago (when I dropped iTunes) using mp3tag. It took a while to chew its way through (ā6000 albums) but it worked without a hitch.
I have 8,000 albums. Assuming 10 tracks per album (thatās very conservative) and ever increasing artwork sizes (which Iām all in favour of, 1,000 x 1,000 is great) thatās a lot of wasted storage.
However, if I add up all the Roon customers that comes to a colossal amount of unnecessary space used. Itās not just me, itās all of us in aggregate you need to think about.
[quote=āstruts, post:5, topic:1570ā]
As far as being expensive goes, well thatās changing fast (how about $59.99/yr for unlimited?).
[/quote]Thatās interesting Amazon UK want Ā£320 / year / 1000 GB
As regards using Cloud Storage as your backup plan, have you considered the following when it comes to the hopefully never arriving day of āDisaster Recoveryāā¦i.e your house gets hit by the proverbial iceberg, and your live storage goes belly up
the hundreds of hours required to Re-Rip and Groom your metadata
How long it would take to Download 6,000 Albums or approx 2Tb of 16/44 data from the cloudā¦especially when many cloud services donāt necessarily allow you to use your full bandwidth for downloads
Most ISPās have an in-the-small-print Fair Use Policy (FUP) for the volume of Downloads in a Monthā¦this can range from 300Gb to 450Gb per MONTHā¦sometimes higher or lowerā¦but 2Tb is certainly way outside most ISP allowances
The impact that such a download would have on the rest of the Web activity in your household, while the Download is occuringā¦Netflix becomes compromisedā¦Tidal streaming is compromisedā¦even normal Internet browsing is possibly affected
Portable 2Tb drives are available for about Ā£50ā¦and make all of the above questions moot
Mainly because I donāt have access to a windows machine any more but that could be easily fixed.
But please explain how youāre thinking. To be clear here the key is to use the (heavily groomed) cover art on my disk, not just any old cover art picked up on Gracenote or some other metadata broker.
Most definitely. Thanks for the perspective. But āoffsiteā and āfully automatedā are hard to combine in a non-cloud solution for many of the same reasons you list. All roads seem to lead back to discipline and sneakernet.
My suggestion would be to put the Organized Folders section on a second page that you have to click through the warning to get to.