Just getting to the end of the Roon trial period. Have to say that whilst the interface is great and the album info is a welcome listening companion, Roon has failed to identify or has incorrectly identifies a significant number of the albums on my Uniti Core server, whereas via the Naim app it’s just about spot on. I really don’t have the willpower to make all the necessary corrections, so it looks like I will be handing it all back. Anyone else with similar issues?
Roon has worked well for me, but I’ve seen plenty of similar issues…
If you have ripped directly to your Core as wav, the metadata is buried in the Core database, which the Naim app can see but which Roon can’t. If you’ve ripped to flac I think you should be slightly better off, but I’m unclear about whether the Core actually embeds metadata in the flac file.
The Naim Core is only acting as a data store when using Roon, so if you want to persevere with Roon any plan depends on whether you wish to continue to rip using the Naim Core. If not, there are many ways to skin the cat!
What are you running Roon on?
There are some good metadata services that can add the ‘missing’ metadata and so help Roon. I use SongKong - it’s pretty good at adding metadata info to files and then Roon uses this, and it’s own metadata, to enrich it. If you use SongKong to do this and then run delete duplicates, it can robustly identify copies in your library and delete/move elsewhere the lower quality one.
Naim’s assigning and storing of metadata may be a factor, however Roon failed to identify a significant proportion of my collection which is not on or ripped with a Naim device. (Some ripped from CD using dBPoweramp, some downloaded from stores like Qobuz, Primephonic or HDTracks, and some LP rips using Audacity and duly named with the correct album and artist details and track names.)
If the Naim rip found metadata, I’d expect Roon to have a fair go at it too… but as with most things it depends…
I think one caution might be to be very careful about making any changes on the Naim Core storage, whether with SongKong or anything else that is not the Naim software. I gather it can get very confused.
Thanks guys. Roon is running on a network hard connected PC. I was heavily advised by both dealer and enthusiasts to rip my CD’s to WAV files which I did. I now have over 30,000 tracks on it, so starting again with FLAC is not an option. The Naim Core and app does the basic job really well (for me anyway), but has limited track and artist data. I love the idea of Roon, but with random albums missing from favourite artists and the lack of volume control within the app, the cons are outweighing the pro’s at the moment. The app also has an annoying habit of signing me out despite it running in the background all the time on the PC. What’s that all about? Am I better to wait a bit and see if some of my bugs are ironed out
Room works as well as the meta data it can read… and then if it can’t make sense of the meta data it starts to make suggestions based on album track layout.
Out of 1380 albums/ 24051 tracks in Roon I have not had one single bad identification… in fact Roon has even repaired some bad spellings in my previous meta data.
I have used non Naim rippers and meta data collectors however.
Your bugs sound obscure… perhaps there is local user security config on your Windows machine that is interfering with Roon. To be honest on my OSX iMac it runs in the background, and I have not had one issue in the last nearly 24 months. Good mature bug free software that says what it does on the tin…
I guess horses for courses, but I only use the Naim app for firmware updates now and config setup.
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You wouldn’t necessarily have to re-rip (although that is the ‘sure’ route); you could batch transcode to flac then set SongKong (others available - MusicBrainz Picard sounds rather clever too) the task of tagging. It may take some time, but you don’t have to watch it!
Migrating from the Naim Core ecosystem isn’t going to be painless whenever you do it; I’m left with the feeling that it’s going to be necessary sooner or later, whether Roon is the motivation or not.
my experiences (recent - last few days) are similar to @Simon-in-Suffolk - can’t see any misnaming, and the only things not identified are bootlegs or other recordings from various sources…
Ran Roon on the combined libraries I had, and it identified all. One issue I had was that it wouldn’t group things quite as aggressively as I’d like, so I ran SongKong on the whole lot to firstly set the metadata, then ran delete duplicates, then merged the libraries into one flat structure - then pointed a new Roon instance at it. Now very few duplicates (nothing is perfect) and a smaller neater database. And only one place I have to put my music now…
@Steevc if lots are missing, then I think there’s a network problem, or an inability to write the metadata owing to permissions, or something - can you give some examples and I’ll see if I have them in my library and recognised or not…
This may be slightly off the wall but I had c1500 albums ripped to a Unitiserve in WAV and had very few problems with Roon in album identification when I adopted it. However, I never used the Unitiserve as a store for Roon as at that time the hard drive had gone and it was back at Naim being fixed. Accordingly I used the NAS back up I had for the Unitiserve initially and then to transfer the ripped files to the SSD on the NUC I now have as the Roon Core.
What I suggest therefore is, if you have a back up for the Core on a NAS or elsewhere. then try using that as the Roon store and see if it makes a difference. For some reason that I am not technical enough to understand Roon may find the metadata more accessible. Worth a try anyway.
I don’t think it’s necessarily relevant here, but there are some pernickity differences between Core and Unitiserve under the surface. You can’t always extrapolate what works on one to the other.
If those differences extend to file structure and file naming conventions (I wouldn’t know… ) that might explain different experiences.
Interesting suggestion. Yes Roon, not unlike Naim, maintains its own metadata database separate from the media files themselves.
The key consideration is what is initially the base level metadata in the files to build up from.
@AndyR no - a mixture of approaches. What I liked about SongKong was that it would add metadata fields, or overwrite, as you choose, and by using a range of online references one gets a fairly decent set of metadata placeholders. Then when importing into Roon you can either have Roon overwrite, prefer the ones already there, or combine…
I hadn’t quite cottoned onto the key relevance of the OP using the Uniti Core as server rather than just having a NAS… I accept that if it has its own internal metadata database, then adding metadata to the tracks with a different tool may cause problems. I guess I’d assumed the move to Roon would also come with a move to a NAS…
Raises a lot of interesting qs for me - can the Core act as a NAS? Can it rip CDs to a non-Naim property format? can rips be exported as pure rips to a NAS?
I think the answers are yes, yes, and yes… although rather bizarrely in trying to confirm this by google I ended up referring to one of my own posts on the Roon forum! Slightly worrying…
I also added this…
Note - Tagging of flac rips was only supported on the Uniti Core from firmware release 2.5.
… but a year later really don’t recall where I found that nugget!
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If you ripped with naim software to wav, all bets are off for other programmes.
If you are moving away from naim for ripping then its very easy indeed to extract tags from the wav file names and store them in the actual file. This then gives other programmes, including Roon a fighting chance of finding the info.
Its not roons fault.
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I trialled Roon despite not especially being impressed by any aspect of what people rave about. Ripped 500cds in the trial period using a couple of borrowed devices. Ripped 50% to wav and 50% to flac on the suggestion I could then make a judgement on which I preferred. Did about 50 albums in both. Couldn’t really say that I noticed any significant difference but if I had to I’d go with wav subjectively.
Metadata was interesting. On the wav side Roon failed to fully identify around 40%. On the flac side it was around 25%. I concluded that it worked better with flac but 25% was hardly impressive or less work to fix when translated into 1600 albums.
On the 50 albums I ripped to both formats it scored around 80% on wav and around 65% on flac which suggested something other than a simple meta data issue.
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That’s an extremely low success rate by any standards. I’ve known both Roon and Naim rips to fail to identify obscure albums on a small handful of occasions, but very much a rarity. Either you have, lets say, somewhat eclectic tastes, or the online metadata lookups were not functioning properly for some reason.
I echo @ChrisSU, based on my own experience, the success rate is almost 100%, in fact I have not recalled of any case that Roon fails to identify any albums that I own.
I think you just need to ping Roon support if you feel that it does not do something right, they will come back to you to help you fixing any issues (if there is any).
That must be some pretty obscure music you’re ripping, or you didn’t do due diligence on the metadata when ripping, or the program used didn’t. What did you rip with? I ripped about 900+ albums first with a Vortexbox and then dbamplifer on a mac, and probably had no more than a dozen or so I needed to monkey with upon importing into Roon, and maybe another dozen I just didn’t like their choice of cover (whether correct or not). I would be hesitant to lay this one at Roon’s feet (and I’m not saying the Roon program doesn’t have it’s faults or issues, but those are mostly the UI imo, and classical box sets which I have none of).