WAV files

I’d like some advice on the quickest way to solve the following issue.

Some L.P’s include a complimentary wav.code. I download the file onto my iMac and then place it in the downloads folder of my Uniti Core. Then when I search for it in Roon I can only find individual tracks in a mixed album folder - i.e. all track 1’s from separate downloaded albums are grouped together etc.

What’s the most efficient way of creating a wav. album file which Roon will identify as a complete album by a specific artist?

Are you using the Uniti Core as the file storage for Roon? Similar like a NAS?

For making Roon correctly identify and group tracks into albums, regardless of where they are stored (it does not matter if the files are on the exported drive from the Uniti Core, or a NAS, or an internal disk in the Roon Core), you must enable Roon to do so.

If the files are flac files, they usually have embedded tags for artist, album, etc. Roon uses this to identify them. Downloaded wav files may not have embedded tags, although nowadays this is supported by the wav format, but it is still somewhat unusual.

I would recommend using/downloading flac files in the first place, because Roon decompresses them anyway, and sends raw PCM data to the streamer. I.e., for the streamer it does not matter at all if the files were stored as wav or flac.

If using wav, and if the downloaded wav does not have embedded tags, you may still use some software to create at least album and artist tags before copying the files to the Uniti Core. E.g., the “mp3tags” software can do this, there are also others.

If you don’t do this, and put the bare wav files without tags onto the Uniti Core, Roon will have a hard time identifying them because it does not have any information (except the number of tracks and their durations, but this is certainly not unambiguous). Then you need to tell Roon what the albums are:

For multi-disc sets, also observe this:

Edit: And like @elverdiblanco is saying in the next post, checking and correcting the tags for downloaded files, flac or wav, is always a good idea, because it is not always correct. However, Roon is pretty good in identifying it if at least the artist and album tags are correct, and you can use the methods built into Roon (as per the above links to the Roon documentation) to help Roon identify the correct version of an album.

Album downloads that come with vinyl often have metadata that is either completely missing or not fit for purpose. Check the metadata with something like mp3tag before trying to use the files and correct it where necessary.

If you are not already (not clear to me - sorry) a quick fix that might help Roon would be to make sure each set of album files are in a separate folder named for album and artist.

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Thank you for your advice.

You’re welcome. I hope it helped/helps!

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