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Roon user here. But how to manage local library?

jamesd

pfm Member
(all of the following is based on Mac OS):

I've used iTunes as a music server and library organizer for years. For the past 2 years, I've used Roon as my front-end and iTunes (now Music) to manage my library. If I download a new album, I just drag it to the iTunes icon and it organizes things appropriately. Easy. Perfect.

Now I've purchased a new Macbook Pro, wiped my old computer and moved it over to be my Roon core. Roon works great. It's still pointing to my external hard drive and I've been using it for a few months.

I just bought a bunch of new music off of Bandcamp today and realized I'd never setup iTunes/Music on the "new" computer/Roon core. I'm having a little trouble pointing iTunes/Music to my library on the external hard drive. That made me think: do I need iTunes at all now?

How do I add albums to a hard drive that Roon is watching? It looks like I'd have to do some manual folder management/lite data entry and I have no interest in that.

Is there an app for Mac OS that will auto-arrange albums that I drag into the app the same way iTunes/Music does?

Thanks
 
I run my Roon core on my iMac pointing at storage on an attached hard drive.
I have only ever used iTunes to manage my mp3s for ease of transfer to the iPhone or iPad.

Roon rmanages perfectly well all by itself with everything (WAV, FLAC, AIFF etc) on the HD. When I downloaded my albums this morning I just dragged the folders from "download" to the appropriate place on the HD and Roon found them straight off.

My classical is just a mix of whatever dbpoweramp chose to create in the way of folder names - pretty messy if you start using the Finder to locate something. Totally transparent in Roon. Besides, if I need know where the folder is I just use the "file info" function in Roon. I ripped the classical once I had Roon. Rip, check in Roon, move on to the next disc...

The pop and folk was manually organized by me as I ripped the discs and purchased the downloads but this organization serves no real purpose with Roon (I had finished ripping the pop and rock before I had any streaming/file playing equipment).
 
I run my Roon core on my iMac pointing at storage on an attached hard drive.
I have only ever used iTunes to manage my mp3s for transfer to the iPhone or iPad.

Roon ranges perfectly well all by itself with everything (WAV, FLAC, AIFF etc) on the HD. When I downloaded my albums this morning I just dragged the folders from "download" to the appropriate place on the HD and Roon found them straight off.

when i download an album from Bandcamp, the download folder looks something like: "Artist Name - Album Name"

in my current itunes folder, everything is arranged like

- Artist X
----- Album 1
----- Album 2
- Artist Z
----- Album 1
----- Album 2

if i just drag a downloaded folder to my current itunes drive, it would now look like

- Artist X
----- Album 1
----- Album 2
- Artist X - Album 3 (the new album added from bandcamp)

I could manually do some folder creating and renaming, but that's a pain.

does your music folder look like either example?
 
when i download an album from Bandcamp, the download folder looks something like: "Artist Name - Album Name"

in my current itunes folder, everything is arranged like

- Artist X
----- Album 1
----- Album 2
- Artist Z
----- Album 1
----- Album 2

if i just drag a downloaded folder to my current itunes drive, it would now look like

- Artist X
----- Album 1
----- Album 2
- Artist X - Album 3 (the new album added from bandcamp)

I could manually do some folder creating and renaming, but that's a pain.

does your music folder look like either example?
POP and Folk is
- Artist X
----- Album 1
----- Album 2
- Artist Z
----- Album 1
----- Album 2

The mp3 library that iTunes sees is also organized like this.

Classical is a right royal mess mostly by artist but 'artist' in classical is quite a flexible concept :)
 
i can do that but nothing happens. do you know how to trigger itunes to index it? I made the mistake of not keeping my old itunes library file before wiping my old machine

Create a new catalogue once you’ve changed the library path? That’s just a guess, it’s ages since I changed anything like that.
 
POP and Folk is
- Artist X
----- Album 1
----- Album 2
- Artist Z
----- Album 1
----- Album 2

Classical is a right royal mess mostly by artist but 'artist' in classical is quite a flexible concept :)

So do you manually do that folder work?
 
i can do that but nothing happens. do you know how to trigger itunes to index it? I made the mistake of not keeping my old itunes library file before wiping my old machine
Have you tried the "Add to library" function, pointing it at the appropriate folder - in my case "music in mp3" or "Hyperion downloads" etc
 
So do you manually do that folder work?
Id do. I'm of the generation that has nostalgic memories of MSDOS 3.3 :)
This morning I downloaded two albums by Russian group Veden Kolod and then dragged tham from "downloads" to the "Veden Kolod" folder in "music". I created an "UDU" folder (new group in the collection) and dragged the UDU - Udu album download into it.
A little obsessive compared with what I let happen for classical, I admit, but I really want to know what is where in pop and folk but reason that if my classical catalogue goes belly up that part of the collection is only a modest 800-900 albums. And classical is a real pain to catalogue manually what with many albums having more than one composer, some having soloists others not, some with conductors...
 
Id do. I'm of the generation that has nostalgic memories of MSDOS 3.3 :)
This morning I downloaded two albums by Russian group Veden Kolod and then dragged tham from "downloads" to the "Veden Kolod" folder in "music". I created an "UDU" folder (new group in the collection) and dragged the UDU - Udu album download into it.
A little obsessive compared with what I let happen for classical, I admit, but I really want to know what is where in pop and folk but reason that if my classical catalogue goes belly up that part of the collection is only a modest 800-900 albums. And classical is a real pain to catalogue manually what with many albums having more than one composer, some having soloists others not, some with conductors...

fair enough! i mean, i'm in command line/terminal all day, so I'm not too scared of typing, but it was nice just to drag folders to an icon and have all the backend work done for me.
 


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