Using Roon To Troubleshoot Problems In Tracks

[nicoff]

Recently I was listening to music from my digital library and noticed nasty ticks/pops on several tracks. Since Roon displays the track time and provides a graphic display of the music being played I was able to actually 'see' the location of the tick/pop on the tracks.

I eventually concluded that only my downloaded DSD albums were affected. Some tracks had a couple of ticks/pops, but ALL my DSD downloads showed the problem. I know that all the downloads were fine when I first bought them, so I can only conclude that somehow while moving the files around to different locations/folders/computers/etc. the original files must have gotten corrupted.

Fortunately, I had a good copy of the albums stored in the clouds and was able to download and replace the damaged albums. That process reminded how BIG DSD albums can be; they take a fair amount of time to copy/download them. Their size (several gigs per album is typical) and the time it takes to download/copy makes them more susceptible to something going wrong.

I now look at Roon graphical display with a better appreciation of how it can help me identify problems in my music files. Also interesting is to see how some pop recordings seem to be recorded at maximum volume and the graphs show 'clipping' everywhere.

By the way, the graphical display of the music does not work with tracks from Tidal. Those tracks only show the time elapsed/remaining but no graphical representation of the music.

[joeinid]

Excellent! Thank you for the heads up. I never thought of looking more deeply into Roon and some if its features.

Also goes to show you the importance of backups.

[nicoff]

Also, if I might add, after ripping your SACDs, make sure you save a copy of your ISO files! That will allow you another way of recovering your DSF files. Those ISO files are as close to the physical SACD as you can get!