What is Background Work?

Your Roon library brings together information and artwork from many sources, including streaming services, local and networked files, metadata providers, and your own edits and listening history.

Background Work is how Roon keeps all of this in sync. It’s a broad set of tasks that maintain, enrich, and organize your library: unifying local music, network storage, and streaming services into a single, coherent view.

When new music is added to your library, Roon immediately identifies and analyzes each file to understand its audio characteristics and contextualize it in your library. Over time, Roon periodically revisits every track in your library, to update and improve metadata, fill in missing artwork, and identify any previously unidentified tracks. Roon also re-scans your network storage locations to check for any new additions.

This background work ensures your library stays accurate, up to date, and richly connected to the global music ecosystem. It’s essential for refining the relationships between track files, musical objects, and the rich metadata that power the Roon experience.

Why Schedule Background Work?

Over time, we’ve heard from users who want more control over when Background Work happens, so Roon can work around each user’s listening habits and usage patterns.

Our goal is to ensure Roon users have clear, predictable control over when library maintenance occurs, preserving their server’s resources when they are actively browsing, listening, or maintaining their collections. This lets users offload background work to a time of day when they aren’t using Roon.

Some users only run their Server while actively listening, or they power their server on and off throughout the day. If it isn’t practical to schedule Background Work around regular downtime, we recommend disabling scheduling.

You can do this in Settings → Library → Background Work by clicking “Change” → “Disable Scheduling (run continuously)”.

Will Scheduling Background Work Slow Down My Imports and Edits?

When a user is growing, curating, or editing their library, we don’t consider it “background work”.

If you import local files to Roon or make edits to your library, Roon will continue to retrieve metadata and reflect changes right away, and Roon will also continue to check your streaming services periodically for new additions.

How Will Scheduling Affect My Network Storage?

Network storage devices don’t always report file changes to Roon in real time, so Roon allows users to set an Automatic Re-scan Interval (more details here).

Starting with Build 1625, Roon by default re-scans network storage locations during the user-scheduled Background Work window, using the configured interval. Roon will also automatically re-scan network storage on startup.

Users who prefer continuous re-scanning throughout the day can disable scheduling by going to Settings → Storage, clicking the three dots (…), and toggling off Schedule.

What Happens if RoonServer is Offline During the Scheduled Time?

If Background Work hasn’t completed in a week, you’ll see a warning pop-up in Roon. You can snooze this warning, but you might want to revisit the scheduled window to make sure it’s during a time of day when your machine is online.

We strongly recommend Roon is regularly able to run background work at least once a week. If your server won’t be on overnight, we recommend disabling the schedule in Settings → Library → Background Work by clicking “Change” → “Disable Scheduling (run recontinuously).”