2 questions about tagging / display info

Sonos to Roon. I think I was one of the first to ever get Sonos and so my tags are very specific to Sonos. I need to understand two things:

I have about six made-up ‘Artists’ in my file structure (Dj Rick, Acoustic, Various, Soundtracks …). Let’s take one, for instance. I have Dj Mixes I make for cardio workouts. The artist is ‘Dj Rick’ (I know, stupid, but works). Since I access these often, I’ve made the artist ‘_Dj Rick’ so it is at the top of the list. In the tag for each song on the CD/album, the “album artist” - ‘_Dj Rick’. “artist” tag is each artist for each song. Can Roon display only ‘album artist’ or does it have to display ‘artist’? These one-hit-wonders can clutter an artist list pretty quickly. For some reason, the underscore to move them to the top of my artist list worked except for this one so I had to edit the Artist to have it move up the list.

Second question: I have several acoustic CDs. I placed them in an “album artist” category and file called “Acoustic”. Somehow, someway - two CDs created their own artist called “Acoustic Series”. These two albums/CDs are unrelated to each other. Did Roon’s database do this? I tried changing the artist to “Acoustic” to trick it into the ‘Acoustic’ folder and artist, but that did not work. I made sure the edited tag is ‘Acoustic’ and not ‘Acoustic Series’. I’m pretty sure I changed the artist to 'not use Roon database and made the artist ‘Acoustic’. Thoughts on how to get all albums/CDs into ‘Acoustic’ and get rid of ‘Acoustic Series’ that has 2 albums/CDs?

Lastly, I bought three high-resolution CDs to try. They are albums I already have in my library. I distinguished them from the original by the title and added _24/96 after them. They don’t show up in my artist album list? What do people do about this?

Small changes, but I’d like to clean things up like in Sonos.

Fooling around with metadata might work for dumb solutions that solely rely on data present in file-tags but this approach brings you in trouble when used with software that matches your library against external metadata sources. You should stop doing so and use the correct metadata for your files to get the best experience from Roon IMHO.

This is mostly irrelevant for Roon. It may be taken into account to help matching album/tracks to Roon’s metadata if the file metadata is insufficient to do so. Parts of it can be used to show version information (Settings|General>Show version information on albums) for an album.

Sounds like the use-case for playlists.

If this is something else, you should make sure to thoroughly tag your files as a real and independent album that belongs to you and the world has never heard about before (AlbumTitle, AlbumArtist, DJ-Mixer|Remixed by|Remixer, …) to ensure that Roon doesn’t identify your Album|Tracks as something else.

There are generally no lists in Roon (with some exceptions as for example the Tracks Browser), You can use a bookmark instead.

The use-case for a tag in Roon. You can use ROONALBUMTAG & ROONTRACKTAG in your files to let Roon auto-create and/or add album/tracks with tags on import.

If this are real soundtrack albums, the information should be already there (Focus on Album type Soundtrack) but feel free to add a tag too.

FAQ: I have multiple versions of the same album, but I only see one album cover. Where are the other versions?