I know that but if the metadata are correct maybe a small indication should do.
For example I have an illegal vinyl rip of Alan Parsons project eye in the sky. As you may know the first two songs are essentially one. The ripper didn’t do a perfect job and that album is wrong for a few seconds between the two.
Imagine now a whole library full of such bad ripped albums. Maybe the wrong IDs are less than 20% but that strict policy won’t show that.
Totally agree on your strategy. But, for heaven’s sake, beware of Yate. This is a totally ideosyncratic tool made for nerds by a computer science nerd. There is actually nothing comprehensible about it and you will get lost in difficult scanner/parsing strategies for anything more elaborate than switching one string for another.
I would recommend MusicBrainz Picard or mp3tag (both free) for the newcomer and foobar2000 for people with a penchant for more difficult problems. The latter is well documented and still relatively easy to adopt. Further to metadata editing it comes with the latest audio codecs and can serve as a tool for changing almost every input audio format to flac.
Another vote for SongKong. I don’t have a huge library, but it was getting problematic . SongKong cleaned it up nicely and rearranged files so the hierarchy was easier to deal with outside of Roon.
Thanks, everyone. I think I will give SongKong a go. But question…
If I start updating my files with SK, will the albums start showing up in Roon as newly added? Any way to avoid this?
With me, they indeed showed up as newly added. I tried to change Roon’s import settings, but this didn’t have any effect.
With the default settings SongKong adds metadata to your songs but does not rename and files, they will not show up as newly added. If you modify the settings so the files are renamed as well then Roon would see them as newly added because they would be different files and Roon cannot track files renamed or moved outside of it.
With SongKong I would always fixing the metadata without renaming the files in the first instance.
I have 579 of my 7050 classical albums not identified. Some will never be identified because they were private issues and other such. Before adding a new album, I always “fix” the metadata to my own standards. After adding the album I check if Roon identified it. If not, then I try to do it manually. I also usually split long “albums” into logical albums of 60 to 90 minutes because that’s how I like to choose them for listening. Roon has fits with these and doesn’t give me much help with matching up the tracks, something I would like Roon to do something about. (Yes, I’ve submitted a ticket.)
For manual identification, the right one often pops up right in the initial suggestions, but Roon didn’t choose it for some reason. Those are the easiest. If I have to go into the “None of these look right” area, then it can get dicey. Sometimes I get lucky and find a match right away toward the very end of that list. More often I have to adjust the search criteria. I have the best luck with erasing the content of both top boxes and putting in the most prominent words on the album cover. If that doesn’t work, I try searching for just the artist, or just a few keywords for the album name. Fewer words are best. Roon has some annoying habits: putting the same suggestions at the top of the list as the initial ones (that I already said didn’t match), not giving me nice options like “starts with”, inundating me with matches on single words like “symphony” from any composer that are irrelevant, and some infernal limit on number of hits (where I’m sure if I could see just a few more, I’d find it). Even so, I have pretty good luck on average.
I hope you find this helpful.
This is a good description of what to do after reading in. If you only have to do 10-25% manual rework, you are well off with Roon. Unfortunately, there are no data providers who can do it 99%.
I agree that Yate has a learning curve, but it is definitely not “a totally idiosyncratic tool make for nerds”. It is quite comprehensible. Like many good pieces of software, some of it is for experts only. But those parts can be safely ignored.
Geefes, you would be more persuasive if you toned down the rhetoric. Okay, Yate does not work for you; point made. No need to pile on the vitriol.
And no, I have no affiliation with Yate. It’s just a great piece of software.
OK, sorry I might have offended you - this was not my intent. But I made my point clear - and I stick to it.
I hold an MSc degree in computer science and I have done more than 20 years of research in parsing technologies in the fields of formal languages for different purposes from compiler construction to more recent methods of knowledge extraction and processing. I think I know a lot of prototypes and products in this area and I know of the problems of deployment in real life environments with real persons. This led me to conclude that I have never seen a more idiosyncratic tool than Yate for the purpose of lexical and syntactical analysis, string matching and grammar building and tree operations (to put it formally).
Otherwise, I would appreciate the author’s effort to donate an obviously layman’s tool to the music collectors’ community - if it was free.
Thanks for the current summary, definitely agree - with a tear in my eye. 
Yate or SongKong
That’s the question 
It is NOT the lack of metadata. It is rather that roon insists to identify albums through its own metadata sources. Providing perfect metadata does not help at all.
Oh, i thought this might help to get rid of undefined albums
Unfortunately not. They need to be identified by Roon against Roon sources. Nothing else will do. I have tons of unidentified albums with valid metadata. Which cause Roon to go crazy every time it tries to identify them, for no reason at all.
SongKong is highly recommended, by the way.
Sez you, but Roon HAS to have a single reference source with more “street credentials” than you or I. And if your album doesn’t agree with its reference source, Roon has a very good reason not to recognize it. To do otherwise would be to introduce chaos into its library and those of its users.
One major fix, it seems to me, is for users to report errors and omissions; AND, for Roon (or its proxies) to quickly investigate and put its official stamp of approval on the changes/additions. I think Roon has improved over the years holding up their end of the bargain. I’m less sure about how the users are improving, if at all. Users may feel it’s not their job to help fill out the database, or they may perceive that their entries are never considered.
To be sure, the classical database, particularly from 1970 and back, is weak. And there are a subset of labels that don’t seem to report their products’ tags. Given the general lack of financial incentives, I’m not sure these weaknesses will ever be overcome.
Yate is highly recommended, by the way. 
I would not care. But Roon goes nuts in failing to identify those over and over again. They will never be able to get all the music out there identified by their rules. The more music, the more fails. Not following mainstream does not help, either.
The solution thus cannot be to identify more. They must find a way to handle not identified stuff, as this is out there with their customers. It is not about managing expectations (like Roon tries to), it’s about coping with reality.
This is exactly right. Roon should not rely on album identification for good functionality. Fine if it won’t play unidentified albums in Radio, but otherwise it just needs work well regardless.
If the metadata set exists within roon´s internal databases and it is simply choosing not to identify the album due to contradictory data (such as wrong track/discs numbers, artist´s name, track duration, missing or duplicated tracks and alike) - YES! Then improving file metadata or reorganizing folder structure helps in many cases.
If roon does not know the album, there is nothing to do about it (except from being a MusicBrainz contributor). It is using the local metadata but would continue to handle the album as unidentified.
Define ´tons´!
I have the feeling it is not solely roon´s continuous attempt to identify non-identifiable albums (that should be fixed quickly by the software team). But rather the way of integrating the local-only metadata and analysis´ results of unidentified albums into their search and filter routines. I came to that conclusion when finding especially difficult-to-handle formats such as .DSF and .DST in unidentified albums being the root of the performance issues as well as unusual albums such as boxsets, anthologies and alike (100s of discs, 1,000 of tracks, lots of references and interdependencies).
The sheer number of unidentified album seems not to be the problem if you do not have 1,000s of them.
Totally agree, and since a lot of them are on Tidal and Qobuz, it gets even worse as very simple decisions - who is primary Artist, who is composer? - or ´what is a composition, what is a part of composition?´ seem to enjoy a shocking level of neglect from the copyright owners uploading that stuff.
I have completely given up searching for classical performances particularly from Tidal via roon. You are at first impressed they offer 1,000 recordings of let us say Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony but looking at the recording list you have 100s of lonely movements flying around and popular recordings appearing in dozens of variants, so I gave up. Not to mention recordings and release dates which in a lot of cases are wrong.
Would really appreciate if there ever could be a focus filter like ´show albums with consistent metadata only`. Similar to what is already working with ´show full recordings of a composition´ or leave out duplicates.
Unfortunately, it relies exactly on that. The seamless integration of streamed (unidentified) content, identified local files and unidentified files is one of the main factors of roon´s convenience so it has to process this integration with the maximum of speed and computing power. If you switch off these routines, you cut off users from a part of their library as the unidentified albums would not even show up in composition lists, discographies or search queries. Not an option, in my opinion.
Perhaps @paultaylor (the developer of SongKong) can comment, I personally view him as one expert on metadata
SongKong uses MusicBrainz and Discogs, Roon uses MusicBrainz and All Music , so fixing metadata with SongKong may help where the ID is via MusicBrainz but not if SK id’s via Discogs