A confusing metadata issue

[Snowdog]

Content you’re reporting an issue with

Primary Artist Names

Have you made any edits to this content in Roon?

Yes

Is this content from local files, TIDAL, or Qobuz?

Local

Screenshot of import settings

Description of the issue

Hi all. I wonder if anyone can shed any light, here.

Now that I’m getting more accustomed to editing tags in Roon, I have the following little conundrum…

Here, I have primary artists as “Brian Eno” & “David Byrne” with an album artist of “Brian Eno - David Byrne” & it seems to be quite happily sorting correctly under E. (If I switch off the primary artists, it moves to file under B. This makes complete sense to me.)

Here I have my primary artists as “Robert Dean” & “Martin Birke” with an album artist of “Robert Dean / Martin Birke” but try as I might, I cannot get this album to sort under D for Dean without swapping the names around (i.e. Dean, Robert) which, given that Roon is set to file by last name, looks really ugly when nothing else is like that.

Does anyone know why these two things don’t seem to be following the same rules?

In case it’s important, Roon suggests “Robert Dean & Martin Birke” as a pre-existing single entry & I have to create the two in order for them to appear as two separate people. Would this affect it? I’m only doing this to try & replicate the Eno one, which, curiously doesn’t suggest “Brian Eno & David Byrne” as a single entry.

The Mike Rutherford album has “Mike Rutherford” as both the primary artist & album artist & seems quite happy to file under “Rutherford”.

Is there anywhere else I can look to see why this might be filing this way?

My main settings are set to file by last name.

Thanks.

PS: Another thing I noticed is that I generally got the distinct impression that primary artists sorted alphabetically, regardless of what order you entered them. Brian Eno & David Byrne are not changing but are staying in that order.

[MamaTried (Paul)]

This may have absolutely nothing to do with it, but one is named first performer - second. the later is first performer / second

[Snowdog]

Thanks for the reply. I’ve tried changing that & it doesn’t seem to make any difference.

[Snowdog]

I guess Friday night wasn’t the best time to be posting on here. Is this thread going to be shut down by the time Monday comes around?

[joel]

Hi @Snowdog . Does your Robert Dean have a sort name? For example, for Amy Winehouse (metadata from Roon’s servers), I have the following; but if your Robert Dean metadata is local only, the sort name might not be there.

[Snowdog]

Thanks, that was the clue I needed. I woke up this morning thinking that, as I’d created a new artist, there was no way the software would know which was the first name & last name.

What I didn’t realise was that I could go in & edit it.

This also answers the question about some artists having pictures & some not.

I almost never view by artist, so it’s not such a big deal, but it’s handy to know that I can edit them should the need arise.

So, the only issue I’m left with after all that is the following:

In order to create an artist that’s transcribed the same way as it is on the album, I’ve created “Robert Dean / Martin Birke” as the primary artist & told it to sort as “Dean”.

All good! Thanks!