Hello everyone,
since last update I have this minor quibble:
Why is this happening?
This is what I have in the Album editor view:
Did you Edit the album artist line manually?
Usually, this happens, if primary artist and album artist names are either contradictory, or not matching the internal database, so only one of the two lines is a link. Can for example occur if internal roon metadata, as sourced from Xperi/MusicBrainz, delivers different results than what roon is extracting from local file tags:
In your case, I would say file tags seem to be the origin of the confusion, as “Johann Sebastian Bach” is not really an Album Artist.
This is a bugbear for me too. Assuming that the delimited names in the user-edited Album Artist field match the Primary Artist links, the only delimiters I’ve found that are processed correctly in the user-edited Album Artist field are the forward-slash (/), the ampersand (&), and the semi-colon (;); even the humble comma (,) is curiously neglected. Substitute a forward-slash, an ampersand, or a semi-colon and you will at least get the desired single line Album Artist but not your desired delimiter
Tag delimiters are definable within Settings/Library/Import Settings; however, as the user-edited field is strictly not an imported tag, any custom delimiters are ignored. I have found no workaround to this little problem. Post-processing the user-edited field with the Import Settings would be desirable.
This is by design - commas are often used in tags, so you should not use them as delimiters.
Yes, I edited manually. All my albums in Roon are Conductor / Orchestra (ensemble). I dont have a file tag editor so the “Sebastian Bach” is in the downloaded file.
The artist albums and the primary artists they match each other whilst in you example are different.
Thank you.. it was the backlash instead of the forward slash!
The ampersand is far more prevalent in Album Artist names yet is still allowed. Roon seems to attempt an exhaustive match of the Album Artist link name to the user-edited name between delimiters. Here is an artificial example what Roon already achieves with delimiters often used in tags. Both Amos & Sara, and Blood, Sweat & Tears are clickable links
The extensible set in Settings/Library/Import Settings are not applied to the user-edited Album Artist field and we are stuck with a small set of delimiters which does not adequately encompass real life typography.
@Geoff_Coupe made a good point regarding the prudent use of custom delimiters as the imported Album Artist field may be garbled, although if the album is identified correctly then the Roon provided Album Artist field is probably correct.
I made a comment about how infrequent the comma is in Album Artist names, about 0.3% in my library compared to the ampersand at 3%. This is indicative of how well Roon correctly parses the comma; Jazz collaborations come to mind:
The double line Album Artist display only becomes an issue when the user prefers to override the imported, or Roon, data. In the above example, if it was not identified by Roon, then it would be impossible to force a single-line Album Artist Dudu Pukwana, Han Bennink, Misha Mengelberg leading to a clunky Album Artist display of two lines, a typographical duplicate, with only one line with active links.
Most discographical resources respect typography of the source and it would be nice to see Roon have the ability to correctly parse a user-edited entry. Even the single addition of the comma to the predefined delimiters would likely cover the vast majority of false negatives.