After Roon 1.8 appeared many users (including me) were confused about the Discography section on the artist page (@support). In a recent post, @danny shed some light on how Roon actually intends it to be:
Since this feature is apparently under discussion by the Roon team at the moment, I’d like to contribute some comments. It is clear that the present state of the Discography section is unsatisfactory. But before changing any details it makes sense to reflect about what the purpose of this section acually should be.
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From @danny’s post I take that the Overview section is about my library, whereas the Discography section shows everything the artist recorded. It is a separate entity curated by Roon and should appear identical to all users with a streaming account.
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If this is the case, there’s a severe inconsistency in the present implementation: There is no possibility to focus and filter in the Overview section. In larger collections, this makes Overview difficult to use. With focus and filter options added, I would accept this section as a useful thing.
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The Discography section, on the other hand, lacks other features if it is to function as Roon intends. There are already some attempts visible to distinguish between main albums, “sideman” albums and compilations. The main albums should be the clearly visible core of the discography. What is missing (and what is presently filed in the main part) is a section for dubious releases by bootleg labels. Especially for artist active before 1965 (where European copyright laws do not hold) these are a real nuisance. On Qobuz, there are hundreds of classic jazz albums, repackaging the same material over and over again. For many artists, the discography becomes pretty useless because it is crowded by junk albums.
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Speaking of these junk albums: It would be good to have a manual option of “banning” them individually. I don’t want to see that “Adagios for my Baby” album in the Karajan discography – I ban it and gone it is. This would be a feature I’d like.
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While we are manual interventions: It is clear that no human at Roon can curate all these artist discographies. But there are thousands of volunteers out here willing to care lovingly for their artist’s discographies. A thumbs up/down option could easily collect the user responses.
Finally I can’t resist to give some examples why the discography is not useful for me in its present state (although I know that it is unfair because it’s still in its infancy, and I’d like to stress again that in principle I find it very useful)
Leonard Bernstein seems have been an exclusive artist for the French BnF label. He later even made a recording for the Austrian newspaper Kronenzeitung and a "Fiesta 2014) soccer album:
Miles Davis: Again a nearly exclusive BnF artist. Some good music but doesn’t seem to have been very creative. In his recording habits, he seem to have had a certain weakness for some titles he recorded over and over again. There are dozens of recodings of titles like Freddie Freeloader, Blue in Green, So what.
