Here’s an issue that I have had multiple occurrences of as I add my music library to Roon, and I will try to be brief in the explanation but complete enough to describe the actions taken.
When adding an album that is not initially recognized, Roon will create perhaps two or three separate unidentified discs from adding that one album, which is not suprising since the album is not initially identified. However, if I then identify the album properly and save each disc after properly identifying it, and then combine the separate discs by using the merge function, the merging will be successful except for the fact that are now duplicate entries of some of the tracks. At this point, I am unable to remove the multiple entries … so that I end up with album with duplicates, say track 20 and 21 being the same file. When watching Roon play the files, I notice that when it gets to track 20, both tracks, 20 and 21 seem to be playing at the same time (both show the meter movement that indicates that they playing. At first I thought this to be a minor problem that didn’t need fixing. However, it still THINKS track 21 is an actual additional track, and when it finishes playing track 20, it then plays track 21 (the same track … and also the same file … (there aren’t two copies of the same file in the master folder) meaning that I have to listen to the same twice instead of just once. So that, the fact that it thinks there is a duplicate file is an annoyance. Why does this happen but more importantly, what can be done about it. I have spent an inordinate about of time trying to fix Roon’s insistence on thinking there is a duplicate file. Once the album is correctly identified and merged, there doesn’t seem to be a way to remove the 2nd listing of the same file in the playlist. Very frustrating.
And yes, I am finding your metadata help and your interface rather confusing and complete laborious to go through. Identifying tracks by using the up and down arrow on releases that contain several discs or more than several discs (Maria Joao Pires Complete Solo Piano Recordings (a 20 disc set) comes to mind, and having to scroll up or down for identify a track can eat up a ridiculous amount of time just trying to render discs. The process seems positively medieval. And if there are duplicates too, they don’t seem to be able to be gotten rid of at all.
The problem of duplicates just doesn’t seem to make sense because there are NOT duplicates when the files are dragged into the watched folders. They only appear when properly identifying the albums and then merging them … and right there, if they are properly identified, I don’t understand why I am ending up with multiple listings for the same track after merging.