I’ve got a large collection of files with ‘hand-groomed’ meta-data and while it’s impressive how many albums roon has managed to tag more or less correctly, when things go wrong they really do, so:
Today after trying to fix albums by using “fix track grouping” after a while I had to give up (after saving albums would get wrong artwork or just be messed up in a new way from before) and just resorted to “use original meta-data”. Now, with one artist in particular most of their albums were randomly split in two parts. Trying to fix those via “regrouping” however, resulted in those albums to disappear. By chance I noticed one of the disappeared albums was now mixed with one of the albums I had previously fixed by using the original meta data even though that was by a different artist. I now had an album “Blur / Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - The Great Escape / Dazzle Ships”. Trying to untangle this mess led to more weirdness.
Is there a way to find the other missing albums?
Will there be a way to use my own meta-data by default? I have a lot of singles with remixes and many of those just show the track name without remix name. Not really helpful.
Will there be ways to re-classify albums, singles, compilations? Most singles I have get filed in the album section by default. This feature basically doesn’t work at all for me.
We’re working on features that will allow for way more flexibility with regards to your tags, but there’s a lot of complexity here, so I’d definitely ask you to keep an open mind.
Bulk reverting back to tags is a very fine line for us, as “Miles Davis” in the tags is a simple piece of text, whereas in Roon, he’s connected to hundreds of different pieces of data a user can explore, and these connections are a big part of what powers the experience. Brian discussed this in some detail here, so it’s definitely worth a read.
I’m also a little bummed out you’ve had to fix track groupings so often, especially since we have a redesign for that screen in the works that we weren’t able to finish in time for release.
Files in a directory with contiguous numbering and sensible disc numbers should never be split up, but we’ve heard one or two reports this happening with iTunes imports. Any chance you’re importing your music that way?
@jeremiah’s post here is also worth a read, as it goes into detail about how to ensure your collection gets the best metadata possible.
I’d like to make sure we don’t leave you in this state, and there are some diagnostics we can do on your Roon database to see why so much work was needed on the grouping. If you’re interested in digging a bit further, shoot me a PM here on the forums, and I’m sure we can extend your trial and get a better sense of what’s gone awry.
Hi Mike
Speaking on behalf of the OP here, the basic issue is that Roon is MIS-Identifying a reasonably large number of his albums
This can mean that the Artist Name or Album Name or BOTH is changed from what’s already in the Tags
This can mean that the Album(s) simply goes “missing”…and cannot easily be found, in order for the user to Re-Identify it
Likewise, it makes it difficult to find the album to even PLAY it…metadata being wrong or right…
Not being able to FIND an album to simply play it can lead to a lot of frustration and users deciding to go back to using the more limited software they were using previously, simply because they can FIND their music
Thanks @mike for your detailed answer and the link to Brian’s post. I completely understand why there is no such thing as ‘simply’ with regards to tags and using them to do useful things.
And yes, I’ve tagged and imported most of my music using iTunes.
Thanks @Ronnie for chiming in. That is exactly the problem. Even though roon’s auto-identification is much better than any other such system I’ve tried in the past, when 1-5% (again, this is admittedly low) of a collection of 5000 albums gets mis-identified (like different artist+album) or kind of disappears when doing edits it leads to such an amount of work and frustration for me/the user that it might seem easier to just give up. Because the biggest problem then is finding the album in the first place.
I’ve noticed quite a lot of singles/eps being misidentified, often with the correct versions listed when trying to re-identify. Who’d guess you can listen to Radiohead’s Paranoid Android CD1 by looking for Jive Bunny and the Master Mixers? (not really, but there were a quite a few similar cases). Apart from the problem with split albums, I’ve found very few albums that were completely wrong - before messing them up with the merge function.
It seems easy to suggest looking at the tags in case of ambiguity or at least partly use them to search for matching works in your database. But you probably do that already and I don’t know how your app works internally so I’ll try not to make suggestions.
Don’t want to sound too negative, I’d love to see this app improved so I’ll gladly supply diagnostics.
We identified some issues with shorter albums about a week or two before launch. We have a ticket open internally to ensure that when identifying a given album, as the # of tracks goes down our identifications need to get more and more stringent. Unfortunately, the work hasn’t been completed yet. Expect this to get a lot better once that work is done.
Of course, your situation is doubly bad – with your albums split up, you’re more exposed to the current shortcomings surrounding short albums, but we’re looking into your album splitting issue now. I’m hoping things get more accurate once our algorithms are looking at full albums in your collection, which is a pretty big part of the identification logic.