I had a handful of albums, all identified and all box sets, that would keep splitting every week or so. Merging them was only a temporary fix. Metadata and folder structure all looked consistent.
Since converting the problem albums from ALAC to FLAC though, not one of them has split. The only change I made to metadata was to take advantage of FLAC’s multiple artist tags (one of the reasons I’m converting to FLAC). Album Artist and Album Title were unchanged.
I don’t know if this helps at all, but so far is working for me.
I came across another boxed set (Wagner’s Vision, Bayreuth Heritage) that had suddenly split into two. I converted it to FLAC, created separate tags for each artist and the album again merged back into a single album without further editing.
Wow, great report @chrisbyrd – we’ve heard scattered reports of this happening but haven’t been able to reproduce in-house. This is potentially a very good clue!
Any chance you have one of these sets in their original ALAC form? If so, I’d love to get some media from you and try to reproduce this. Let me know and if you do, I’ll give you some instructions for uploading the media to us.
@mike I’ve found one of the sets in the original ALAC form, so do you want to let me know how to upload the media? It might take a while as the upload speed of my internet connection is slow and the files total about 560MB.
@mike I am also seeing similar funky ALAC behavior that fixes itself when converted to FLAC. In my case, I am combining albums that I had earlier (pre-Roon) split into various subfolders back into a single folder for the entire album. All my files are in ALAC. Sometimes (not all the time) when I do that, the original subfolders remain in Roon, and no amount of re-ID’ing, re-scanning files, re-scanning storage, rebooting, etc will fix things. I used to grapple with the merge feature, but that also had problems.
Anyway, after reading this thread, the last few times this happened I went into the folder and converted the ALACs to FLACs. In most cases, the album immediately resolved itself into the single entity it should have been, with all vestigial versions disappearing. In one case, I had to exit/re-invoke Roon, at which point the album fixed itself instantly.
Definitely a correlation between these 2 similarly funky behaviors and ALAC files.
Can you zip up an album folder or two, upload it to Dropbox or similar, and PM me a link? I have a test in progress with @chrisbyrd’s media, but a few more examples couldn’t hurt.