I just downloaded Simon Rattle’s 9 Beethoven symphonies with the Berliner Philharmoniker. To get them identified in Roon, I played around with the CD version (the vinyl version was the other choice) of the metadata Roon found in an identification search, so that the symphonies matched in tracks (with the exception of 4 tracks, whose timing apparently was outside what Roon considers tolerable deviation). So I got a “known” recording designation (eg, including a little essay).
Unfortunately, Disc 1 has symphonies 1 and 3, and the other discs have a combination of the remaining symphonies. Since I’d play the symphonies as stand-alone pieces, I would like the 9 symphonies to each be on a separate disc, namely, Symphony 1 on Disc 1, Symphony 2 on Disc 2, and so forth, all discs under one album. I started experimenting with Fix Track Grouping but stopped when I got Symphony 8 on its own disc but handled as a separate album. As I said, I want 1 album for all 9 symphonies, each symphony on its own disc.
Rather than continue experimenting, let me ask: Is there a way to achieve the result of 9 symphonies grouped under 1 album, each symphony on its own disc?
You can treat the symphonies as stand-alone pieces from the composition page with no effort rearranging the symphonies across discs. If you select one of the symphonies from the composition page roon will just play that symphony even if in the box it has been split across discs. There are usually a lot of advantages just accepting roon on roon’s terms.
But box’s are so badly handled I routinely rearrange them. Many others seem to as well from comments on the forum. It is better to rearrange the discs in an external tagger. If they were originally released as standalone discs then you can identify them as the original releases with the original artwork (instead of a box) and then just collect them together with a common tag like “The 9 Beethoven Symphonies” to create a pseudo album of nine tiles.
You could also rearrange the discs and number them 1-9 and merge them together as an “unidentified” box. But that will be a lot of work because now you are dealing with both an unidentified box and unidentified albums so you will almost certainly have to hand tag everything with canonical composition names including WORK/PART etc. and all the individual performers, soloists, ensembles choirs, conductors and choir masters to get something approximating a roon layout.
I would rip or edit all symphonies with composition/work and movement/part tags and use the disc tag to pretend they were all separate discs. Make sure you let Roon keep your own metadata for those fields.
I have been streaming my classical collection with Squeezebox so I had to invent a system that would keep tracks as parts of bigger compositions. I chose to rip every composition into an album, so a disc with two symphonies would end up as two separate albums. Now I am editing all my tracks moving the album tags to composition and track titles to movements. It is a lot of work, but it gives me excellent overview of composers and works…
I’d put each symphony’s tracks in a separate subfolder, and number the “discs” 1/9, 2/9, etc. That works for me when I want to do what you are talking about.