I curate my library carefully, making sure tags are as I want them and as complete as possible. One common problem is the ARTIST tag when there’s more than one artist, and having Roon properly parse the tag into different artists.
I know how to make it work: In Yate I can separate the artists with “;;;”. For example:
ARTIST: Artist1;;; Artist2
However, it would make sense that Roon understands that:
ARTIST: Artist1, Artist2
because many downloaded or ripped content will set the tag this way.
But Roon doesn’t do this and instead seems to think the artist is “Artist1, Artist2” !!!
An additional problem with this is that XLD only keeps one of the artists when it transcoded (eg AIFF → FLAC), so only Artist2 will show in the transcoded file’s metadata.
Sorry, but the usual delimiter for multi-entry ID3v2 tag fields is a semicolon and not a comma. You’re asking for Roon to deliberately break this convention.
The convention arose I suspect because of the requirement to support the “Last name, First name” sort ordering which some prefer to use, so that both choices could be supported, e.g.:
ARTIST: Fred Smith; Joe Bloggs
ARTIST: Smith, Fred; Bloggs, Joe
10,000 Maniacs
Earth, Wind & Fire
Crosby, Stills and Nash
Choir of King’s College, Cambridge
But it would appear to be not that common. I have 50 instances from 13,136 artists.
Depending on how your library is set up, you may want to add a comma delimiter in import settings and just manually edit occasional miss fires by roon. For others this might not make any sense but the option is there. I have several artist delimiters set but chose not to add a comma delimiter for artists, although I have one for genres.
I forget what metadata conventions are used on Qobuz downloads (which is most of my download purchases). I recently purchased an album from Presto Classical and in that case artists were separated by a comma, and Roon took the two artists as one. Changing the comma to three semicolons in Yate renders the proper split in Roon. Using only one semicolon also does work in Roon but does not work in Audirvana. Lastly, the three semicolons is not preserved properly by XLD when transcoding FLAC to AIFF, but the single semicolon is preserved.
Bottomline: Presto metadata is problematic as artists are comma-separated. So I have edited those to a single semicolon to not have issues with XLD.
