Artist Tag is associating with the incorrect Artist on Import

I know this issue has been raised before, but I’m hopeful that there is a workaround that I have not yet found.

When I import an album where the Artist tag at the track level is “Dave Matthews” Roon continues to associate this with Dave Matthews the “American Jazz saxophonist active principally during the swing era” instead of Dave Matthews “…the lead vocalist and guitarist for the Dave Matthews Band.”

This continues to happen even though my library contains hundreds of tracks from the latter (i.e., lead vocalist of DMB) and none from the former (i.e., saxophonist).
I am now experiencing a similar issue with Goose the “American jam band from Wilton, CT” and GOOSE the “Belgian electronic band.” where Roon is continuing to associate with the latter when I want the jam band from CT.

I know of the two proposed workarounds: a) manually edit the artist on each track within Roon or b) merge the artists. I have been dealing with this issue by continuing to utilize solution a, however this is tedious and very time consuming. Merging artists isn’t a good solution either and doesn’t always work.

To everyone – including Roon developers – is there a way to select a default artist so that the software auto-selects the one that is most likely correct based on a user’s library? I suspect many users are like me in that most of the time it’s the same artist and manually editing each track isn’t practical. Accurate metadata is a key feature of Roon and this continues to be an issue. Any help is greatly appreciated.

It’s likely some disambiguation with one of Roons metadata providers, Is the album fully identified in Roon? What is the album in question?

This is happening across many albums, not just one.

In many cases, these are unidentified albums so Roon should be reading straight off of the metadata tags. The tags are all correct, but of course there is no way for Roon to know if it’s Goose from CT or GOOSE from Belgium.

In other cases, it is an identified album like “Some Devil” by Dave Matthews which was still picking up the saxophonist on the track credits and I manually changed this on each track.

One would think that Roon should be able to know that if hundreds of tracks in the library have already been updated, it would be best to default to the artist in the library in huge numbers as opposed to continuing to default to an artist that isn’t in the library at all.

No it won’t necessarily get the correct information from the tags if the albums isn’t identified. It won’t know which one to pick so likely picked wrong one.I don’t have any to try out but all the albums I see for the band in Qobuz attributes correctly adding it to my library adds correct Dave Matthew’s. I guess maybe one unidentied album and it added the wrong one and that’s being done going forward.

If you don’t have anything in your library by the other Dave Matthew’s then you batch edit all to change delete the primary artist. Then delete the artist from your library. The unidentified album is there no match for them in Roon at all?

Right, I agree. On the first import of a particular artist it grabbed the wrong one (i.e. Dave Matthews the saxophonist vs. Dave Matthews the vocalist) and now it’s doing that on every single unidentified album, of which there are dozens, despite the fact that I manually changed the artist at the track level. My question is why is Roon doing this as it doesn’t make sense programmatically. Either Roon should be able to learn that the artist is the one I have in my library and default to that moving forward OR it should give me the option to choose the default on import for unidentified albums and use that.

This is primarily happening on unidentified albums for which Roon doesn’t have a match and likely won’t since they aren’t standard releases. For example, if I download a live show from Goose’s website or Nugs.net in all likelihood that isn’t going to be in Roon’s database or it’s partner’s databases.

Of course I can continue to manually edit each and every time, but that’s a ton of work. Roon should be able to allow me to change this on import going forward since it is the same error over and over again.

Have you deleted the other Dave Matthew’s from your library? I would remove him from all entries delete him and then remove them, do a library clean up then add them back and see if it fixes things . If these are bootlegs then getting Roon to properly identify the correct artist and album is unlikely unless they are in MusicBrainz.

When you say deleted from my library, can you be more specific? When I go to “Artists” in Roon, he does not show but perhaps there is another way to check to see if he is deleted from the library.

I’m not looking for Roon to identify the album or artist - I’m just looking for a way to tell Roon how to prioritize an artist it reads on a tag for an unidentified album. This seems like something Roon could add or allow by adding a simple bit of logic to the Artist page in Roon like a toggle switch that says “Default Artist” - that way when you import something unidentified, it would always grab the default artist instead of continuing to incorrectly associate someone over and over and over again. Alternatively, Roon’s logic could look to the user’s artist library first and default to an artist that is already IN the library vs. one that isn’t. This is imperfect, but far better than the way it works now.

This seems to me to be a small change to the Roon code that would solve this problem in the vast majority of cases.

So he’s currently not showing up in your library under artists? Then go to library clean up and see if it has anything to cleanup. Often removing albums from Roon, then doing a library clean up, then add them back in clears metadata issues. As Roon can get stuck and won’t change it.

But yes likely need better tools to sort things out. I would not hold your breath though. Create a feature request.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t work to resolve this issue.

While I’m not holding my breath, it certainly seems like this is a relatively easy fix in the software.