Let’s say you have an artist that has played in multiple bands. Take Prince for example. He has music under his own name, with The Revolution, The New Power Generation, etc. Now, when Roon scans your library, if metadata is found, under Artists you will have separate tiles for each band (in this case only the Prince one has an artist bio and picture. Prince & the Revolution and Prince & the New Power Generation do not). If I was to go into the Revolution tile there are blue hyperlinks for Main Artist (Prince & The Revolution where only the “Prince” part is linked) and Album Artist that take me to other Prince tiles.
BUT if you have albums Roon can’t find metadata for OR if the spelling is not EXACTLY like what Roon is looking for there will also be tiles based on the Album Artist name. I have 2 additional tiles for Revolution and New Power Generation albums because some of my albums used & symbols instead of “and” and because I like to use beginning capital letters for all words in my tags (And instead of and).
No big deal, right? I should be able to edit the metadata using Roon and make everything match.
NOPE!
For some reason editing metadata with Roon does not make things combine. I can change the band names to match exactly but they still won’t combine into the same tile. Even if the names are exactly the same and I click on the hyperlink it still won’t take me to the other tile with the same name. As far as Roon is concerned I haven’t changed a thing UNDERNEATH, just on the surface.
The key to making everything work was to use an external metadata editor. I use MP3Tag. Once I used that and changed the Album Artist tag to EXACTLY match what Roon was looking for then the albums went to their correct place.
One thing though. Roon organizes based on Album Artist. In the case of artists that have multiple bands if you want to keep everything in individual tiles make the Artist field be the main performer (Prince) and make the Album Artist be what’s actually listed on the album. If you want all of the bands to be under the main performer change change that around.
(By the way, this only works for albums that either don’t have metadata found or you choose not to use it.)