I am currently on my free trial and I’m enjoying the experience so far but there is a very serious issue for me that may hold off on my decision to pay which is the artist page and view. I have searched extensively on how to resolve the issue and have found countless forum and reddit posts but there doesn’t seem to be a good solution.
The issue is Roon’s metadata scraping adding artist data that is largely incorrect and/or excessive, then the UI’s artist view not displaying the “Album Artist” tag but instead this rather incorrect “Artist” tag.
An example where the pulled metadata is incorrect:
The Chemical Brothers - Further
The Chemical Brothers are a very famous duo but this album of theirs and ONLY this album displays their individual names (Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons) as separate artist entries. Saying that this album is either of the individuals’ albums is flat out incorrect as no one would ever refer to it being a work that’s created by either individual and not the name of the group. To make it worse, “Further” is the only album where this happens so it is even more inconsistent than all of their albums behaving this way.
An example where the pulled metadata is excessive (and incorrect):
Bright Eyes - A Christmas Album
This is a compilation album that very clearly should be listed with Bright Eyes as the album artist but Roon has decided to pull every single collaborating artist and create separate artist entries for them. I couldn’t find a way to check or uncheck any metadata settings to circumvent this from happening. To make things monumentally worse, clicking on the individual artist that is not the correct album artist (Bright Eyes) lists ALL of the tracks in the album so its not like the artist entry contains just the track that they collaborated on.
My hope is that there is something that I don’t know or am doing wrong because just from these two albums, my artist view is ballooned to +12 artists. These are just two specific and egregious examples I’ve picked out but there are many other examples where the same artist is listed twice, once as their alias and once as their name to display a separate set of albums. Requesting some guidance on a resolution. The exact same library has been scraped in the past by many separate audio library solutions and these issues have never occurred and I’ve also checked the actual tags themselves to make sure they aren’t the cause of this strange behavior.
This is more or less the only thing that I holding me back from purchasing lifetime at this point. Thank you in advance.
Roon identifies your album and then uses the Metadata provided by it’s metadata providers. (I want to say Allmusic / Tivo but I don’t remember off the top of my head).
However, if you wish Roon to use the file’s properites then you need to go into settings, Library, Import Settings. Then you will see Album level settings followed by track level settings. I think the values you are looking for are on the Track level
You may have a point if the rest of chem bros albums are under either or both of the individuals but they are not. I also think its erroneous to list individuals from a group as separate artists to be credited for an album. Like for example Hotel California is in no shape or form a Don Henley album no matter how much credit he should receive for being part of it. For categorization purposes it is flat out excessive information at best.
You can simply edit the additional artists in the album or track credits, if the album was added to your Roon library.
Get used to it because metadata is full of errors. That’s what they get from TiVo and MusicBrainz.
mjw
(Father! Father! Resist not! Let us destroy the core! Set us free!)
8
I fundamentally disagree with this point of view. For instance, if I want to view all the works of David Sylvian, it is important that he is credited on releases from Japan and Propaganda, as well as solo albums and collaborations.
Artist collaborations and "musical root* are an important part of music discovery, and this is something Roon does well. Indeed, I don’t think other player come close to Roon in regard to metadata and relationships.
Labels are possibly the worst for metadata, but at least we can influence what comes from MusicBrainz, and let Roon use our preferred source , i.e., local metadata.
I still prefer Roon because it does at least part of the work, but nevertheless the point is that one should get used to editing metadata one way or another.
mjw
(Father! Father! Resist not! Let us destroy the core! Set us free!)
12
