Hi gang. I’m a new user and have a few problems uploading and organising my collection that I need some advice on. I have roughly 50K tracks. 6500 of which are compilations that I have broken into basic genres, 3000 that are individual tracks that I have also broken into sub genres folders. The rest is just standard Artist, Album format.
With the compilations the best solution I can find is to set sorting preferences to Various Artists which means I have hundreds of compilations mashed together. If I go to My Albums and search ‘various artists’, then Focus ‘electronic’, it is missing about 70% of my electronic compilations. This makes it hard to find what I’m looking for. Is there a solution for this?
I also need advice on how I can best upload my collection of individual tracks in genre folders to Roon. I need some way that I can transpose the existing order of my folder structure into Roon, and be able to continually add to this over time. Also, ideally, these artists wouldn’t be displayed in the My Artists section of Roon because often I just have a single track of the artist and if they get added there it would substantially dilute the search functionality and browsability of the Artist page. I could turn these into compilations but you can only allocate a single album artwork so unfortunately this wouldn’t work. Is there a trick?
Roon doesn’t care about folders, just the metadata in file tags
Roon is very album-centric and breaking up your compilation albums will probably cause them to be Unidentified in Roon. This can cause performance problems beyond a certain threshold.
All primary artists get an entry in My Artists, you can’t avoid this.
Generally, the Roon software is very opinionated about how it wants things done and fighting against it will not give you good results. Based on what you described, I’m not sure that Roon is a good fit for what you seem to be trying to do
Thanks for your response! Most of my compilations are there when I search Various Artist, but when I try and narrow the search in Focus by genre it becomes a mess. My metadata is 100% accurate. I did it all manually as it was necessary for my previous setup. Roon’s automated genre tagging has gone astray. I could go through and correct this manually in Roon but I would like to avoid it as there are a few thousand albums and it’d take some time.
Regarding the folders of individual tracks, I assumed as much. Hopefully I can figure out a workaround for it.
Works ok for me. I use the filter to set various artists then use focus for genre or other criteria.
I also add is compilation to all my albums, Roon seems to have its own opinion that only compilation albums by same artist are classed as compilations which is nonsense.
Some its does I guess this is whats in MusicBrainz/Allmusic but it doesnt honor your own and no choice to set it to for imports. I end up doing a filter for all addtions for varios artists and block change them.
Agreed. It’s maybe not entirely unambiguous what qualifies as a compilation in principle, either. Together with the usual metadata inconsistencies and errors there’s ample scope for disagreements