I’m struggling to understand how Roon orders albums. For example I have rolling stones albums on the decca label that i want to see first. I also have the same albums on the London label and I call the artist Rolling Stones - London or Rolling Stones (London). I want these to appear after the albums labelled simply “Rolling Stones” but Roomie seems to want to put the albums with the qualifier first with the rolling stones. with other artists the behaviour is the opposite - artist name with qualifier is ordered after. I can’t understand the logic or methodology being applied. What do i need to do to get the desired result - artist name followed by qualifier comes after albums with only artist name.
Related question. I’ve set compilations to be ordered as various artists. However with the various artist section of albums i’ld expect them to be organised by the name of the album but this isn’t the case - in fact it seems random how various artists are organised. how can i organise various artist albums by title?
I think the sensible approach is to have a single artist and then identify each release under that artist using the label and catalogue number. This information may be displayed on the Album cover. In addition you can use focus to filter by artist and label.
Regarding compilations of various artists go to Album view and use focus to select compilations and various artist. Then short by artist, date, date added etc.
For Compilations, I saw a post where someone suggested sorting by Various artist, but I want all my similar compilations to be grouped together, so what I do is a) Tag all Compilations and then b) tag them by group such as my Uncut Magazine Sampler CDs:
I don’t think Roon has considered this organizational scheme. Default sort for Artist is release date. In other words, if you group your albums by artist, they are sorted by release date. If you create two artists named Rolling Stones - “Qualifier”, remember there is an “Artist Name” field and there is a “Last-First Sort Name” field for each artist. Roon will use the “Artist Name” field to sort on unless a “Last-First Sort Name” is specified. So if you create an artist named Rolling Stones - London, you may not have specified a “Last-First Sort Name” or that field may simply be Rolling Stones. Look at these two fields to see if there’s a pattern to the sorting problem.
I think trying to organize the way you have described is going to be problematic for Roon. It simply isn’t designed to have two names for the same artist. I think Martin has the right idea. Use the focus function to view the albums based on the data you prefer then bookmark that view for future use.
Has Roon recognized your 2 “Artists” ? Normally Roon “uses its own !!” and ignores your tags
Likely it will have Identified the Album and downloaded from its own Metadata source the Artist ie The Rolling Stones . You will have to go into each album delete The Rolling Stones as a credit and Edit to your name version. You should be able to do this en mass by selecting all the albums you wish to edit
Up to now, I’ve been doing what Mike suggests - manually changing the artist name to for example “Rolling Stones (London)” or “Rolling Stones - London”. What I can’t figure out is why Roomie then organises these before albums with default name “Rolling Stones” This is true even if I manually change the name to “Rolling Stones” The strange thing is it doesn’t seem to consistently do this - I also have given some titles given the name “Rolling Stones (unreleased)” and they order after “Rolling Stones” It’s a bit OCD i know but it would be easier if the first titles i see in order are the default name.
I will play with focus more but one problem i encounter is it seems hard to rely on release date as a tag because some reissues seem to get assigned the reissue release date instead of original release date
On the compilations question, focus is a great tip but it’s actually clunky compared to how iTunes/apple music did it. There, various artist compilations are ordered at the end of single artist albums and then ordered by title. I do think this is better than ordering them as various artists and then not ordering them by title as Roon does. There’s no obvious logic to logic to how Roon is organising these - i’m guessing it’s something like first artist in the compilation but just seems like this would be an easy thing for Roon to improve
Another thing i’ve found is if you have multiple volumes of a title ending in the volume number so for example pebbles 1, pebbles 2, pebbles 10, pebbles 11, roon puts pebbles 10 and 11 before 2. Agains seems like something that would be easy to fix; otherwise presumably need to label them pebbles 01, etc to make it organise logically.
Any further input, suggestions or comments appreciated!
Yes I have thanks but the thing is that then seems to result in all the compilations being interspersed among other albums when I sort by artist.
What I would want is to sort albums by artist, all various artists comps to be grouped together, ideally at the end of the single artists and then ordered by title. That’s what iTunes/Apple Music does and it just makes more sense than what Roon presently does. Don’t get me wrong i like Roon. I subscribed about 8 months ago but i’m just getting serious about migrating from iTunes and starting to try to better understand the functionality.
I forgot to mention, when I order my Compilations, using TAGs, if you start from the main Roon menu, choose Albums, then hit the / key and start typing, as my screen shot above show, I got all my UNCUT albums in one screen, the RED is what I typed in, but I was able to stop after typing UN, so it’s really quick and easy to find and view albums as groups. I then edited each album name as shown with the release Date/Mo. I have hundreds of compilations and do the same, so they all show up. Here’s my MOJO compilations:
Coming back to this issue of ordering of albums in Roon. The system has a strong bias to sort by release date for any given artist. That’s not all bad, in fact is maybe even good once i’ve gotten used to it… except for various artists compilations. These can often be part of a series and you really want to sort by title alphabetically for them as a default regardless how albums sort for an artist. As it stands, i have various artist albums that are part of series spread all over the place within various artists albums i’ve bookmarked which is just not good
It appears to me the fix for this would be to have a default sort by title or separate selection of how to sort for various artist albums. If there is a way to do this in Roon today, I’ll be happy to hear about but otherwise would like to request the Roon team consider improving the functionality for various artist album sorting as described.
I too would like to change the default sort order, I don’t know why it can’t remember your choice and then use that choice for ever until you change it. But for now you can easily get what you want, in the example I showed you above, if you do a search, find the albums you want, sort them the way you want, then hit the Bookmark icon on the top and save it, it will always come up the way you want sorted the way you like.
Thanks, didnt realize you could change sort with a bookmark
That’s good althouGh still think there should be a default Sort selection for various artists and they should all show up at end of albums - yes like itunes!
another organization question … is there a way to list all albums roon has not identified?
Yes!
From Album view, Select Focus, then Inspector and check “Identified” it will come up as a green filter. Click the green Identified filter again and it will turn red, indicating it is showing you albums NOT identified.
