i’ve read (some of) the various box set related requests.
-definitely, a per disc album art would be appreciated-
-but it’ not sufficient. i think that a 90 cd box set (very probably, a collected re-edition of individual albums) should not be displayed as a single album
my request would be to have the option to separate in the gui a box set in its individual albums. or (as i think someone suggested) to add a navigation level (but this i think is more difficult).
in practice, 90 albums that share the same metadata identification.
in the single album view, i could see the specific album art and the subset of metadata.
this should be an option, and not a general rule, because for smaller box sets (2 CD or similar) the general rule should be to show them as a single album
But as a workaround with “original jackets” box sets you should be able to do this manually. It is obviously a lot of work.
Periodically I do a search on the forum for box set handling. Not a high priority it would seem. There are many posts from 2015 mostly repeating similar requests. There is even a 2014 reference in this one but I couldn’t open it as I think it was to an alpha testing forum.
actually, i was wrong.
i could split a 90 cd boxset (identified). and then, the single cd displayed their corresponding albumart, and i could (in the album settings) ask roon to show the album title in the tags.
the only problem is that i had to to this manually… and it’s been lengthy. but it worked.
As you think about the suggestions, this seems like a crazy amount of work for a situation that should be automate. Roon really needs to address this!!
Most players can easily do this – JRiver, Bluesound, Muso. Musichi.
One of the problems is that Roon works with a data model, where the music files are matched against their database. However, even if the box set is in their database, they are not able to match up individual albums in the box set.
To me this is a problem with their model. They need to allow more flexibility to handle these situations, or allow the use of user custom tags.
As a person who has built statistical models, you learn that all models have limitations and you have to allow for exceptions.
yes, this is another level of the problem.
but at the moment, i could accept this lack of match, requiring me to tell roon to merge all those albums of the boxset. an easy task, as i have some (but not millions) of boxsets.
the point here is more how boxsets are shown by roon. i see 2 possibilities:
-an option like “show all the CDs of this box set as individual albums, with their titles and albumarts”
-add a browsing level, similar to the composition/part structure. you select the box set and say: show me all the albums of this box set.
in any case, the albums are identified as part of that particular box set, and inherit all the relative metadata (label of the boxset, release date, artists/performers and so on)
if i should have a preference, i think the second solution is better. in fact, that would be interesting even with small box sets (like a CD + bonus CD). in this case, i don’t want them to be shows as separate albums. but it would be nice to explore them separately as if they were 2 albums (for example, because the bonus cd has an alternative albumart…)
but at the end, as it seems this feature has been address from the beginning, and it has not implemented yet, i think that the easiest solution would be ok (whatever it is )
)