Box Sets B-52s vs Grateful Dead

Is this me, my music’s data or Roon? I added some new music today and my B-52s boxed set of studio albums got their own LP names but my 13 studio album Grateful Dead set all has a generic “Complete Studio Album Collection” title with know way to tell American Beauty from Working Mans Dead. See picture with green circle around B-52s and red circle abound a couple of the dead’s I get that they won’t have the actual album art, but I’d like to be able to tell one album from the other.

Looking closer at the Dead and The Cars it looks like on both it got the self titled albums (The Cars and The Grateful Dead) then applied the box set name to the rest. Is this standard SOP for Roon and I just got lucky on the B-52s?

Take a look at our documentation on box sets: https://kb.roonlabs.com/FAQ:_How_can_I_ensure_multi_disc_sets_and_box_sets_are_identified_properly%3F

Generally, there are a couple of options when it comes to box sets:

  1. You can group them together (as outlined in the article linked above)
  2. You can keep them as separate albums

Either way you choose, the metadata and structure of the files is going to be important. If you want to keep them separate you can identify them as the correct album (instead of part of the box set). You can learn more about identification here:

https://kb.roonlabs.com/Editing#Metadata_Identification

If you have any questions please let me know!

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If you don’t mind tackling some meta data kung fu, the Roon “Work Name” field (created for classical albums) can be extremely helpful in organizing box sets. With this you can make the box set or collection name the official album title and then use Roon’s “Work Name” field to label and organize the individual albums. After doing this and loading into Roon, you can see the proper organization and easily play the entire box set, an entire album within the box set, an individual cd or a track. You can see this as follows in one of my box sets (and I picked a Grateful Dead one to continue the theme):

Note the “Fare Thee Well” Album which is comprised of 12 discs organized by date/location of play.

You can see the organization where you can view all tracks (the view shown) or just the tracks in an individual CD. You can also see the effective album name – in this case the date/location of play “Solder Field, Chicago, 7/3/15”. Scrolling down, you see:

Now you can see the next album name “Solder Field, Chicago, 7/4/15” and also see by looking up that there were 4 cds that comprised the entire performance on 7/3/15.

The ONLY thing missing in this type of organization is the ability to see both the box set album art and the individual album art — the latter is missing. And I will note you have to be willing to do some meta-data editing prior to loading into Roon to get the proper construction with Work Name.

In my collection the files are organized as below:

But then I’ve used a meta data editor (in my case Yate) to organize the tracks properly under each Work Name that represents an album title.

While there are many ways to organize box sets, this process works extremely well for me and takes advantage of the capability that Roon offers.

As a final note, If a box set is just a combination of albums and the albums are clearly the most important thing vs the box set name/organization and you absolutely want the album art vs the box set art, then I generally choose to just keep the albums separate but add a Roon Album Tag to them so that I can see that they were originally part of a box set. You can see this below for a CSN album:

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@Craig_Palmer Thanks so much for the detailed response!

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