I wanted to get some thoughts from other users on how to deal with box sets. I have a reasonably modest collection of CDs imported into Roon (about 800) but quite a few of these - maybe about half - are CDs from the classical music mega box sets that have been common (and amazingly inexpensive) over the last few years.
My approach with these sets is to rip and import each CD individually and have it existing in Roon as its own album (ie not part of one album with 50 or so discs). The benefit of this is
• I can display each album with its proper artwork - many of the CDs carry the original artwork when the album was first released on LP and it’s usually very attractive
• Each album has its correct name, and not Disc 1 / Disc 2 and so on
• Quicker load times - an album with 50 discs can take quite a few seconds to load.
There are, however, some disadvantages to this approach. In a few cases, the box sets contain only albums which have been released previously on CD, so with a little bit of tweaking the individual albums are all identified by Roon. However this is not always the case, and they would have been identified correctly if I had imported and grouped the box set as a multi disc album.
Where the box sets were imported as individual, separate albums, my approach was to tag them with the box set name, so it was easy to focus on that tag and view a particular box set’s individual discs. This would have been perfect if it wasn’t for the fact that the tags keep disappearing if I ever have cause to restart Roon! It’s very frustrating to take time tagging 50 or so discs to discover later that there are only 15 discs with that tag attached!
So it seems that, for me, there’s no ideal approach yet. I know that better handling of box sets has been asked for before… Is this being developed at the moment? I have the Rubinstein 144 disc set that I have yet to import!