Can I have Roon observe the definite article rather than ignoring it?

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Have you made any edits to this content in Roon?

Is the album identified in Roon?

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Or any other article, for that matter.

I can find requests to have Roon ignore the indefinite article as well as the definite one, but not the reverse.

I would be screwed if A Perfect Circle got filed under P. :rofl:

… or “The The” got filled nowhere. But you ask a good question, methinks.

You can override Roon’s metadata, either by selecting the metadata from file option, or simply replacing it with something.

I override Roon’s metadata on a regular basis & have all my options set to prefer the file data.

Nevertheless, Roon is only asked to “prefer” my metadata & routinely ignores me.

That said, I’m not sure there’s a way to override the “definite article” problem using metadata, is there?

I don’t know enough about Roon to give an educated answer. I know how Apple Music/iTunes handles the articles, it uses a sort field, such “Sort Album”, and you can type whet you want into that field, including the article you want to include.

Yeah, I can go into my “artists” & “composers” & edit the sorting options for first & last names, but I’m not sure where I’d adjust that for album titles.

I went looking, and you can prefer Roon or your own metadata, or you can create something new as the album title.

I have a raft of albums that start with " A …", and Roon sorts on the that first article.

If you go into your album list and sort by album title, you’ll see what I mean.

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I don’t understand, are you having issues? Sorry for being thick, but Roon is taking definitive articles into account, where relevant?


To clarify, this is Album view, ordered by Artist.
Meaning Roon displays Various artist albums by their album title, and Album artists if available.

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Apologies for any confusion. I only mentioned the indefinite article because there were feature requests to have Roon ignore that, too, which would be a pain.

As always, my “problem” is so niche that it would probably leave most people scratching their heads & politely suggesting that I get out more. I was trying to solve a problem where albums were sorting differently in Roon than in the finder on my Mac & ideally they’d both be in the same order.

Specifically… In the finder on my Mac, firstly “The” is observed whereas in Roon it’s ignored & secondly the finder looks at the whole numbers to decide which is greater so the numbers 25 & 50 come before the numbers 1963 & 2005 whereas Roon files strictly by the first number then second number so they go 1963, 2005, 25, 50. My “mission” is to try & get the finder and Roon to show the albums in the same order.

As a result, I couldn’t get “The 25th Anniversary Album” & “The 50th Anniversary Collection” to do the same thing in both places.

The solution would be to rename the “problem” albums thus:

Twenty-Fifth Anniversary Album, The
Fiftieth Anniversary Collection, The

Which sidesteps the article issue & the number issue & leaves everything to file alphabetically.

I suppose I was wondering if there was already a switch available on a “per album” basis where I could choose to ignore the article & I got drawn into the feature requests side of things which, after a good night’s sleeps, feel like a bit of a blind alley.

As you were. :rofl:

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Creating a new Album name may well prevent Roon IDing the album, take care . If you do it ID first then change it

When you get a fair number of albums the album view is quite useless no matter how it’s sorted , except for either applying Focus or Filtering .

So filter missing the A or The off

JRiver allows a “collection “ of prefixes to ignore , it even crosses languages. If you ignore The , it will ignore Die as well, bit confusing at times

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Have you tried using the sort order tags? Here are mine, using the Yate tagger:

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To be fair, I have established a rock solid set of techniques for sorting in Roon over the last year & I don’t give a hoot whether or not Roon identifies the album. In fact, because of all that blurb that ends up littering my library, I actually prefer it when Roon doesn’t identify the album & I wish it could be hidden, but that’s a topic for another thread.

I am a Yate user, though, so that may well be worth looking into. Thanks. :slight_smile:

Ah a non classical listener :smiling_imp:

Not IDing a classical album loses vital metadata such as Compositions and Movement.

Rock etc doesn’t matter …

Absolutely not. I have about 10,000 classical albums. I add in my own metadata because I don’t like the way Roon does it, but Roon does it anyway! :rofl:

When I first started using Roon, I was always banging on about the problems I was having but I’ve mellowed because I basically love Roon, despite the issues. So I just put in the stuff I can control & try not to worry about the stuff I can’t.

That is serious hard work, I have around 4000 and manually added Composition and Movement. A bit of help from MusiCHI Tagger and JRiver but still a lotta screen time , life is too short :joy::joy:

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I know, right? Also, I have a very idiosyncratic way of organising my music, so I kind of have to break a few Rools to get things how I want them.

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