Can someone help me with why my albums are not sorting correctly?

[Snowdog]

Content you’re reporting an issue with

Have you made any edits to this content in Roon?

Is this content from local files, TIDAL, or Qobuz?

Screenshot of import settings

Description of the issue

Below is a screen shot of the Genesis albums I’ve added so far. (A random place to start, but I was working on these albums when I was introduced to Roon, so I just ported them over.)

I’ve set Roon to use my file tags over its own.
In all cases the “album artist” & “artist” are set to Genesis.
The album titles all begin with the original release date of the album.

As you can see, for some reason that I cannot fathom, the dates restart from 1969 periodically (denoted by the blue arrows).

The very first album in the list should be the Genesis Archive (the second red ring) as it starts with the earliest date.

Just to keep things interesting, there is a Lamb bootleg in a completely random postition (the first red ring).

Does anyone have any clue why this is happening, what stupid mistake I might be making or what I might do to fix it.

[Snowdog]

Here are the albums, sitting in my finder, all in the correct order.

There are no spurious tags or meta-data in the files, but upon close examination of the editing fields for the album within Roon, there seem to be certain fields that say “using Roon data because your file does not have this data”.

I know. It’s not meant to. I don’t want that data to be used. I want the data I’ve supplied to be used & no other data whatsoever. Why is that so difficult?

[BlackJack]

When using artist sort option then albums are sorted by release date under artist. If you want them sorted by title use title sort option - use the filter to filter for Genesis if you are interested in albums for that artist only.

@Snowdog

I don’t want that data to be used. I want the data I’ve supplied to be used & no other data whatsoever. Why is that so difficult?

It’s not hard, just not supported. It’s not a goal of Roon. Roon is built around it’s own metadata cloud that provides enriched and cross-linked metadata. The ability to also use your own is just a fallback when data is missing or wrong.

[Snowdog]

Okay, well thanks for your reply. I’ll mark that as a solution, since it’s about as good as I’m going to get for the time being.

I do wish I could just switch off most of the “rich data cloud” that Roon is insistent upon providing for me. It’s my record collection. I already know that stuff! The same as I already know how many discs are in an album, but Roon insists on ruining my sleeve art by sticking a little number in the corner. I don’t suppose I can switch that off, either, can I?

Thanks again for your reply. There are a number of things I immediately love about Roon but if I’m going to stick with it, it’s gonna take some getting used to!