Apologies if this has been addressed elsewhere. Keen for an update on this problem.
I just added an album to Roon, which is unrecognised. The artist is listed as “various artists”, though it should be “mother gong”. The folder it is in is “Mother Gong - Eye”.
I changed the album artist using the “edit fields” option. This option seems to be a misnomer however - as when I click save, the field doesn’t change to “Mother Gong” - it keeps “various artists”, and simply adds “Mother Gong” below it, and not even clickable. Also, the album doesn’t appear with the other Mother Gong albums.
Is this expected behaviour, and something which will be remedied when metadata editing comes?
File tags are stored in the file. Roon can prefer them to the Rovi or user metadata stored in the Roon database. You can edit the file tags in MP3TAG or any other file tag editor and tell Roon to use that metadata.
Well, that doesn’t work for me at all. I set it to prefer the metadata for album artist (to Steven Wilson) and it still picks the Rovi one which is all sorts of messed up.
I have a lot of albums showing up like this and personally I can’t stand it. There should/needs to be a way you can only set it to only the main artists. I have also noticed a few albums where the artist comes up as “Various Artists” and there is no way to get rid of it (i.e. The band Spirit and their s/t debut comes in as Various Artists).
Andybob - I know you can choose between Roon and the file tags - but there is an option to “edit” and type your own. What does that option actually do then, if not edit the tag?
Writing an edit in Roon modifies the Roon database but does not affect the file tags attached to the file.
Take “Album Name” for example. There are three sources of metadata. The external supplier, file tags and edits I make in Roon. I can choose which of these to prefer but my edits in Roon will not overwrite either the external supplier or the file tags. I can overwrite the file tags using a file tag editor, but not in Roon.
Thanks for the clarification there. I hadn’t clicked that the edits in Roon don’t modify the file tags, and that these tags will continue to be used despite the edit.
Our current product design handles this well in the vast majority of cases, including albums that genuinely have two main performers, like this one for example. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a few examples of albums where AllMusic seems to designate way more people this way than we would expect.
We’re doing some analysis on this to see if the problem is widespread enough to necessitate a change in the product. For now this seems to only affect a few albums, so I would encourage everyone to submit corrections directly through the album’s page on the AllMusic site for now. It’s pretty easy, and our experience is that they tend to fix issues quickly, which then filter down to Roon.
Surely this issue affects more than just “a few” albums? What about classical albums, where a piece may have an orchestra, choir(s), and soloists? I’ve always ensured that these are all listed separately in my ID3v2 tags. Does AllMusic (and by extension, Roon) just lump everything into “Various Artists”?
