Thanks for taking the time to write this out. I think you will find this thread to be worth a read. This post, too.
I completely agree with you about the shortcomings.
Some, like (4), are relatively localized user interface warts. Things like this will get attention once our launch craziness calms down.
Some are data problems with our metadata providers, like (2). To some extent, this may be improved by the changes discussed here, since those changes will separate the concept of “album artist” from “main artists associated with an album”.
For (1), you need “Prefer Local Metadata” (a feature that is not released yet, currently being designed) + maybe some basic editing features, too. We are still working out our relationship with metadata editing, and trying to decide how deep of a metadata “grooming” platform Roon should be. One thing is very clear: it’s important to provide a way for people to “get back” any pre-existing data that we may have damaged in the process of metadata enhancement.
(3) is probably the most complex problem of those you mentioned. If our data sources don’t know about the album, it’s difficult for us to know about it. I think many of the metadata providers out there just give up when it comes to classical disc sets.
One idea I’ve been thinking about is attempting some kind of work-level identification when album-level identification fails. Even if we can’t get great album-level data (review, artwork, etc), it would be nice to get the work structure into a reasonable state. That way, if your files started out with reasonable tags + album information, we can at least make the system superimpose work/part structure and composer information on the tracks. This + whatever data is present in your files would be a huge step forward from where you are today.
The most important thing, I think, is that we are working on it. These data modeling problems are really the meat of it for us. You can think of Roon as a sort of research platform for figuring out how to model and navigate music collections–it’s going to grow and change over time as we learn more and do more. It will take time, but we’re not going anywhere 