Compilation artists not listed in Artist screen

New Roon user. Testing an import and seeing this problem.
A compilation shows the artist name as Performed By but these identified artists don’t show up in the main Artist screen/list, nor in search results.
Is this a bug? How to I get the artist to be listed and searchable?


Hey @Sydney_Low – because Roon retrieves so much metadata about every album in your collection that we identify, we only show artists that have albums in your library. Or to be a little more technical about it, we only show performers that have “Main Performer” credits on albums.

Generally this isn’t an issue in real collections, but let me know if there’s something unique about your case and we’ll take a look. Thanks!

Hi Mike,
These are “unidentified” albums as they’re compilations that I’ve made. Can’t these show the Artist name in the tracks in the Artist screen?

My tracks in compilations are tagged:

  • Album Artist: Various Artist
  • Artist: The actual artist name

How should I tag compilations so that the actual artist is shown in the Artist screen?

Syd

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@support

Similar: my unidentified compilations in Roon (e.g. Kscope samplers, Vive Le Rock compilations) generally show the artist for each properly-tagged track as a performer (which is good and expected). But if I don’t have any albums by that artist in my Library, Roon creates a “rogue” artist entry with no bio, reviews or Tidal albums, even if that artist turns up with Tidal entries during a search in Roon.

When I add even a single Tidal track from that artist to my Library, then the “new” artist entry and the previously rogue artist magically combine into a proper artist entry. The rogue artist entry goes away. If I then delete the single Tidal track that I added (creating again a situation where I don’t have any albums by that artist in my Library), Roon still hangs on to the artist info that was generated by its addition and the rogue artist entry does not reappear.

So it appears that giving Roon a kick in the pants by adding the Tidal track forces proper identification of the artist(s). I would like (and expect) that Roon could find and display a proper artist entry without me having to smack it upside the head first by adding tracks.

Hey @Jeff_Bellune – thanks for the question.

Roon is built to treat artists, performers, and composers as richly detailed entities that go beyond the handling you see in lots of other apps – they’re not just a piece of text. So, for example we can support 2 artists with the same name, ensuring you know which Bill Evans you’re looking at on a given album or credit.

Generally speaking, Roon is not going to make judgments calls about the identity of artists in your library without any content (or context) on which to base those judgments. So, if you have a few albums by this Bill Evans Roon will connect the dots and assume that unidentified content in your library is the same Bill Evans.

However, if Bill Evans doesn’t exist in your library at all, the app isn’t going to hazard a guess and, for example, mix your unidentified content in with the other Bill Evans.

Thanks @mike. That makes a lot of sense. And in the mea culpa department, it seems that I was faulting Roon here for the same type of thing for which I praised it there:

Roon, TIDAL and MQA

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Has Roon made progresses in that direction? I believe that when manually adding credits to a track Roon should allow to pick-up names from Tidal or other sources of metadata. It is so painful being forced to add an artist to the library just for the purpose of working around rogue artists.