Compilation vs collection vs anthology vs compendium

How does Roon define and differentiate the following:

Compilation
Collection
Anthology
Compendium

To my mind a compilation should consist of various artists, whereas a collection has a mixture of tracks by the same artist (but not an album). Anthology and compendium would be similar to collection in this regards.

Thanks.

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Did anyone bother replying to this?

Flagging @support but as it’s a weekend maybe need to wait for someone to chime in. Maybe got missed. And maybe the OP forgot about it too?

Not forgotten! Not heard much the team recently so have just been waiting.

Roon more or less accepted that Apple never got that right so they seem to not have bothered themselves treating differnt things separated.

From scratch I would suggest to create so called TAGs within roon, one for each of the categories mentioned. (you could add another one for box sets aswell). And the benefit is that similar to genres you could flag the same album into multiple tag categories.

Got my samplers physically in a separated storage location.
\NAS…\samplers
which then allows me to do the following thing:

inside roon
Albums>Focus>Inspector>Storage Locations> ticking the samplers storage location
Press first album long
scroll to the last
shift press the last
press the 3 dots top left section
add to tag
press the + for a new tag
enter ‘samplers’ for example
create
save

done

I agree these are potentially interesting distinctions (particularly Anthology vs Compilation) but from what I can tell none of our metadata sources make this distinction, unfortunately.

Is this something you guys have seen elsewhere? Are there are any sources we might be able to use to populate this data automatically?

If this is a something you’re looking to enter manually using Tags is probably the way to go for now, but we need to be able to automatically populate this data if we’re going to make a change here.

You won’t manage to get this automated. Can’t name a provider being accurate in these things.

Sampler vs. Compilation … discogs if ever.
But when it comes to things like Anthologies, box sets and such like … I’d say no way to get this automated.
You could perhaps run some function trying to check if a compilation is more or less a summary of known albums, since that’s what forms an anthology most times.
But the pitty is ‘most’ times not ‘all’ times, which is then a major argument against trying to automate this.

In return it’s lots easier to differ between a compilation and a sampler as @extracampine explained. This is next to 100% failproven since adopted that way by next to any software I could name besides things to do with apple since they always do implementations differt at any cost, something also called “defective by design”.

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Yes it needs to allow the user to enter or edit this information.

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Keeping this thread alive. There should definitely be a way to distinguish between single and multiple artist compilations. The symbol that they use foir both only applies to the latter.

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Any progress with this?

I seem to have lost the album type “compilation” alltogether?
Only way for me to identify my compilation albums at this time seem to be filtrering on the “Album Artist” = “Various Artists”.
Which by the way should NOT be treated as an artist at all, just a descriptor, a property of the album.

But i am very interested in the possibility to set a descriptor based on @extracampine suggestions earlier, at least the two main distinctions:
Compilation (several artists on one album)
Collection or Anthology (tracks performed by the same artist, but recorded during different sessions/periods/eras)

I like “samplers” from particular labels such as ACT, Chesky Records, Opus3 etc. and would like to sift them put of my collection in an easy way.

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Works for me still but it seems compilation has moved to other and not in type any more so this seems like another regression ui bug @Geoff_Coupe can you check with QA on this ? I am sure compilations was under type?


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You’re right! It was there, under “Other”.


But here we have primarily (most) collections/anthologys…

And to be honest, this is not what i’m looking for. There could be an album type Compilation/Sampler to represent the “various artists”-albums as well as the Collection/Anthology to represent an album with various recordings from one artist.

And there might as well be an album type such as “Tribute” where various artists interpret some band/composers work.


It would be reasonable (to me) that the tributed artist is credited as Album Artist in these cases.
Thoughts on that?

I would add “mix album” or similar into the mix also.

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