When reading in a compilation, it would be great to have the source album listed under the track - or perhaps if a compilation of an artist’s output (for example the Mosaic box sets), a separate heading in the disc’s track listing with the name of the album.
If the data is available this would indeed be nice.
From what I’ve seen so far there’s probably not enough good metadata out there to make this work for enough compilation releases (and there are just too many out there). Haven’t checked with rovi/tivo if they do capture this at all but I believe to know that musicbrainz does not directly provide the info and I assume tivo doesn’t either. It may get reconstructed using the information about the recordings used in the compilation or via albums which also have that track but that requires preconditions (first album using the recording has to be in rovi / musicbrainz, tracks / recordings have to be assigned / tagged correctly …) which are not always, maybe even only rarely met.
Also, to fit into the philosophy of Roon, it may be necessary that the original album is in your library and/or available on a subscribed and Roon-supported streaming service.
Yes, you’re right, the metadata might be tricky.
I’d even be satisfied with a way to enter it manually, if necessary.
There’s a tag for this called discsubtitle. Why Roon have yet to support it I don’t know.
This when Roon Radio is playing?
No, I’m not too bothered when Roon Radio is playing. I really want it for my own CD library. I have quite a few jazz box sets of the type The Complete Wes Montgomery on Riverside. That would bring together a number of records under one box set. When ripping the CDs to my NAS, Roon recognizes the box set, gives it the appropriate cover and so on. However, the track listing make no mention of the original album the track comes from.
Why would I want that? I would have a record of which releases by a particular artist I own/have on my NAS and also it allows me to jump and listen to a particular record. Usually, in a box set, the CDs are laid out in chronological order, with one CD containing about 1.5 LPs. Sometimes an artist has a release, say with strings, followed by one in a trio setting. I may want to listen only to the trio release.
With box sets becoming more and more ubiquitous, in all music genres, this would be a really useful feature to have.
Your views/ desires on box set treatment are much the same as that expressed many times by many users over as many years as Roon has been in existence. At one point years back it was implied it’s being dealt with alongside being able to add reviews, biographies etc. but …since then it’s been crickets.
There’s a vorbiscomments tag called discsubtitle intended to carry those album/disc names - I populate it in the hope that one day Roon might decide to recognise it and use it for box sets.
In the meantime one thing you could try as a workaround is to add the individual album titles to a tag called recordinglocation for each disc, then rescan the boxset and you should see that appear under each disc as you navigate to it. Not great, but better than nothing because:
- it’s a partial workaround
- you won’t see it till you navigate to the disc so you still need to know which disc you’re after.
- On the positive side, Roon has no recordinglocation metadata for box sets so you’re not losing or overriding other data points and should the day come that Roon endeavours to do better with box sets you could just copy the recordinglocation metadata to discsubtitle or whatever tag it is they decide to implement/support.
I’d like to see this as well. I already tag tracks on compilations and sountracks, as well as bonus tracks on studio albums with the name of the original release so it would be nice to see it in Roon. I’m currently using the original album tag for this.
It would be good if it could link in with a track level release date as well.
Like how for live tracks it shows Performed [date], [location] for compilations it could show Originally released [date], [album]
Apologies for my ignorance but how do I do that? Can I give a tag per track or am I restricted to a tag per disc? The issue is that usually I’m getting 1.5 LPs (releases) per disc.
tag per disc