Christmas time is coming and so I had to start searching for my Christmas music, of which most are in compilations. I used a good couple of hours today to learn about the stuff, and - unless I am again doing something wrong - here are my lessons learned:
The way how Roon creates compilations is a deep mystery to me. I did find a couple of CD’s I imported as a whole, all the others are divided into different artists causing the one disc to be in the worst case 15 different “Albums”. And believe me, I did import those albums using the very same principles during ripping.
If you select one such compilation album and want to listen to it, after the last song the “Roon Radio” kicks in and does follow the artist, not the genre. In other words, if I have a rock band performing (in their style but still quite melodic way) a Christmas song, then the next one can be … least to say, out of the mood against all the previous songs. Additionally, on some of these “short” compilation “albums” you can’t even select “Play from here”, and thus after the very first song, Roon will start playing something completely different kind of music.
After reading all (that I could find) forum topics about the compilation, I still don’t know, how to “re-compile” the “uncompiled” albums back into one album. The only way for me was to create Playlists of these - which turned out to be a very good way as then I was able to easily share those with my wife, too. Ease of usage is the key here.
Sorting of the Albums does not affect on the “un-compilation” Roon does when it imports the music.
Once you create the playlist of these uncompiled short albums, the graphics usually don’t follow. In most cases, you have a top left-hand corner of the “right” image and all the other corners are this black-grey…
A bit out of the topic, but once you select an Album to be played, the Loop & Shuffle buttons are behind the Queue-button. Why they can’t be on the front page?
So, given my lessons learned are correct, I suggest that:
Roon needs to focus on keeping things simple. This is, what Apple does really well in their products. You shouldn’t need to click twice to select, whether to shuffle or not.
Understanding Roon is a bit more than just standard Apple products or like, some more in-depth product/help guidelines are needed. The “Roon User Guide” is way too general for the issues I am describing here.
Roon should create some more sophisticated ways to manage the library. The library itself can be “as it is”, but the user should have ways to “merge” some albums (i.e. to remerge the compiled Albums) and thus have a better view of his/her own music.
Comments welcome! I am personally very happy with Roon, but I think there’s still quite a lot of work to be done… Happy to be part of the journey!
You can do this already. Select the albums you want to merge and a bar is displayed across the scree. Click the 3-dots and choose Edit. Finally, click on Merge Albums.
I had the same problem with compilation albums, of which I have an unfortunate many. The Roon solution is to use “Focus” (click on Overview, then Albums, Focus should appear at the top). Focus has a checkbox for “compilations”. If you’ve chosen Albums and checked Compilations, your screen should show all your compilations by album cover. You can then tag and save that to get one-click access.
The limitation to this method is that it doesn’t update if you add another compilation to the tagged group, i.e. it isn’t a SmartPlaylist as in iTunes. And, I guess, it isn’t as convenient as having Compilations be its own category at the level of Artists, Albums, Tracks, and Composers.
There could definitely be more options and features to support compilations. As people have said before, there are ways to improve the initial identification, but it does not solve everything. For one thing, box sets (one artist, and often made from albums release separately previously) remain a headache. For one thing, I’d love for Roon to just allow me to toggle between both views, rather than having to “force” one way.
When it comes to playing the right song in radio with a seed from a compilation, that can be a great deal trickier. After all, the software cannot easily know why that song is the seed. Currently all it can do is take the artist and find correlations from there. I have to say it would be great if Roon gave the option to play radio by mood instead, others do it, but it would take a significant effort (like the purchase of an existing database, or the algorithm to analyse tunes, etc).
By the way you don’t even need to set “Albumartist” to “Various Artists”, you can just leave it blank.
Also note that Roon sees an album of tracks of different artists as “Various Artists” and Greatest Hits albums, i.e. albums of tracks by a single artists taken from different recordings, as “compilations”. As such many “live” albums are also seen as “compilations”.