Confused by album editor / metadata preference / track title. Is it working?

I am confused about using the “Album editor” to choose which metadata is used for track titles.

The disc in question is Simon Rattle conducting the Berlin Philharmonic in Mahler’s 10th Symphony, a live EMI recording from 1999. I ripped the disc with dBpoweramp, which consulted MusicBrainz for the mp3 tags and got them all correct as far as I can see. Specifically, the five movements are labeled correctly: the track title tag for the first movement is “Symphony No. 10 in F sharp minor: I. Adagio” and the other four movements are similarly tagged.

Now I copy the files over to my Nucleus. Roon shows the tracks simply as “Movement 1” etc. Huh? To fix this, I open up the album editor for this disc and edit the metadata preferences. Specifically, under “Set preference for the tracks of 1 album,” I select “Prefer file” for “Track’s title” and then Save. The result is, alas, no change to the displayed track titles. Huh?

Finally, I tried using the track editor to set the metadata preference for the track title track-by-track. Same result: the tracks are still listed as “Movement 1” etc.

And thoughts on how to do this right? Thanks in advance!

Roon does not display track titles for multi-part compositions – it displays work and part information instead. Read also:

Learn to live with it, tag your files accordingly and change the metadata preferences or tell Roon to ignore the multi-part compositions grouping for the album in question (album editor at the bottom).

Thanks for replying, BlackJack. But I don’t think your answer addresses my issue. In my Roon library I have literally thousands of similar multi-part compositions (e.g. symphonies) in which the individual tracks (e.g. movements) are correctly labeled by the track-title mp3 tags. This disc is different.

Moreover, changing the multi-composition grouping in the album editor had no effect.

Also, please note that I did change the metadata preferences in Roon, but that had no effect.

Further thoughts welcome.

Roon has a habit of insisting that its own metadata is correct - even if you tell it to use file tag metadata.

The workaround is to break the link with Roon’s version of the metadata, by setting the album as “unidentified”. In the Album editor, click on the Identify album button, and you’ll see that Roon has picked a result to use for the metadata. Now click on the “None of these look right” (twice) then click on the “Use basic File information” button. This should break the link with Roon’s metadata, and start using the file tag information…

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Thanks, Geoff. That indeed worked perfectly. I’m grateful.

Grateful, but also puzzled. Why does Roon have this habit? It seems more like a bug to me: we are given a chance to override the default behavior, but when we exercise this choice it doesn’t work.

Any thoughts about this?

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