Debbie Taylor MIA

Is a soul singer with no albums but 7 tracks listed on Tidal. When I put her name into Roon, I cannot find her listed as an artist. Do artists have to have an album released before they can be found in Roon under the artist search, or is there another way to find these tracks easily on Roon ?

I just added her to my Tidal favorites and she shows up in Roon but no tracks, only the four albums she appears on.
one song on three of the albums albums and two songs on the forth, one a repeat. so four track total.
Check yourself
Too sad to tell
Never gonna let him know
Lets prove then wrong

And it wont let me Favorite some of the tracks. Searching for the tracks does not yield anything.

Same idea with this one, which was mentioned in an article I was reading today by Bob Stanley. Patti Jo - “Make me believe in you”. This track is listed in Tidal, but in I can’t find it Roon under, artist, track or album "From the Soul, Vol. 1 ?

It would be nice if someone from the Roon Support team (sic) had the manners to answer a legitimate query.

Hey Keith,

Sorry for the slow response here. We actually discussed this late last week and I wanted to get back to you myself, but I was travelling for the last few days. Three people mentioned this thread to me today, so I assure you you’re not being ignored, I just needed to find the time to respond with the right amount of detail.

So, you’ve identified an interesting case here. In Roon, you’re generally looking at Roon’s enhanced metadata, and that includes when you’re looking at TIDAL content. This means you’re less likely to see artists represented by text like Marvin Gaye & Diana Ross, and are instead likely to see links to the rich detail pages that actually represent those two artists. This is because all the metadata in Roon is processed in our metadata service before it reaches you.

Roon’s handling of artists is particularly rich, and you can read more about that in this article, which is about file tags, but which can also give you some context about Roon’s metadata in general. The key takeaway here is that even small collections in Roon can be tracking hundreds of thousands of people once you factor in credits and composers. So we need to be selective about what we call an “artist” in Roon – if we didn’t, half of our users would end up with a 100k people in the Artist browser.

In Roon, the definition of an artists is someone who has an album – to be a bit more specific, it’s a Performer who has received a Main Performer credit at the album level. That’s the criteria for inclusion in the Artist browser, and for pretty much anywhere else you see the word “Artists”, including Search Results.

So here’s the rub – you’re not actually trying to search “Artists” in Roon, at least not according to Roon’s definition of “Artist”. What you’re looking for is a search of Performers on TIDAL, which isn’t currently possible in Roon.

As soon as you add one of those albums to your Library, Debbie Taylor will be a Performer in your library and you’ll be to find her under Performers – because she doesn’t have any albums, Roon considers her to be a performer (as opposed to an artist) and so you won’t be able to find her when you’re searching TIDAL (as opposed to your library). Feel free to open a feature request for searching of TIDAL performers and we can look into adding this functionality depending on how much demand there is.

I’ll also just say it was hard for me to understand this issue initially because I actually do have a number of albums on which Debbie Taylor appears in my library (which prevented me from seeing the issue). I have a bunch of her work with Patrick Adams, who actually reunited in New York this summer with his band and a number of singers he produced over the years. I don’t think Debbie Taylor was there, but Fonda Rae and Donna McGhee were there, and it was pretty amazing hearing some of these songs live.

The Patti Jo song you mentioned is a personal favorite too (there’s a solid Tom Moulton mix out there as well), so please accept my compliments on your taste, in addition to my apologies for the slow response (and for the length of this post). If you have any questions, let me know @Keith_Brown. Thanks!

1 Like

Many thanks. I find the “Deep Soul” genre to be rather thin on Tidal and I suppose - no doubt naively - I expected more. In a perfect world, an intern would be sent here for the summer:

http://www.sirshambling.com/sir_shambling/artistlist.php

and told to beef up the catalogue.

Anyway, here’s a great track from Ms. Taylor: