Despite all Prefer File settings Roon often decides to use its own track names

Dylan, another thing about classical I haven’t yet mentioned are the track names. Despite all Prefer File settings Roon often decides to use its own track names, usually coupled with its own grouping (and frankly, my metadata is better).

Hi @anon20084133,

Can you share a screenshot of one example of this?



Dylan, where are we on this one?

As your example is a multi-part composition, you have to edit the album preference for multi-part compositions to “Prefer File Data” or Roon’s metadata for the multi-part composition gets chosen.

If you really want track titles and no work/part names, choose “Disable Multi-Part Compositions on this Album”.

See also: File Tag Best Practice - Tagging Multi-Part Works

Update: But I see you already know this all.

I’m impressed with your thorough research, but I need Roon Support to weigh in on this. There are some holes for classical music fans (like a composer sort setting but no composer sort).

I’d like Dylan to find out why there is a Prefer File option for track name that gets ignored in the import. If a multi-part composition overrides takes precedence, I think that’s a bug.

For multi-part compositions Roon displays part names instead of track names, according to it’s configuration either from Roon’s metadata or your file tags. In such cases Roon usually uses it’s own metadata if there is no file data available when set to “Prefer File”. If you want to see the track titles instead, you have to tell so (“Disable Multi-Part Compositions on this Album”). As the option indicates, you have to explicitly do so for every album where that should be the case. If done then Roon will disable the display of work/part names and display track names instead, again according to it’s configuration, either from Roon’s metadata or your file tags. See also:

As there is no global option for disabling the display of work/part names right now, you might want to open a feature request for it.

Dylan’s statement affirms what I want:

“You can globally set Roon to prefer file tags for composition grouping, but that will just use your tags rather than disabling completely.”

I have it set, and it doesn’t appear to be working. In other words, I’m okay with the intrusive grouping if it will still use my track names. Please let him respond. Thanks again for your help.

Hi @anon20084133,

Do you have Work/Part names in your file tags? If you’re using the preference to prefer composition grouping from tags, it’s using these work/part tags to do so, not track names.

Note that this might not be exactly what you’re looking for here, though — We have some “behind the scenes” logic that is used for compositions to help identify them. Much of this data comes from our metadata providers and is used to identify various performances of a composition. There is no way to just edit the Part names in Roon.

Thanks Dylan. First, the Wikipedia style help forum attracts well meaning contributions, but we ultimately need your definitive input. Do you guys still keep an eye on threads when a customer responds?

On the issue, I only populate album, artist, title, and track with dBpoweramp’s batch converter. I don’t really mind the grouping, but I’d prefer my track names. Can this happen?

Hi @anon20084133,

No — Track names and part names are not the same in Roon and there is no way to replace the part names with track names. If you don’t want to use composition grouping you can disable this entirely in favor of track names, but this is a per-album setting with no global option as BlackJack pointed out above.