Did "Identify album" always remove local credit edits?

With the new frequent updates I often get confused whether a behavior is new or was always like this :slight_smile: Maybe someone call help me out:

Yesterday, with build 952, I ripped a CD, imported it into Roon and missed the fact that Roon did not identify it automatically. I proceeded to edit and add extensive credits for the album and for individual tracks. Then I realized the missing identification and triggered it manually. An appropriate album was found and I selected it.

I was a bit shocked to see that the identification removed all my local credits for the album and tracks, replacing them with decidedly less complete Roon credits.

Now, I seem to recall that I occasionally overlooked a missing identification in the past and that identifying it after making edits preserved my local credits. But I am not sure.

Can anyone confirm?

If it’s not new behavior, it would still be nice if Roon could be made to respect my local credits if I happen to identify an album after creating them - or at least show a warning.

The way of working was always that Roon tried an automatic identification from the available data. This can never be more perfect than the data supplier. It lacks both quantity and quality even in the manual post-processing. Who of us can really reliably tell the individual versions apart? The algorithm is superior to us.

In the end, anyone with infinite diligence can decide for themselves what is used and whether any manual work is done at all on identification or manual maintenance in or out of Roon. For my database, it would almost be better if Roon did away with the 20% recognition altogether. 80% is not recognized.

I think you may have misunderstood what I was asking. Roon did not auto identify the album because of some slight track duration differences between the info that Roon had and the CD release I had. That’s fine.

I did not notice that the album was unidentified and made extensive manual edits. Then I noticed, clicked Identify, and accepted one of the albums that Roon found - which was the essentially correct one.

Due to this late identification, Roon removed all of my manual credit edits and applied the ones from its own database, which were much less complete.

So my question is if it should be removing user edits upon album identification, and if it was always like that, because I can’t remember.
(Apart from late manual identification: What happens if I have local credit edits for an album that is not in Roon’s database at the time. If Roon learns about the album at a later date, will it auto identify the album and thereby also remove my local edits?)

I think it depends on what you have set in
Settings, import settings for each individual field.
Prefer file
prefer roon
merge file and roon

That is how I had understood it. Roon does nothing with your data, which they maintain outside. The moment you manually ask Roon again if it knows and can describe this album, your own efforts become obsolete. That’s Roon’s logic and if you now want your own efforts again, you have to prioritize them again and adjust them so that Roon doesn’t always have priority with its new assignment.

No that’s incorrect. See above.

@ged_hickman1 it’s like above, one’s priority decides what we see.

Ok, I never changed my preference settings after the initial setup, so in this case it probably was always the same and it just never happened to me before. Ok thanks.

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If you specifically manually re-identify (Edit → Identify Album) an album it will clear out any meta-data that you have entered, and, reset, any album specific meta-data preferences.

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Thanks, good to know that this didn’t change inadvertently. I still think there should be a warning in this case as it’s not obvious - in all of software development, user-provided data is sacrosanct

Yes, I learned the hard way back in 2015. After that I make little to no changes IN Roon and do any meta-data editing I want in the files themselves.

This doesn’t always work as expected, either. E.g., one of the tracks I imported had John Doe and Exene Cervenka (of the band X) as a composers in the file tags, another one had Clapton, Bruce, and Pete Brown (of Cream) as composers. Roon assigned a completely different John Doe and Pete Brown, but got the others right. Although it would not have been too hard to figure out that the Doe and the Brown from the same band as the correctly identified other composers was probably meant, and not a completely unrelated one :slight_smile: So I had to edit that in Roon, I should just have made all my edits before identifying :slight_smile:

Yes, there are times where I have to correct things in Roon, but, I try to do enough outside of Roon to minimize that.

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