I have many different performances of Schubert’s Winterreise in my library, six of them sung by Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Today I noticed some of them were missing from the Tracks view. After some fiddling I found out that some of the albums I was looking for were joined in a cluster of “versions”:
Even weirder is the fact that sometimes, all by themselves, albums dissappear from and after a while reappear on this list of versions. For instance, I’ve seen the 1955 performance with Gerald Moore at the piano appear and disappear from this cluster. As soon as it is cut loose from the versions cluster I can find it as a separate album. And when it is in the cluster, it can no longer be found as an independent album.
The performance with Murray Perahia on Sony has at one time also been a part of this versions cluster. Although I’m not sure it was the real reason but after replacing the folder.jpg image file in this album’s directory by a higher resolution one, the Sony album suddenly became an independent album again… 
This the situation at this moment:
It appears as if there are only 4 albums containing a performance of the Winterreise by Fischer-Dieskau in my library, while in fact two of them are “hidden” behind the album on which Jörg Demus plays the piano (DGG “The Originals” series).
When the albums are “hidden” as a version of another album, they are not listed in the Tracks view. I was counting (or at least I was trying to…) the number of files in a directory “Schubert/Lied” and the number I found in the Tracks view was lower than what I knew to be the right number (as given by both MediaMonkey and Windows Explorer).
This can’t be right, now can it? I expect each and every track in a given directory to show up in the Tracks view, with no exceptions made for whatever reason, but most certainly not because some albums are (incorrectly!) considered to be Versions of another album.
Firstly, I think it’s not an unreasonable demand that a Roon user must be able to ascertain the number of imported files is exactly the same as the number found by MediaMonkey or Windows Explorer.
And secondly, having albums being hidden in Version clusters is also very undesirable!
EDIT (the next day):
This morning the situation is like this:
Especially the unpredictability of which albums are visible as “stand-alone” albums and which ones are not and the fact that the passing of time seems to be a decisive though random factor, are maddening!
By the way, all of these albums have been identified by Roon.
Here is a comparison between the track durations of the Jörg Demus and Murray Perahia performances that shows that the differences are greater than what Roon normally finds acceptable in the identification process of an album! So how can these two albums be considered to be clones of each other??? Also, these albums all consist of 16/44 FLAC files.
