I’ve been using Roon for about 2.5 years and thought I was pretty good with it, but this one just threw me for a loop and a quick search didn’t lead me to anything that I could find but…
I have 4,850 albums.
When I am viewing them in any sort mode, the UI reports 4,850 albums. But when I view them “By artist,” I get something like this:
In this view, if there is a different artist for different tracks on an album, it displays the album multiple times (once for each represented artist). Whoa. Is this new behavior, or something I’ve just overlooked?
Or, maybe better questions are: did older versions of Roon allow you to sort Albums by Album Artist rather than Artist and I just can’t remember that? is viewing Albums by mere Artist even useful, when that is really a track-based dimension of our music?
I think I noticed one post on recent days mentioning that there may have been a change in Artist sort regarding Primary Artist vs Album Artist, maybe there is some effect there? I tried switching “Name for compilation sorting” from Various Artist to By Album Title but it makes no difference for me
Well. Thanks for that tip. If I change this setting, it “fixes” the issue. My normal setting is “By album title” and switching to “Various Artists” brings the number down to 4,850. I wonder if this is changed/fixed in EA?
Haven’t tried rebooting a Roon just yet. What are others seeing when this setting is changed?
I’m seeing the same as @Suedkiez - i.e. no change to the total no. of albums. I am on EA, but there’s nothing in the release notes about any change to this behaviour from the Production build.
For your Compilation albums, do you have “Various Artists” as the Album Artist, or have you listed the track artists in this metadata field as well?
PS I think if the Album is known to Roon, it will set the Album Artist to “Various Artist” itself for Compilation albums, even if the individual artists are listed in the file metadata as Album Artists. If the album is Unidentified - then it is likely to use the file metadata, and thus you will have the artists listed as Album Artists and Primary Artist. See here for an example of Roon ignoring file metadata because it knows about the album (and I have “Prefer Roon” set):
I’m quite strict about having compilations’ album artist be Various Artists, and only that.
This problem is affecting both identified and unidentified albums. As a matter of fact, I know that I have only 158 on identified albums, and I wanted to just review this number, which I do occasionally, and it was up to 212 or something. That’s how I discovered the problem, actually.
For what it’s worth, ARC doesn’t exhibit this behavior.
It might be related to the ongoing issues with VA albums handling that surfaced after the recent performance fixes, where in certain cases VA albums get split up
True, but the list is never complete. Either minor stuff gets lumped into „various fixes and improvements“ or even major ones are omitted like, this time, the full screen ARC on iPad…
Indeed. This is definitely standard practice. This might have been a small regression that they have unceremonially fixed in EA. It’s certainly not a critical bug at all.
