I frequently have to correct artist credits for tracks and albums because Roon is doing a very poor job of differentiating artists with the same name. I thought I would give Valence a shot to report a bad band image and this fundamental issue persists over there, too:
There are 5 different artists named Andromeda on this list. How am I supposed to guess which is the right one?
If needed and appropriate I add the same number as discogs has to the name. After that I cleanup and merge artists wherever possible. Itās painful but there seems to be no alternative.
Iāve been adding [I] [II] [III] to artist names to differentiate but matching Discogs is a good idea. Those local edits donāt seem to carry over to Valence edits, though.
On the album side you can get Roon to differentiate by adding the artist and and albums to MusicBrainz then giving it a few days for Roon to integrate into its own metadata store. At the very least at that juncture youāll be able to assign the album to the correct namesake.
As for sorting namesakes in Valenceās art director - thatās the part where I wish you luck. But itās fun trying to figure out which is which when there are no clues, isnāt it.
Roon used to boast about their object model database that happily dealt with all this āsame nameā confusion but things seem to have deteriorated somewhat in recent years.
It would be really helpful if Roon implemented the Disambiguation field from the Artist. That would make it easy to distinguish and give users a way to submit/correct data when needed.
Thatās a good point. There are often ample hints within albums that should also assist with assigning an album to the correct namesake - composition matches across albums, genres, common performers & other credits should provide strong hints of which artist to assign an album to, but to dare Iāve not seen any evidence that this type of data has been leveraged to improve matches.
Thereās also ample opportunity for confidence scoring and prompting a user to make the final determination when confidence is below a threshold, but again thereās no evidence thatās being considered. Iād think coupling this to machine learning would deliver good results. Like all things commercial though I guess theyāre asking is the juice worth the squeeze.
Always a good idea to tag @metadata_support as they do not always get to read all the posts. Iāve been waiting for a fix for this for a long time as well
Roon has made so much progress on the technical side in the past few yearsā¦ itās been such a great ride! My hope is that some similar degree of attention can be focused on metadata integration next. Iām sure we all realize Roon is at the mercy of the upstream third party data providers for thisā¦ but is there some way to leverage the wisdom of the crowd for at least this one issue - artist disambiguation? Itās a pervasive challenge, is there a way to think outside the box?
The thing that frustrates me is that MusicBrainz IS a third party data provider for Roon and already has disambiguation for similarly named artists. Theyāre probably importing this field but not exposing it.
Here are the search results from MusicBrainz for the āAndromedaā example above: