Differentiate artists with the same name

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:

Screen Shot 2022-11-16 at 9.50.43 AM

There are 5 different artists named Andromeda on this list. How am I supposed to guess which is the right one?

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If needed and appropriate I add the same number as discogs has to the name. After that I cleanup and merge artists wherever possible. Itā€˜s painful but there seems to be no alternative.

Iā€™ve raised this more times than I care to remember, good luck getting anyone to care enough to do something about it.

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Iā€™ve been adding [I] [II] [III] to artist names to differentiate but matching Discogs is a good idea. Those local edits donā€™t 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 youā€™ll be able to assign the album to the correct namesake.

As for sorting namesakes in Valenceā€™s art director - thatā€™s the part where I wish you luck. But itā€™s fun trying to figure out which is which when there are no clues, isnā€™t it.

Roon used to boast about their object model database that happily dealt with all this ā€˜same nameā€™ confusion but things seem to have deteriorated somewhat in recent years.

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I have over 25,000 edits on MusicBrainz. :slight_smile:
https://musicbrainz.org/user/EvilGnome6

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.

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Thatā€™s 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 Iā€™ve not seen any evidence that this type of data has been leveraged to improve matches.

Thereā€™s also ample opportunity for confidence scoring and prompting a user to make the final determination when confidence is below a threshold, but again thereā€™s no evidence thatā€™s being considered. Iā€™d think coupling this to machine learning would deliver good results. Like all things commercial though I guess theyā€™re 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. Iā€™ve been waiting for a fix for this for a long time as well :slight_smile:

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Roon has made so much progress on the technical side in the past few yearsā€¦ itā€™s been such a great ride! My hope is that some similar degree of attention can be focused on metadata integration next. Iā€™m 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? Itā€™s a pervasive challenge, is there a way to think outside the box?

The wisdom of the crowd approach has worked well for artist photos, so the same approach on this issue has promise.

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The thing that frustrates me is that MusicBrainz IS a third party data provider for Roon and already has disambiguation for similarly named artists. Theyā€™re probably importing this field but not exposing it.

Here are the search results from MusicBrainz for the ā€œAndromedaā€ example above:

I can easily see which is the right one. If information needs to be fixed, I can submit a correction.

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Oh wow, I didnā€™t know! Youā€™re rightā€¦ it may be a fix coming then!

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