I’ve just noticed that I have a serious double artists problem. Many well-known artists are split into two different ones. One is the actual artist and the other has the same name but is either mistaken for someone else or left unidentified. See attached screenshot for two examples.
This is very disappointing and frustrating for a $700 software. It does not happen with free solutions like Foobar2000, Kodi, or even the $60 worth of Jriver. I couldn’t find am option to merge artists or force identification like I can with albums.
P.S. I just noticed that it happens to any artist that has unidentified EPs or Singles. Roon takes the Singles and associates them with another unknown artist (who is the other Al Stewart guy who died in 2016 according to Roon’s bio?). And I just discovered that I have a 3rd Michael Jackson who is a radio host…
You can merge artists but you need to have at least one album of each in the library. Then select both (or more) artists and there should be a merge button in the top right window corner. After clicking, you can choose which one should survive. (You can list and un-merge them from Settings > Library, if you made a mistake)
However, you will not be able to see the info on the merged artist, just the one you merged into.
In some cases, this does not seem to work (there is no merge button) for reasons I don’t understand, but most of the time it does.
It happens when the metadata coming from the metadata providers is messed up.
However, an actual duplication of the same artist usually happens more or less only with less known artists. Sometimes people just have the same name, and then it can happen that the wrong one is incorrectly credited on an album. In your Micheal Jackson case, for instance, the third screenshot seems to be a guy from Australia who exists and just shares the name with the Michael Jackson, and he was incorrectly credited on Dirty Diana
In such a case you can open a new topic in Metadata to describe the issue (one topic per issue) and Roon will report it to the metadata provider. (Or edit it locally in your Roon)
In your Al Stewart case, these are also different guys, look at their birth/death dates and places. Though looking at the images, it seems that the wrong picture may have been assigned to the second one (born in 1927). Not sure but his main photo looks a lot like the first Al Stewart. This is the born-in-1927’s Al Stewart’s small image:
If just the picture is wrong, you can click “Improve this photo” and fix it on Roon’s Valence:
Another source of duplicate artists is when you edit artists. If you add a credit for an artist that is not yet in your library, the real artist entry is not found during editing, and it creates a stub entry with the same name. These can later also be merged, but it’s generally better to first add an album to the library where the real artist is credited. Then it will be found during credit editing and you don’t end up with a duplicate in the first place. If you prefer, you can later remove the album from the library that you only added to have a real artist entry.
mjw
(Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Call that job satisfaction? I don't.)
3
In both cases, there appears to be two artists of the same name. For Al Stewart, there is the Scottish musician, and a deceased American jazz trumpeter (with incorrect photo.) I’ve no idea about the “other” Michael Jackson, born in Australia.
However, the issue is not the existence of another artist of the same name, but the incorrect attribution to the releases. You should be able to correct this yourself, especially if the EPs and singles are unidentified. Indeed, it may be worthwhile attempting to identify the releases using Musicbrainz Picard.
