It is not possible to merge performers and artists. But although I am able to merge artists I cannot seem to use that feature to consistently avoid duplicates. The objective is that what ever version of an artist equivalent is in the public metadata roon uses or is in my tags or on the back of a CD doesn’t matter very much because I have linked them. I just cannot seem to get this to work. This is a typical example.
In my tags I have “Sir John Barbirolli”. In general roon doesn’t use these British “honorifics” and to avoid duplicates the simplest thing is to re-tag to “John Barbirolli”. But I am weary of the editing. I have been re-tagging for over a year now. It is all over my library. There is also Dame Janet Baker and Sir Edward Elgar and even Lord Yehudi Menuhin and many many more. If I do not re-tag. This is what I get:
I have tried temporarily creating a primary artist “Sir John Barbirolli” and merging that to “John Barbirolli”. But the result is the same. The only way I seem to be able to get rid of the duplicate is to either edit the album artist in roon or change the album artist directly in my tags. Normally I prefer to change directly in my tags. So, if I change album artist (and artist) from “Sir John Barbiroilli” to “John Barbirolli” in my tags I get this:
But I don’t want to go through this manual step every time I import a Sir john Barbirolli album. What I would prefer is to merge all variations to the artist “John Barbirolli” such that it doesn’t matter which version roon picks up from its metadata suppliers or are in my tags or on the back of a CD cover and I never get any duplicates I have to manually fix. Is this possible?