Flexibility in names for artists (The Beatles vs. Beatles, The and Dylan, Bob vs. Bob Dylan)

Feedback Feature Suggestions
1

Would it be possible to have Roon read artists names in the various ways they are stored? I have most of my collection stored in folders, which are named by last name etc. So: “Dylan, Bob” and “Beatles, The”, versus Born Dylan and The Beatles. This is true for the metadata too, so the Artists field will show “Dylan, Bob”. Currently, Roon (1.2) interpretets these as different, so does not group stuff from Dylan in one and the same header. It even starts spreading my files over other folders.
Is there any way to have Roon re-interpret this, or is there but 1 way and that is for me to edit all Metatags?

2

Have you tried the artists sort by under settings and made it to last name.

Does that help?

3

Thanks, yes I tried. Doesn’t"t really help as it sees the entries as different artists. So, “Adams, Bryan” is not the same as “Bryan Adams”, and only the latter has the full Roon tags.
It would need Roon to recognise that what’s behing the comma actually is the first name or the like…

4

You may wonder why I did this. Simple - to have order in the folders (artists) as created by iTunes…

5

I did this too, a few years ago as I starting ripping my CDs using iTunes. It made sense at the time to use the Last Name, First Name sorting schema. I regret doing so and am grateful I only got through the “G” in the alphabet.

This is one of the many “If only I hadn’t…” in my digital library building experience. Certainly not the worst decision though.

6

Indeed, made sense at the time, now I regret it…
So… I fear I will have to re-edit more than half of my music. Especially the classical will be fun :frowning: I grouped everything under the composer.
And that for several 1000 albums.
Now, I know what I will do the next dark evenings…

7

You can utilise additional TAGs in the music files themselves to help. This has helped me with problematic artists such as The Beatles.

For example…
Artist = The Beatles
ArtistSort = Beatles, The
AlbumArtist = The Beatles
AlbumArtistSort = Beatles, The

If you want to add these for all your collection, scripting with tools like MP3TAG can assist, but I decided to just stick to the artists that Roon needed a bit of help with (which I updated manually without scripting).

Nick

8

Thanks Nick. Been thinking about that. But errr… my music collection is quite big… (many 1000 albums).
So, re-tagging will be a huge amount of work in any case.
It would be so much simpler if the software can interpret the names either eay. Which now it can’t.