I’m seeking help with a problem using Focus. I am a new user testing how Roon navigation and discovery works with a large artist collection. I’ve uploaded 650 albums of Grateful Dead recordings and split them between three different Roon primary artists; ‘Grateful Dead’, ‘Grateful Dead Archive’ and ‘Grateful Dead Bootleg’. All albums also include ‘Grateful Dead’ in the secondary Artist metadata field.
I want to use Focus to filter on the primary artist ‘Grateful Dead Archive’ (example). There is no primary artist filter but there is Performers which I presume is similar. I can select ‘Grateful Dead’ as performer which successfully displays the full 650 album catalogue. But I have to click ‘view more’ in order to select ‘Grateful Dead Archive’ or ‘Grateful Dead Bootleg’. At this point… if I select either of those two artists, the list of displayed albums drops to zero with the message “try removing some focus criteria”. This problem only seems to occur when selecting one of these two particular primary artists. All the other artists that are offered work fine.
If you try to manually find one of the affected albums that is not showing up properly with the Focus filter, right-click it, 3-dot menu at the top and press Edit → Edit Album, what details do you see listed there? Have you ensured that the correct field is the one that Roon is focusing on?
Thanks for the advice, As far as I can tell the metadata is all correct although I am not sure how to interpret your question “Have you ensured that the correct field is the one that Roon is focusing on?” Every album has the correct primary artist although many of them lack any additional credits.
I am trying to filter on a primary artist but there is no ‘primary artist’ filter in Focus, the closest would seem to be ‘performers’. My two ‘problem’ primary artists (Grateful Dead Archive and Grateful Dead Bootleg) display correctly in the list of performers which also includes an accurate count of albums for each of them (pic attached). But if I actually select either of them, the album count drops to zero and nothing is displayed.
Perhaps there is a key difference to Performer vs Primary Artist that is causing this?
Alternatively is there a different way to filter albums by Primary Artist?
Have you tried using the “filter” search (magnifying glass on the right side just about the display of library) for “Grateful Dead Archive”? If the filter search returns the correct 316 recordings then save this search as a bookmark (which is the notched rectangle icon in the upper right hand corner). Do the same thing for “Grateful Dead Bootleg” and save it as a bookmark.
Of course that still leaves how to filter out the 50 or so Grateful Dead recordings that are not either Archive or Bootleg. However there most likely is a way to do what exactly what you want using a few custom file tags, unfortunately I’m not the one to help with that since I don’t use custom file tags. Hopefully other community members will be able to help sort this all out.
I’m sorry that I don’t have any help to give, other than to say that I think that’s a brilliant way to break up the catalogue of Dead material, and I may be copying that for my own collection of Grateful Dead.
Thanks for the suggestion. Unfortunately that doesn’t really help. I would like to use Focus to trim down the album list to a single artist, leaving the filter search box free for further detail. Your suggestion (a good one in every other respect) shuts that option off.
[Point to note: the reason I have this problem is that the Roon search filter is unable to handle multiple keywords. I usually find that two keywords from an artist name and album title is all it takes to narrow down a search. But Roon can only handle a single keyword/text string so i am looking for another way to filter the artist as a first cut. I realise that I can achieve this via My Artists as opposed to My Albums, but My Artists then offers a different set of Focus filter options (not sure why?) which does not include fields such as date and genre that I want to use.]
Not sure what the issue is, but personally, I would use Tags here instead of forcing the Performer criterion to hold these entities, which seem to me to be album classifications rather than performers as such…
No, because it’s a tag and unnecessary. When you add new albums with a particular primary artist, then these will automatically be included in the Focus > “my primary artist” …
Thanks Geoff, I get that. But I’m going round in circles here, maybe you can help. My problem (one of my own making) is finding a way to quickly drill down into a large list of albums by a particular artist. I have several such collections. They are all tagged with primary artist, title, genre and year. Typically (in other systems I have used) two to three keywords from those fields is all I need to filter down, with the option to sort by date or title. I am currently struggling to achieve the same with Roon.
Roon main search can handle multiple keywords and dates and give me a list from my library. But there are no options to adjust the sorting. Alternatively, the artist and album browsers offer sorting capability but the filters cant handle multiple keywords or dates. So… I’m trying to add an extra search dimension with Focus, hence this thread.
To summarise what I have discovered: In the artist discography browser, Focus does not offer date as a filter. In the album browser, focus does offer date but doesn’t offer primary artist as a filter. In other words, there’s no simple way to list all the albums by an artist in one year using focus. I also want to focus on primary artist in the album browser so that I can use the filter for other keywords. But this isn’t working for me as per the previous contents of this thread.
This probably isn’t an issue with more moderately sized collections. But it is a challenge endlessly scrolling through collections of live recordings that can span several decades. Filtering is (usually) a terrific way to quickly find an album or cut down a list of albums to explore. But as far as I can see, none of Roon’s three main routes into the collection (main search, my albums, my artists) offer the full combination of keywords, date filters and sorting capability that I need. Instead, each offers a different combination of some of them.
Thanks for the suggestion. But i dont think tags will dynamically update when new albums are added and Ill keep forgetting to add tags. I smart idea but it wont scale (for me).
You are correct in that you need to add tags. However you can add them to the base files and they will be picked up by Roon. So adding the field the the new files should be part of adding new file process.
Well I would only do this for those you are having an issue with, i.e. The Grateful Dead.
You can add a Tag directly to albums by using Edit and then select Add to Tag. However, at that point it is only in the Roon Database. You can add a metadata tag to your music files that Roon will scan for and automatically add the Tag. That way if you need to rebuild your library you won’t have to redo Tags. The instructions to do it that way are found here: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/tags#ROONALBUMTAG__ROONTRACKTAG
I would suggest if you have never used a Tag, to select a couple of albums and/or tracks add a tag or two and play around with it. Tags are super versatile in Roon. While your use is to add a tag to an album, a tag can be also be added to Track, Artist, Genre, Composition, and other database objects.
Tagging is likely the most precise and accurate solution here, although it’s undoubtedly arduous from a curatorial perspective.
We have an open ticket that will prevent Roon from applying spellcheck to number-based search queries. This won’t solve the issue, but it would additionally allow you add titular information in numerical form to organize this collection. In your original post, this concerned Live Album release years differing from the year listed in the title. Not quite relevant here; but I hope I’ve communicated that we are making incremental improvements to both search, indexing, and Focus all the time.
For now, I’m going to mark this thread as Closed with the above workaround in place. However, I recommend creating a Feature suggestion for more granular sorting in Focus that meets your needs here.
