I recently procured the “30 years outside the box” YoYo Ma set, and I’m finding roon doesn’t deal with it terribly well. There is this existing thread which shows it importing as one “main” entry with 90 sub-discs (GUI needs attention for large box sets). However, I can’t get Roon to actually do that. What happens is one of two things:
The album is identified but with the title “30 years outside the box”. It has all the right metadata to show it’s the correct disc when I identify it against the full 90-disc entry, however it shows up as an individual unique entry, not as “disc N”. This isn’t great because now i have 90 discs with the same title cluttering up all the views and there is no way to tell which is which.
The album is identified as its original, unrelated to the 30-years set. I can easily re-identify it as part of the set, but then I have the same problem as above: it remains a unique entry not grouped together with similar albums in the set.
I can’t seem to actually get it to behave like that 2016 thread, so I worry that Roon has somehow regressed in its handling. I’ve had this issue with other (smaller) sets as well and posted about it with no good resolution (yes, the ripped metadata is all correct for disc and track numbers). Maybe I should be thankful, as roon’s handling of large sets isn’t great, so I should just keep everything as unique entries anyway.
What do others do here? Am I alone in thinking that things have changed?
-mike
I agree box set handling still isn’t particularly great. In my view it hasn’t gotten worse, but also hasn’t improved. Especially classical music identification is a drag. I ended up splitting this box up in seperate, original releases and fortunately, Roon identied most of them. I have many classical cd’s and box sets and it takes me a lot of time manually grooming them.
Also, although some improvements have been made with 1.3, I think the playing of large classical box sets in Roon still leaves a lot to be desired. It’s still very slow, making me split up boxes even more often. I really hope the team will be able to take this some steps further in the near future.
I also agree that there is much room for improvement here - though I have advocated for a slightly broader functionality than simply better box set handling - i.e. better ability to group albums in general.
Some may be grouped in a box set, and others may be grouped in a series. For example, I have around 15 volumes in the “Cafe del Mar” series, and it would be great to be able to group these together when browsing via album, rather than have 1 or 2 pages of Cafe del Mar albums showing separately. They were never released as part of a box set though. Would make it possible to tidy many things up and also make browsing compilation (various artist) albums so much better.
I see a real user case here, @extracampine! Others (like @Ludwig, if I’m correct) have already requested a better representation of the different cd’s in a box set – individual covers, subtitles – more detailed than “Disc 1”, “Disc 2” etcetera, with the box set cover as the “mother” image. Or something like that.
Would be even better if this idea were to be expanded with your suggestion, i.e. being able to merge albums of your own choice into non-existent box sets, while maintaining the underlying recognizability of each individual merged disc/album/volume.
Perhaps this is already part of the upcoming UI update, making this request redundant. If not then I would strongly support a further development of these ideas!
Perversely, I have found that box set handling has probably in some sense got better, but in a bad way.
I gave up on roon box set / series handling a long time ago. Often I go as far as blanking out the disc number tags altogether. But a few times recently roon still managed to identify the box set anyway which I have then had to break up manually. Grrr, can’t win.
