Home-brewed album doesn't show up in Roon [Multiple entries, Same Artist][Solved]

I created an album out of a few tracks off of youtube (used Quicktime to extract the audio). Just FYI these tracks are not available anywhere for purchase.

Converted the tracks to AIFF 16/44, tagged them fully, put a picture as the art, gave the album a name, etc. This looks as an album just fine in iTunes, Audirvana, JRMC.

Roon will not show me these files. What gives?

Never mind, found it. Pretty hard to do given Roon data obviously doesn’t exist at all.

You totally cannot see the album? Then it might be something technical where roon cannot identify the converted tracks. Roon is rightly so in my opnion quite unforgiving with “non compliant” tracks. With non compliant I mean the technical part not the source.

If you can see it, but the album is blank you could try to edit the track fields to look at the tags instead of the roon data.

EDIT: our posts crossed. Good to see you sorted it. What was the solution?

Searched for the album and found it. But it’s not getting grouped properly.

I’ve edited the tags within Roon, in most cases to tell it to use the file data. Now I can find it in Roon, but it doesn’t get grouped with my other kosher albums.

For the fun of I renamed one of my artists an set roon to accept my tags instead of roon. As it appears, once roon has identified the artist it sticks with it, no matter what you do…

But since you have found the album or at least part of it and edited the rest of the information, it should group it under The Carpenters.

No clue as to why this is not happening…

It seems to me that Roon is not just grouping by name. The album is showing now as artist “The Carpenters” just somehow not the same “The Carpenters” as the ones Roon can find in it’s database.

I would like to tell Roon when I edit the tags that this “The Carpenters” are indeed the same artist as “The Carpenters” it knows of.

So in other words, question for the Roon team: How do I tag this album so that the artist “The Carpenters” is grouped with “The Carpenters” Roon knows about?

Hey @miguelito – can you post two screenshots, one for each album details screen:

  • one of an album that’s showing up properly, identified and credited to The Carpenters, and
  • one of the unidentified “home brew” album which is being attributed to a different “The Carpenters”

That should help us get a sense of what’s happening here.

@mike: sent you a PM

Thanks @miguelito – I got your media and took a look at this. I understand the issue, and it’s not entirely straightforward, so first a couple baselines points to understand:

Editing in Roon is a work in progress – right now you have a good deal of control over how your music is displayed, and for most fields you can choose to display the data Roon has retrieved from our metadata service, the information that’s in your tags, or any data you enter by hand in Roon.

What’s not editable right now are the links displayed in Roon – so if any album is tied to a performer (either as the albums main performer, or via a credit), that link cannot currently be edited (although we will be changing that at some point in the future).

The second point to understand is the difference between main performers and album artist, which is a little counter intuitive at first, but which is ultimately a very flexible and powerful way to credit the albums in your collection. Consider the case of groups like James Brown & the Famous Flames or The Miles Davis Quintet – these groups released albums, but are they distinct from James Brown or Miles Davis, respectively?

It’s really very subjective, but I think it’s fair to say whether or not you consider them full fledged “artists” in your collection, you probably want their albums to appear on both pages, meaning on the James Brown & the Famous Flames page, and the James Brown page. This is why you sometimes see two rows under an album’s name – one is the main performers of that album, and the other is the Album Artist, meaning whoever’s name was on the cover or spine.

So, to explain your issue, first keep in mind that AllMusic considers the name of the group to be Carpenters, not The Carpenters. Also note that, in a wacky twist, they consider the album artist to be The Carpenters. :expressionless:

So, you can see below what shows up on the album’s page. Note that because The Carpenters don’t appear in any meaningful way in Roon’s database, it’s not an active link, as seen here:

Moving on, the home brew album has no match in Roon’s metadata of course, so the tags are used as is. As such, the album is credited to The Carpenters, whereas all the identified albums are instead credited to Carpenters. So, they aren’t grouped together under a single artist. Still with me? Incredible, if so :smile:

So, what can you do? I would recommend changing the tags in your home brew album to Carpenters, then rescan the album, and watch it magically group in with the other albums. Once Roon considers these to all be Carpenters albums, you can even edit the display name for the group in Roon if you’d prefer to see it displayed with The.

Phew. Does that make sense?

Voila! Makes perfect sense. You need a unique key representing the artist, and for better or for worse that happens to be “Carpenters”. For all the albums you know about, you must have taken the artist in the released album, which say was “The Carpenters”, but internally you have mapped it to the official “key” which is Carpenters. Completely understand.

Also learned that this mother key is the link in blue, had not realized that.

Thanks a lot, extremely helpful - and I don’t think there’s anything to fix.