I am looking for a way to identify albums that don’t get a primary artist link from Roon.
Based on my experience this happens in two situations
I have an album artist in my tag, but Roon identifies the album as a “Various Artist” Album
I have an album artist in my tag and Roon does not identify the album. In some cases, artists from my tags won’t be recognized as primary artists and get no link
In case 1 I can focus on Performer = Various Artist and manually correct those albums.
Is there a way to identify case 2? If I focus on “unidentified” alone it is way too many albums to go through individually (> 1000)
To find unidentified albums you could try this:
Go to Album view
Click on Focus
Select “Inspector”
Click on Identified. This will show a tag for all Identified Albums.
If you click that Tag again it goes from Green to Red, which means “Not” “Identified”
Is this what you are trying to do? Use that Tag in conjunction with the Artist Tag?
From what @Klaus_Kammerer1 wrote I thought focussing on unidentified alone wouldn’t be enough. So an additional filter for “unlinked album artists” would be needed - which as far as I can see isn’t achievable. I could find all albums which have not yet been linked to a performer listed in the artist browser (I think) but that would be just a subset of the cases.
yes you are correct. focusing on unidentified albums yields a result way to big for me.
i was still hoping that I overlooked something.
Typically, I find those kind of albums by accident.
I’ve probably misunderstood but,
If you look at an album what does Roon show for the primary artist in these cases? Does it show unknown artist? If so, use the funnel filter on that.
How would I use the funnel filter on a list of 1000 albums that could have such a case?
What would I enter as the filter? I do not know which artists don‘t have links. That‘s what I want to find out.
BTW, for the subset of artists which do not yet have been recognized as Primary Artists, I would tag all artists within the Artist Browser with a “Helper Tag” and then apply the “Helper Tag” to the album browser, maybe also adding -Identified and -Various – but I wonder if that would be of much help.
Try this…
In albums browser, focus on identified. Invert it.
Select all, and save as new tag unid.
In artist browser, focus on the unid tag.
Select all, and save as new tag artist-with-unid
In albums browser, focus on tags unid and artist-with-unid
Invert the artist-with-unid tag.
I think this gives you albums which are unidentified and don’t have an associated primary artist.
You’ll probably get Various Artists too, but you can filter those out.
Thanks a lot for the suggestions. I will try and report back.
However, to tackle this from a different angle: How can I prevent this from happening? I understand that Roon uses the album artist tag as one of the input items for determining the primary artist. Why is this not always working properly?
I already have the artist Nikolaus Harnoncourt in Roon. What could I have done in order to have Roon accept it from the tag as an primary artist link?
If the primary artist tag cannot be used to populate the primary artist, my question would be: what does the “prefer file” function for the album artist actually do? [edit]: I have ignored the fact, that “prefer file” on album artist makes the tag content appear on the album page, even if there is no primary artist link established. Stupid me. But still, I’d be interested to understand how to trigger primary artist links being created.
I do not properly understand what is happening here.
This is an identified album and (rightly or wrongly) Roon has decided to use its own metadata for the primary artist link. (Note the Roon symbol next to the Various Artists)
I think Prefer file doesn’t stop Roon using something if it thinks it can add to your data.
If you unidentify it (use identify and refuse all offers) does it stick N.H. in as primary artist?
(Incidentally, as it’s identified, my work round above won’t find it)
Both album artists are shown as links and funnily Roon adds Heinz Holliger from whatever piece of metadata it brings to the table.
Why does the other album not behave in a similar manner? Maybe it has to do with the Various Artist thingy and Roon treats metadata differently in this case? I don’t know. I would like to understand it better, though. There is something going on behind the scene that’s for sure. Roon is applying a complex logic to this replacement process.
I wonder whether the rules applied could be used by me for maintainingmy tags? But I’m afraid that the logic is so complex that it can’t be described in a simple diagram.
I know this is one of the selling points for Roon, but personally I do not like these black box magic thingys…
I think you are right, but why call it prefer file then? Because that’s not what it does. I think the terminology is misleading some users to think they have control where in fact they have not, if Roon thinks it has something to add. And you can’t stop Roon from “thinking”…
I think you are too generous in assuming there is logic behind this. One see’s quirks like this all over the place. The Linda Ronstadt song “Ooh Baby Baby” basically is listed as two different songs depending on how you search. One has a comma after the first Baby and the other does not. If this is in the metadata, Roon can’t figure it out and there are two separate versions.
