I have various radio recordings in my library that I’d like to manage in Roon (I know, not a great idea). To that end, I tag them correctly using MP3Tag and Tune-Instructor.
However, Roon keeps rearranging them in completely nonsensical ways, grouping them illogically, jumbling everything up, and ignoring the ID3 tags in the process!
How can I stop Roon from doing this, and how can I undo these nonsensical groupings?
Also, how can I manually group songs where it makes sense to do so?
Thanks…
I suspect that there’s something about your method of tagging that appears to be confusing Roon. Perhaps show the metadata for the examples you give in your post?
PS - I assume that you have read this…
The Metadatas are absolutely correct tagged. But roon ignores them consequently! Titel Numbers for instance, Titelnames etc…
For example I need to edit every single track to tell roon it may use the “title number” as title number. Without that roon gives every track title number 0 (ZERO) 
Well yes it would - the track number in an album is an important piece of metadata. You can’t expect Roon to magically conjure up track numbers - it relies on metadata being present and correct.
As I say, please post examples of the metadata you set - e.g. a screenshot or two of Mp3tag
I’ll give you an example of what Roon can do to fix missing track numbers.
I like downloading podcasts and adding episodes to an “album” I have created for a podcast series.
Here’s my “album” of LRB podcasts. When I add new downloaded episodes to the album, there is minimal metadata contained in the downloads - certainly no track number; for example:
As a result, I need to edit the album in Roon, because, as you say, no track number metadata means that Roon gives it a value of 0:
Note the drag handles on the right of every entry - I can reorder the tracks if I want to.
And, Roon has that “Renumber tracks” button, so I press it and:
BTW, going back to your original screenshot, I suspect the reason why you have those grouped tracks is because the track titles have strings in common and use the quote symbol. Here for example are two LRB podcasts on the common theme of Poetry and the Turning World - the background is showing the files in File Explorer, with the metadata of the two files in the foreground:
Roon uses this to group the tracks as two parts of a common theme (or work):
As it says in the File Tags article - the track number is just a digit - not track number/disc number. The disc number is a separate metadata field.
Your metadata implies the disc number is 24, yet the metadata disc number is 1. No wonder Roon gets confused.
This looks to be something to investigate, that looks like text which will cause Roon to mess up as it is expecting a number. I’ve used MP3tag for over a decade and the Track Number is always a numeral and I’ve never had an issue, like this..
Try changing the track numbers to 1,2,3,4,5, etc on 1 album, rescan and see if it functions correctly.
Please show the metadata entries for tracks 3 and 4 from your original screenshot. Thank you.
No this means it is track number 1 of total 24 tracks. Disc number is „1" as seen in the first column. Normally music player read this correct but i will try to change „1/24" to „1" only and see what happens.
thanks this way @all
Yes, we as humans understand that, but a software system have no way to understand this when it expect only a numerical value.
@Otto_K_Domma you are correct.if these are mp3 files (or another format) that uses ID3 the Track No field is of the form TrackNo/Track Total stored in a TRCK frame, whereas if using VorbisComment as used by Flac/Ogg TrackNo and Track Total are stored in two distinct fields TRACKNUMBER and TRACKTOTAL
So it seems to be there shouldn’t be an issue with how you have them
In the screenshot below the first album listed is Flac files the other albums are Mp3 files.
You have “various artists” as Album-Interpret. What the benefit of this entry? It just means “Artist not defined”. It creates data-base entries without any further information. I tend to leave this field empty.
Those must be “unidentified” self-constructed albums. By default for unidentified albums roon will group “multi-part” compositions. This is primarily a feature to support Classical libraries but it looks like roon is interpreting your “.” date delimiters as WORK/PART delimiters as it would, for example, a Symphony with several movements.
Have you tried switching off multi-part grouping? I believe you can do this globally. I never have but I do sometimes dissable on an album basis. Just scroll down to the bottom of the album editor:
You can also try changing your date formatting. Eg. ddmmyyy or dd-mm-yyyy instead of dd.mm.yyyy.
Ultimately, though, it looks like you want finer control over grouping and even sectioning, so you will need WORK, PART and SECTION tags for that. I cannot see from your screen-shots if you have set them up in mp3tag yet.
Normally players identify collections this way
I use the Format yyyy-mm-dd for this and this works in roon
Edit: missunderstood your post. You mean in the TITLE? Yeah that sounds logical i will try this.
Yes. But there are is no guarantee that just changing “.” to “-” in the title will work as other common delimiters roon uses in titles are “-” and “:” It’s worth a try but you may also have to just switch off multi-part compositions for these DJ-Mix compilations.
TBH. Expect other issues with unidentified albums. Roon is not a string formatter so with unidentified albums you may have to selectively switch off features it is using to match against global data bases. In the worse case where simple workarounds do not succeed, you may have to completely change your tagging schema so that it is not conflicting with roon’s identification logic
Yes its worth a try
