How do I win this battle?

[Hans_N]

I tag all my bootleg flac files with Yate tagger. Among the tags I use is Artist and Musicians Credits and until now (more than 2.000 bootlegs) I have had no trouble.

Today I have just tagged a new bootleg and the artist is the pianist Benny Green. But Roon insist that it is the trombonist Bennie Green.

How do I make Roon accept that it is the pianist Benny Green? I do not want to use Roons tagging, I insist tagging my files. How do I make Roon read the correct name from the file (Benny and not Bennie)?

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

Add an identified album to the library, where the desired Benny Green is credited. It’s easiest to do this from a streaming service, if possible, of course. Then this Benny Green will be listed in the artists when you go to your problem album > Edit > Edit Credits to remove the wrong one and add the right one.

Compare here and the several other threads that are linked from this post (note the list below the post). The issue here is slightly different but the common thing is that you can only select an artist during editing if an album where this artist is credited is already in the library:

Valence Confusion Abounds

The thing is this: If an artist exists properly as a known artist in Roon (e.g., may have a Valence picture, a biography, and/or is credited on other albums), but no album where they are credited is already in your library, then Roon often (or always?) creates a duplicate artist when you import the local files. I think this can occur even if the newly imported album is identified, but definitely if it is unidentified. This duplicate artist will show under the name as it appears in the file tags…

[Hans_N]

Thank you. That solved the problem. But why on earth do I have to add an album to my library, that I’m not interested in, to make Roon read my tag correctly? I can understand that Roon has difficulties with musicians with identical names, ie the trumpeter Avishai Cohen and the bassist Avishai Cohen… But Benny and Bennie are not identical.

[DrTone (Jeff)]

I assume to keep the list of Artists manageable. It would be impossible to list all possible artists. And even if they did which of duplicate in the world is correct, same artist names are probably pretty common.

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

Roon is very dependent on its local database. As @DrTone said, there are millions of artists, but Roon’s artist list only shows the ones in your library, and these come from the albums that are in your library. Only the in-library artists appear during editing.

It’s essentially the same thing that causes other limitations, such as Roon’s Focus feature being largely restricted to in-library items. Solving this would probably require that Roon keeps everything (not just your library) local, but there’s not enough storage, RAM, and CPU on local servers. Alternatively moving more of Roon into the cloud would not be so resource-limited, but is probably far in the future.

[Hans_N]

Thank you both of you for explaining, it makes sense, although I do not understand why and how Roon guess the names not in the library. Also I have lots of bootlegs with musicians not in my Roon library and they show up correctly with name and instrument (but off course without picture, bio etc.)