If a box set is a collection of “previously released albums” the way is clear
Create a box set folder
Name each subfolder “CD01 - Album name 1” etc
Set Album Name tag = Album name NOT Box Set Name
Renumber each disc# =1
Set ROONALBUMTAG =“ Box Set Name”
Import
Roon will treat each CD folder as a new album and will probably ID them
You will not see the box set as an album, unfortunately you can’t have it both ways
Roon will create a Roon Tag and put the albums in it
Setting disc# to the original box set disc number will cause Roon to not ID as say Abbey Road was not disc 8 it was disc#=1 or blank
This nearly preserves the box set
The alternative is to leave disc# alone then once imported go to each album and Edit> Fix Track Groupings to set each album - disc # 1 then create 1 album will ID it . The file tags will keep the proper disc #’ only Roon , internally, see the disc# =1
Clear as mud ?k
Yes it’s a mess ! With Custom Tags in JRiver, it’s a piece of
I think you seem to believe that you can get roon to display both by boxset and by individual albums. They are mutually exclusive. You must make a choice. Either you can display by boxset or you can display as individual albums.
If you have decided to display by individual albums you may still want to group them together with a roon tag. Pressing the roon tag you have used to group the individual albums does not display a box set screen. All it does is display a “roon tag” screen that groups together otherwise unrelated individual albums.
Before ROONALBUMTAG, setting this roon tag was a manual step you performed after identifying all the disks in the box-set individually. You would highlight them and set a roon tag so that you could conveniently display the individual albums together with individual artwork. But the resulting screen is completely different to your example above. It is just a “roon tag” screen.
All that ROONALBUMTAG does is allow you to perform this manual step outside roon. The “roon tag” screen looses all the box set metadata. This may or may not be important to you. You will definitely loose things like release date, mastering information, box-set review. Personally that is unimportant to me as I think navigation is more important. But particularly with non-Classical box-sets it is very common that the running order, track version, bonus tracks, or even several of the tracks themselves are completely different from the original album. This may require alot of post editing, moving tracks around, renaming tracks etc. etc. With most boxes I am prepared to do that as roon box-set handling is so bad. With some boxes, this sort of editing is a bit hopeless as there are too many differences and those I leave alone.
Anything bigger than 10 discs (arbitrarily chosen as it covers Beethoven sonata sets) I navigate in JRiver where I define how it looks . Dual system, dual maintenance a nightmare
If and only if you know that the discs/albums within the box are identifiable albums will this work, as Tony says anything else has extra tracks, alternative tracks , slightly different timings etc
Roon only understands Albums , as far as Roon is concerned a Box Set is an album and can be identified as such.
Until Roon defines a Box Set object with appropriate properties and actions this will remain an elusive mess.
We need to follow the Album route and learn to navigate in other ways.
Let’s see what new navigation tools 1.8 brings, if any
I think trying to automate this will leave you screaming
A partial solution I am leading towards is this, match songs to BoxSet so displays in Roon as Boxset, but also set ROONALBUMTAG to boxSetName for all songs in the boxset, so then if user wants to modify the metadata to display as separate albums in roon they can do that but can at least still groups the albums as if they were a boxset by selecting the boxSetName from Roons Tags page.
It would be possible in many cases to correctly match to at least some discs to albums and correctly match each song. But many boxsets contain additional material not previously released so then you are left with some original albums and partial boxsets. Also, its SongKongs job to correctly identify your music and then upto Roon to display it sensibly, it doesn’t seem right for SongKong to on purposely not match to the box set.
There are also box-sets within box-sets. So there can be hierarchies of box-sets. This is common with opera. For example, the Decca 33 CD Wagner Bayreuth Festival is actually a collection of 10 complete live operas of between 3 and 4 CDs each.
33 CDs is quite a modest sized classical box set these days but in roon the default box-set display is essentially unnavigable. On the other hand, as a roon-tag display it looks like this:
This is an example where roon has no problems identifying 100% the individual albums as there is no change between the original albums and the box-set versions. However, there is a lot of pre-processing necessary to force roon to identify individual albums rather than an unnavigable box-set which roon will do by default. It may be necessary as a minimum to do all these three things:
Change the album titles from a uniform box title to the original album titles
Change the folder names from CD1, CD2, CD3 etc. to something like
CD1 - Composer, work, artist
CD2 - Composer, work, artist
CD3 - Composer, work, artist
Change the disk numbers from 1/33, 2/33, 3/33 . . . to 1/1, 1/1, 1/1, (or 1/3, 2/3, 3/3 if it is a box within a box as in the above example)
It would be nice to have some means of automating that. May be giving the user the option of “preparing” the box for individual identification by roon. If individual identification doesn’t work out in roon because there are too many differences between the box release and the original releases then this can be reversed. What you need to do in that case is delete the album and clean the library in roon and re-import as a box. A manual version of these steps is what most of us are doing that want the option of sometimes importing into roon as a box and sometimes importing into roon as individual albums on a case by case basis.
Okay I will consider it.
I had a quick go at it by just modifying albumname, discno, disctotal, filename but it didnt work because SongKong still contained the MusicBrainzIds of the boxset and Roon understands these so it kept on matching to the boxset.So instead I will have to actually match to actual albums for each disc, this is going to take more work to do efficiently so unlikely to make it to next release.
But I will add the automatic ROONALBUMTAG boxset tagging as an option, now what is a boxset rather than just a multidisc album?
I think a reasonable definition would be any release with at least four discs/mediums.
Yes. It would save a lot of work if possible. The key is an easy way to roll the identification back to the box-set if there were too many differences.
Also, Roon refuses to display the cover art for individual items in a box set. Many classical box sets feature original album art for each disc. You can’t do this in Roon – you can in JRiver and audirvana.
The songKong logic would basically be:
Match folder structure as boxset
for each disc in boxset try and find an alternative album (would include original albumartwork)
if matched all discs save data as original albums
else save data as boxset
(in either case set ROONALBUMTAG)
That would work. But sometimes there are only a few differences. Any way of toggling that exact match on/off in “advanced settings” or something like that? If for example, I had a 50 CD box and just picking a number out of the air, say 5 (10%) didn’t match I would certainly be prepared to fiddle about with that in roon even though I know the match isn’t perfect. Everyone will be different. For some, only an exact match will do. Others prefer navigability and will be more flexible.
The thing is although you can use SongKong on individual albums (or boxsets) SongKong is really designed to be run on your whole library, and hence it doesn’t have options that you may fiddle with on a per album basis. Regardless of this, assume it could only match 45 of the 50 cd’s to original album, would you expect the 5 unmatched to be matched to to the discs on the boxset album (so you have a partial boxset). seems like a better option than leaving unmatched.
Seems like a better option for my other tagger - Jaikoz since this is more designed for adhoc tagging, but Jaikoz needs a bit of a revamp.
Just be careful about going overboard with ROONALBUMTAG and ROONTRACKTAG at the moment. There seems to be an issue that when tags are used in any volume they begin dragging system performance.
I often do a mixture. If I get a match on an original CD I use that. If I can only get a match on the individual CD to a disk in a box I use that instead and just change the album name and cover art to the original CD.
Had lots of problem with the Pink Floyd’s Immersion Box sets (DSOTM, WYWH and The Wall). Was able to organize them, but had to go outside Roon to add the artwork, and edit a few things. But these are small box sets compared to some mentioned on this thread already.
If you dig you will find many more threads on the subject
It’s not fixed, at least 1.8 brought. The Focus tool in at album level so you can focus on composer then composition
BUT that’s only classical, other genres have box sets
The only real way is to make Box Set an object with the same properties and actions as an Album but with subordinate discs.
It’s fairly clear there is no Roon appetite to venture into this .
I have removed all my big boxes from Roon and now use Artist > Discography to get what would have been the contents from Tidal, far from ideal . I leave maybe 25% of my library unused !
JRiver still serves me well on this front , but with manual maintenance and a dual system I do not want
I find it hard to believe that the Room team have no appetite to fix this. In my experience they are usually keen to address issues like this. Can any roon team members chip in?
