@support: My question is not about embedded tags/metadata. It’s about how Roon uses folder trees to discern artist/album info. I can see for at least some albums it’s concatenating the structure Artist>Album into an album called “Artist - Album” by “Unknown Artist”, where as in other cases it seems to be correctly identifying the album and the artist (see example above).
In the absence of Tags, Roon uses a number of different indicators in its identification process, of which, Folder structure is only one part, others included, # of tracks.
In your above example, I would guess that with “collect” as being part of the title and you only having 2 music files, that Roon cannot make a match because “collect” is used in a number of different miles davis albums and you do not have the correct number of tracks for that album. Try splitting the miles-davis-collectors-items-a.flac into The Serpent’s Tooth I.flac, The Serpent’s Tooth II.flac, Round Midnight.flac, compulsion.flac, etc. etc. and I bet Roon will identify the album.
Thanks for the insight. I will experiment and see if I can identify what’s going on. For context, I have archived many LPs and I like to leave the sides intact for listening so that I can easily play ‘side a’ or ‘side b’, just as with the actual LP. For this reason, I’d like to avoid splitting the sides into individual tracks (I realize it’s unavoidable that I lose a lot of functionality that way, but that’s how I like to listen to albums).
Because I have so many files, I’d rather avoid the step of adding embedded metadata/tags if not necessary (there is a cover scan JPG in each folder with the FLAC files).
On the positive side, I really, really appreciate that Roon attempts to identify individual works on an album (as with Classical music) so that you can select individual pieces on an album without having to select a bunch of tracks. It’s a unique feature as far as I am aware, and it is really fantastic for Classical music listening (especially with the Radio/Shuffle mode).
Of course, in a perfect world, there’d be a mechanism for labeling which “side” of an LP a track was on, allowing you to play albums by side, but I’m not sure there’s ever going to be enough demand for someone to implement that.
For future reference, here is the example being discussed:
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I’m on OS X and see odd behavior with regards to how album names are being determined based on folder structure. For example this path:
/Users/randy/Music/records/Miles Davis/Workin' With The Miles Davis Quintet [Esquire - RVG]
With these files:
cover.jpg
m-miles-davis-workin-esquire-a-cr.flac
m-miles-davis-workin-esquire-b-cr.flac
Shows up as:
Workin’ With The Miles Davis Quintet
Miles Davis
Whereas this path:
/Users/randy/Music/records/Miles Davis/Collectors' Items
With these files:
Untitled 2.tiff
Untitled 3.tiff
Untitled 4.tiff
Untitled 5.tiff
Untitled 6.tiff
Untitled 7.tiff
Untitled 8.tiff
Untitled.tiff
back.tif
cover.jpg
cover.tif
miles-davis-collectors-items-a.flac
miles-davis-collectors-items-b.flac
Instead ends up being detected as:
Miles Davis - Collectors’ Items
Unknown Artist
Note that both albums are in the same ‘artist’ folder. I can’t see why one is detected properly and the other is not.