Fritz Reiner Milestones of a Legendary Conductor The Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
Unfortunately, there is no metadata, no title, no cover art, no track information, nothing to guide me in attaching the appropriate metadata.
To keep it together as a set, It would be easy to title them all as above and then add CD 1 of 10, CD 2 of 10, etc to each title. However that leaves the actual contents of each CD completely undocumented.
I could label each track with a lengthy documentation of Composer; Composition, and then add the unique track content and I assume it would be searchable by Composer (am I right about that?).
It would look like this in Naim (I use the Naim Uniti Core to rip my CDs and then transfer to Roon)
Or I could abandon the idea of keeping the compilation together as a box set and title each CD as though I had bought it individually. Then the title would be Brahms: Violin Concerto; Strauss: Don Juan and it would look like this (again, ripped and metadata added in Naim before being transferred to Roon)
I just this weekend read about this topic and just demoed it copying a few albums into Roon
I set the top folder as Artist name, then sub folder as Album name then for one CD I copied the full multi album into the Album folder, and it imported into Roon just fine, except it was all one album, then for the other multi album CD, I made a CD1, CD2 etc sub folders, and when I imported into Roon I had multiple albums, named right a with different coverart.
That boxset is from “The Intense Media.” a budget reissuer of previously recorded tracks. I could not find any metadata for it on Musicbrainz, AllMusic, or Discogs. Your only reliable choice is to use a separate ID3 tag editor (such as Metadatics on Mac) to add all the relevant metadata to the ripped files so that Roon can digest the information. Even then, the boxset will be unidentified because it does not connect to known metadata sources.
Some of us are obsessive enough to have become editors on Musicbrainz and spend time adding missing metadata for obscure recordings. But it’s a lot of work, I would not recommend it unless you want to give your metadata efforts back to the world. Even if you wanted to, I’d recommend starting with something smaller, like a single album, as multidisc, multiwork sets are tricky to get right.
The biggest boxset I ever edited was Boulez’s complete conductor works on CBS, I think 56 discs (I’m away from my Roon right now). Not doing that again any time soon…
I don’t understand how you set up folders. I’m using the Roon editor and I haven’t yet noticed a way to accomplish what you describe. Can you be more explicit?
I’m pretty obsessive about metadata. Unless it’s very difficult, it seems worthwhile to add metadata to Musicbrainz because then it’s available for your own music library. How do you do it?
I use windows file explorer, say for the beetles white album, make a directory called The Beatles, then in there make one called White Album, the in there make one called CD1 and another called CD2, copy the 1st CD into CD1 and the 2nd into CD2 and your all set
Use an ID3 tag editor to add the appropriate tags to each track in the album/boxset. I use Metadatics on macOS. You can get a good idea of what tags to set and how here. When you do this, the tags are added to the FLAC music files, totally outside Roon, but Roon can then ingest the information. One important trick is to use “canonical” names for composers and works. When in doubt, I use AllMusic (I have a paid subscription there that makes this easier). For example, “Bartók’s 3rd Piano Concerto” has the following canonical name in AllMusic (which Roon uses): “Piano Concerto No. 3 in E major, Sz. 119, BB 127 (completed by Tibor Serly).” Same for composers, performers, etc… For Roon’s benefit, it’s really important to use WORK and PART tags as explained in the Roon Knowledge Base article I linked to above.
Once your album/boxset is correctly tagged, you need to create a Musicbrainz account if you don’t have one already. With the account, you can use the cross-platform Musicbrainz Picard app to upload your album information, with the help of the Picard plug-in “Add Cluster As Release.” The whole process is a bit intricate and I don’t have time to explain it fully now, the best is to start with an album that you determined is not on Musicbrainz. The Musicbrainz editing interface is rather easy to get lost in, but it has lots of sanity checks that won’t allow you to add really messed up information. As a new Musicbrainz user, your edits will not be automatically accepted, some review process will go through them. Once you have created enough new useful Musicbrainz records, your edits will be auto-approved.
That works if the multi-disc albums/boxsets have good metadata in Roon’s sources (mainly AllMusic and Musicbrainz). But if not, you need to go through the more complex process I outlined.
