How to handle individual tracks within Roon?

Well that was extremely helpful, thank you!

The trick of creating a temporarily folder to batch process a given set of tracks works like a charm, and will most likely come in handy to batch-edit other stuff as well.

I might use a combination of both methods: create DIY albums, use tags and bookmarks to organise my track library.

Thanks both of you for helping me out. Although I consider myself to be pretty tech-savvy, Roon does take some time to get used to. But I’m sure it’ll pay off… :slight_smile:

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You’re very welcome and I hope you continue to enjoy Roon. I’ve shifted this thread into Roon Software as it doesn’t appear to need attention from the Support devs. Please feel free to post here or in Support if you strike any issues.

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Ok, so I’m trying to get my folder structure with individual tracks in Roon as DIY albums. Using tags and bookmarks works as expected, but I’m struggling with the way Roon displays these track collections or “albums” as you wish.

When I go to Collection > Tracks > TagX, I see my list of tracks, but the Artist column shows Various Artists. In this view I expect to see the Track Artist in the Artist column since these tags are properly set in my files. Only on a album level (the album artist title) I want to see Various Artists.

The same applies to my compilations.

Is this a bug or am I missing something here?

I have been thinking about this and it would be super useful to be able to select a directory in the focus, the above workaround is cunning, but is still a workaround.

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I’m opting for bug in the sense that I can’t see a way to display Track Artist instead of Album Artist or to prefer file metadata as regards Artist. This is similar to History where Artist defaults to Album Artist, and consequently the meaningless “Various Artists”, when Track Artist is what the user wants to know.

Let’s drop flags for @mike (may be away atm) and @joel.

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Agreed, there is a feature request to that effect.

Edit: This is the feature request I was thinking of. It looks like its mainly me asking about increased folder filtering in Focus. This is a separate issue from browsing by folder which has another feature request thread. If you think greater capacity to filter by folder would be useful in Focus (or if you think it would be the end of civilization as we know it !), please pop into the referenced thread and comment.

Thank you. I’ve spend some time trying to figure this out, but apperently it wasn’t me. Hopefully it can be fixed because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

I think it may form part of the metadata revisions coming with 1.3. See the posts by Mike in this related thread. If it is a 1.3 thing then that may mean a longer wait for implementation than the usual bugfix cycle.

I confess I haven’t been paying a great deal of attention to metadata changes. It may be that @Carl or @Ludwig have seen mention of proposed changes to Album Artist - Various Artists references in Tracks, History etc. I’ve got a feeling in my waters that there was another thread about it, but can’t find it now.

That would indeed be very helpful.

I just found out that there is a 120 track limit for albums. I guess that needs to be sorted first to be able to continue this route of making my DIY albums… :frowning:

Playlists also show Various Artists in stead of Track Artist, probably sharing the same view.

It’s kind of ironic that after spending hundreds of hours of tagging my library, and spending $499 on Roon to enhance this meta data, I can’t see “track artist”, arguably the single most import piece of data of a track after track name maybe… :slight_smile:

On a more serious note, I really would like to hear from a Roon rep. whether or not this will be fixed (as well as the 120 track limit for albums). If not, I will have to reconsider my lifetime subscription. One of the reasons to subscribe for life is this community and what seems to be a very competent and responsive development team, so I’m confident that it will be solved.

If there is a better area to report bugs, please let me know.

Let’s flag @mike or @joel for you.

Thank you!

Already asked - but I think Mike is enjoying his last day of holiday - as indeed he should.

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Indeed he should! :slight_smile: I will just wait patiently…

I have around 20000 singles in my collection and like to arange them in DIY albums. Some are 100 tracks, some are 300 tracks, but the biggest DIY album is 4600 tracks. For all the tracks in an album I set the Album Artist tag to Various Artists and each track has its own Artist, Title and also its own embedded Cover Art.

So I agree to what is mentioned about the 120 track limit and the track / album title issue, but I would also see the embedded cover art shown for each song when I set the option “Use cover art from file” for that album.

This handling of individual tracks or DIY albums is the only thing I miss from squeezebox

Agreed! I also have cover art added to my (individual) tracks. It’s a shame they don’t show up now.

I really love Roon already, but IMHO it’s model is too much centred around complete albums from one particular artist. That of course is a very important use case, but Roon should be able to handle collections of individual tracks better than it does at the moment.

Maybe Playlists are the best method to handle these track collections?

Do you mean this thread, as being the related thread maybe?

[Edit] I think this one might be even more relevant…

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Yes. That was the discussion I was thinking of.

Let’s flag @mike again and see if he can tell us if Track Artist instead of Album Artist in appropriate places (Tracks, History, Playlists) is on the way ?

I haven’t got a response from Roon on these issues (yet) and after reading the other related threads it’s still unclear to me if this Various Artist issue is considered to be a bug.

So to answer my own question from the original post: I’m not yet handling my individual track collection with Roon, because unfortunately I can’t. :confused:

A comment from Roon / @mike on these issues would be much appreciated.

  • Is displaying Various Arists in Track View and Playlists (when Artist Tags are set correctly) considered to be normal behaviour or a bug?
  • Will the 120 track limit for albums be changed to a bigger value?

Thank you! :slight_smile: