I am new to Roon and am trying to work through metadata issues. All albums were ripped through dbPoweramp but there is a mixed level of success when importing to Roon. Two examples are JJ Cale and Willie Nelson. I have 5 to 10 albums of each artist. Most tracks imported but a lot of them are not associated with the correct album. They are grouped under an album labeled Unknown Artist. I have tried selecting songs and asking Roon to re identify them but that doesn’t help. Any suggestions?
I look at the metadata and see why it is showing up incorrectly and edit it. I use a PC and mp3tag
Thanks. I will check out that program to see if It can help. Everything imports perfectly into Audirvana Plus. It is perplexing why Roon can’t do the same.
I have similar problems. I would select the orphan tracks/albums together and click merge. That should merge them to one album and you should be able to sort the tracks in the right order. Does that work for you?
This sounds like a good idea. I will try that first. Thanks.
The Merge Album feature is very useful. However, it is not able to fix a lot of my problems as many tracks are still hidden under the Unknown Artist label.
In reviewing metadata on my hard drive, it looks like all files have an artist associated with it. I am wondering if the structure of folders makes any difference in helping Roon identify albums.
At some point I am going to have to learn how to use one of the metadata programs to see if that can help.
Thanks to all who have commented on this thread.
Roon metadata is hell for me. There are a large number of orphaned tracks that don’t show up on the proper album. When I look at the metadata on my hard rive, the information looks the same from song to song. Thus, I don’t even know what to fix to make it work.
Is there a recommended format or certain fields I should be looking at to ensure that all songs from an album end up in the right place? Thanks.
Hi @Sam_Ruff,
Can you share one of these albums that’s exhibiting this problem with us? We can take a look at the album’s metadata and how that translates to Roon so we can better understand the issue you’re seeing.
You can send me a private message with a shared Dropbox link (or any other file sharing service) and the technical team can take a look.
Thanks!
Will do. I will try and get this over to you tonight. Thanks.
Hello. I think this link should work. I shared an album with Jerry Garcia Band. In that album, songs 1,2,3, and 6 do not show up in Roon as part of the album.
The two Willie Nelson songs did not get associated with the album and show up as Unknown Artist.
I am willing to make an extensive effort to fix metadata but I can’t even tell what is wrong as all files look the same to me when I look at them on my hard drive. Thanks.
P.S. all files were ripped with dbPoweramp
This thread has died and there is no word from the Roon rep who was helping out. I am posting again to see if anyone at Roon can offer guidance. Thanks.
the suggestion to use mp3tag is a good one. I use mediamonkey. If you fix things in roon, they are only fixed in roon. If you fix them outside of roon using mp3tag or another piece of software, they will probably be fixed for all software to use. Having said that, if you tag the individual files and write those tags back to disk you should find your problem is corrected. Try it with one album. If it doesn’t pick up. Delete the album, let roon see the deletion and then re add it and see if that doesn’t fix the problem. I also suffer from this but have not corrected all problems yet. This solution did work for me. I can’t answer why roon did not see the files myself.
Thanks for the comment. I will try to retake an album this weekend. My problem is that when i look at the file information on my hard drive, I don’t see any problems. Maybe looking at the files in a tagging program will shed some light.
I am also perplexed why everything shows up perfectly in Audirvana but doesn’t work up in Roon. Roon seems much more sophisticated so it is surprising that it can’t figure this out.
You mention that the tracks all have the ‘artist’ tag populated.
Do you also have a value against ‘Album Artist’, which should be the same for all the tracks in an album?
I find this to be the tag Roon finds most useful in this scenario
I do have consistent tags under Album Artist as well. At least they look consistent whenI look at the files. In addition to looking at the files in a different program, I am going to rip some new cds this weekend so it will be interesting to see how they show up in Roon.
Hi @Sam_Ruff, I think I have made some progress in identifying the cause of the problem (for the Jerry Garcia album you uploaded anyway).
What I did:
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Loaded the album as-is to Roon. I also saw a few tracks identified correctly, with the remainder shown as ‘unknown artist’ etc. There was a clue to help understand the problem though - for some reason, the album title was shown as the folder structure. This hints that the album tag cannot be read on these tracks.
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I changed the album tag in dbpoweramp editor for all tracks, saved it, and then changed it back to the correct name (and of course saved the changes onces more).
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When I then added the new files to Roon it was correctly identified as a complete album with no issues.
Conclusion: The tags are not being written correctly during the ripping process, and have some form of corruption making them unreadable in Roon
Likely cause: The files were ripped using v14.3 of dbpoweramp, which is really old. I am using version 16.7 (windows), but I see there is v16.6 for mac.
Action: I suggest an update to the newest version of the software. I suspect you may well have to re-rip the CDs as well, although making changes in the tag editor might be sufficient to resolve the problems.
Hope this helps
Nick
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Wow. That is great information. Than you so much . I will try to work on that this weekend and will report back