I’m having a huge problems with inentifications of albums, many of which don’t seem fixable using the available tools. The problems fall into several categories. The biggest problem I seem to be having is where additional disks in a multi-disk set get indetified as disk one. (In other words, where a multi disk set was ripped with each disk was titled “XYZ Album (Disk 1)”, “XYZ Album (Disk 2)”, “XYZ Album (Disk 3)”, etc. and the tracks on each disk were all numbered 1-1, 1-2, 1-3, etc. as opposed to being identified as a single “XYZ Album” with tracks being numbered 1-1, 1-2, 1-3 … 2-1, 2-2, 2-3 … 3-1, 3-2, 3-3, etc.) What roon does is to interleave the tracks so that under the album listing (take a 3-disk set), you get tracks in the following order: 1-1, 2-1, 3-1, 1-2, 2-2, 3-2, etc. So what you get when you try to identify the album is that none of your track numberings actually work. You can, of course, move the tracks around, but in a large set, that can be a herculean effort. The main reason for that is because you can’t select multiple tracks in the identification screem and move them en masse. I tried modifying the metadata on my tracks using an external program, but Roon somehow didn’t see the changes.
I’ll give you two examples: First: Pink Floyd - The Dark Side of the Moon Immersion Edition. This is a multi-disk box set that includes multiple different format disks. The only CDs in the set were ripped on my Sooloos and were identified as disks 1, 2 and 3. But Roon thinks that what was idemtfied as disk 3 is really disk 6. So roon correctly matched the first two disks withthe first two disks of the set, but instead of matching the tracks that were ripped as disk 3 with the identical tracks that are in disk 6 in the roon database, it has them as disk 3 and not matching. Fine, I accept that the software works that way. But here’s the problem: there are 170 tracks in between disk 3 and disk 6 in the database, so it would take 2,720 mouse clicks to move the traks into the correct order. Life’s just to short to spend the effort to do that. There has to be a better way.
Here’s another, less eggregious example: Stevie Wonder - Songs in the Key of Life. When this disk was ripped, disk 2 was mistagged as disk 1. Roon merged the tracks in this order 1-1, 1-1, 1-2, 1-2, 1-3, 1-3, etc. I edited the metadata of this disk to make it disk 2, but roon never saw the changes. If there’s a way to let it know to re-read metadata, I don’t know what it is. In any case, what I did was to use Grooping to remove the disk 2 tracks and I wound up with two albums, one with the disk 1 tracks and the other with the disk 2 tracks. When I re-merged the disks, of course, they went back to being interleaved. So I broke the tracks out again and then re-ran the identification on the second disk. I manually moved the tracks individually (moving 16 tracks down 10 places, only 160 mouse clicks which is still way too many) so that I now had two disks that were correctly indentied, one with the disk one data and one with the disk two data. when I merged these albums, the tracks interleaved again! So once again, I manually moved all the tracks to the right place, and now everything is correct, but it took almost 90 minutes to correct the data for one album, way too much!
A second problem is with multiple copies of the same album that strictly speaking shouldn’t ever occur. I’ll use Mike Oldfield - Tubular Bells as my example and I’ll try to illustrate with screen shots. I have three copies of Tubular Bells. Here’s a copy of the finder listing:
“Tubular Bells” and Tubular Bells [2009 Mix] are both 44.1/16 and Rubular Bells HD is the original 1973 mix in 48/24 downloaded from B&W Society of Sound. I have no problem with the original 2-track CD. It gets correctly identified. But look at the way that the other two get identified:
Look at the crazy way that the tracks are listed and the bizarre track times. FYI, the system knows the correct track times because here’s a screen shot of the identification screen:
There has t be a fix for this.
Then there are problems with the Roon database itself. Take a look at this screen shot:
The group you have denominated as “M.A.N.” is, in fact, the Welsh band Man who you have also correctly identified innediately to the right. Now look at this: Here’s an album you think is by M.A.N but is really by Man:
Notice that the description is entirely correct for the first album by Man, and the link in the description takes you to the artist page of Man even though it thinks that the artist is M.A.N. FYI, the metadata on the tracks is correct in identifying the goup as Man, not M.A.N.
There are lots more similar issues in all three categories, but I though I’d start with these. Any thoughts?
