Identifying albums with perfect metadata need improvements

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi,

I noticed that many of my albums are unidentified. I have had to manually identify them. I noticed that some albums should have been correctly identified easily. I understand sometimes Roon could not identify a perfect match due to: multiple versions of the album, time/length of track/tracks is slightly different, or album name is slightly different.

However, today I found an album that should have been identified fully without any issue and yet Roon could not identify it automatically during import and while it is idle doing its thinking. The album has perfect album name, perfect artist name, perfect time/length for each individual track, there was only one version of the album, and worst yet, when I identified it manually, there was only that album that showed up no other album that could “complicate” the identification process. And yet, Roon failed in identifying the album.

Here is the video of the identification process Dropbox - RPReplay_Final1647903016.MP4 - Simplify your life.
Hope this could help improve the program.

Regards.

2

Thanks for posting the video. The reason that automatic identification is failing is that our metadata (from TiVo and MusicBrainz) has this as two discs. Your media has a single disc and it’s this mismatch of disc and track numbers which is preventing identification.

A potential enhancement for the future would be to treat all releases as a “single disc”, but there’s quite a bit of work involved to thread this throughout the code.

1 Like
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Numerous times when ripping CDs I have had to change the metadata obtained by dbPoweramp to enable Roon to identify the CD. Two disc releases always needed tweaking because the metadata never matched what Roon was expecting.
The aim isn’t ‘perfect’ metadata, but metadata that matches what Roon is expecting or isn’t sufficiently different to confuse the matching process. There is no such thing therefore as ‘perfect’ metadata because online sources will disagree with each other. Sometimes ‘less is more’.

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Personally, I struggle a lot in tagging Hybrid SACDs. I use Jaikoz to tag my files that uses its own database. However, this database is mainly based on Musicbrainz, filling some gaps through Discogs. The issue is that the tagging information on Musicbrainz is inconsistent regarding the layers of Hybrid SACDs. Sometimes only one layer, and sometimes separate layers for CD and SACD are provided. For Multichannel SACDs, this gets even worse because sometimes the Stereo SACD layer is provided as another one, but this is not always the case. I think this inconsistencies also contribute to the problem of identifying certain albums.

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A major issue with trouble with dbPoweramp is it treats multiple discs as separate items, so often the metadata between them is not quite consistent, causing problems for Roon.

Hi, there was another more general bug in Jaikoz, that mostly caused problems for hybrid SACD’s that had CD and SACD versions of the same tracks, this is now fixed in Jaikoz 11.5