I ripped my CDs with XLD and then tag them via MusicBrainz.
Some of the tagged music files (so before hey get interpreted by Roon!) show in the composer field twice the same name separated with comma. For example:
The song “Top Hat” (Track 5 of “Menuhin & Grappelli Play Berlin, Kern, Porter & Rodgers & Hart” – MusicBrainz link) has after tagging from MusicBrainz in the composer field:
composer: Irving Berlin, Irving Berlin
Why does the same composer is listed twice? And why are these occurrences separated by comma? (When you separate multiple artists, you do so with semicolon (“;”) not with comma (“,”))
Is there any meaning in the double occurrence (which Roon could pick up when it interprets the metadata)?
Have you tried merging these “duplicate” composers? Although the spelling is identical they are in fact separate data objects in roon’s databases. During roon’s metadata ingestion process most of these occurrences are “equivalenced” in order to reduce the occurrence of duplicates. But my experience is that many still slip through the net. I have manually merged hundreds of duplicate artists and composers. For example:
Here you can see two Mozarts with identical spelling and two Rachmaninov’s with small variations in spelling. Some composers and artists have several hundred variations in spelling and roon does not necessarily equivalence them all.
In order to merge artists and composers you must access the artist screen from the left-hand menu and highlight the artists/composers you want to merge. A merge artist option will appear. Usually you want to merge into the version of the artist with the most metadata, bio, picture, album and composition links but sometimes you may want to use other criteria.
By default roon is expecting a semicolon “;” to delimit artists and composers in your metadata but on screen it presents artist and composer lists delimited with commas.
Thanks @tripleCrotchet. Maybe Roon reflects these different-but-same composers from the original tag in the audio file. Maybe it is best to correct the tag in the audio file before I import the track into Roon?
Only the metadata contributor to MusicBrainz can tell you. Does not look like it was precisely following the guidelines of MB.
My guess: it might be originating from different database systems with different syntax. If roon is picking it up or not, only the practical experiment can tell you. If it does, and two composers of the same name but different spelling exist in roon, you have to follow Tony’s advice of merging them or remove the one roon is not identifying correctly.
In many cases roon does ignore such inconsistent file tags and just proceed with correct metadata (as you have to specifically ask roon to prefer the file tags over its own metadata). In some cases ´ghost artists´ are created based on the incorrect tags.
Your ´ghost´ Mozart seems to be by the first name of ´Wofgang´ which explains why he was not identified.
´Sergey Rachmaninov´ is the most common international transliteration of the original name ´Сергей Рахманинов´ while ´Sergei Rachmaninoff´ is an older German transliteration, which the composer preferred, according to what I have read. Roon should understand that both are based on one and the same Cyrillic name, but seemingly the wrong first name ´Segei´ might have prevented that.
There are cases, though, of names bearing the identical spelling leading to the creation of several artists.
Yes, that is an option and where there are a large number of variations I do that myself, as it is just less trouble to be consistent in my source data. However if there are just a few variations you are coming across on a regular basis then merging is a useful option that will save you a lot of time and trouble as you only have to do it once. In any case, in your example, the spellings are identical so merging is probably your only option.
It is not generally realised the scale of the problem. I cannot see how roon will ever get around to equivalencing all instances so that the problem does not arise in the first place. Here are the variations of Rachmaninov listed by Discogs:
Personally, I find Czech, Finnish and Asian artist/composer names particularly problematic.
Time flies and it will be a few years back now but roon changed its metadata ingestion process to include and combine several suppliers and that led to a dramatic increase in duplicates. I think the idea was that the gaps in one supplier would plug the gaps in another and that probably happened but there are no real metadata standards so what also happened was that the overlaps in one duplicated the overlaps in the other. This includes same spelling duplicates and variation spelling duplicates.
