Another factor is that I want “Outtakes” or “Live” or “B-Sides” or whatever to show in the actual album listing when I search for “James”, instead of having them be separate discs of one huge Deluxe release. Then I can choose exactly what I want to play. Plus it’s easier to search and play the James bonus tracks by themselves, instead of having to remember what deluxe edition they’re a part of. So I can search “James [Live]” and play all the live tracks easily, even if they are spread across bonus discs of several different albums, for instance. This is how I did it in iTunes and how I now do it in JRiver. Now in Roon if I search for “James [Outtakes]” or “James Outtakes” I get zero results.
Let’s go for an easier example. James release “Gold Mother” has 2 versions issued under that name back in 1990 and 1991. They contain different versions of a few tracks, as well as a different playback order, and 1 track that is unique to each. How do I get Roon to show this either as one album “Gold Mother” which has 2 different listings under Versions, or as 2 different listings in the search results where I can easily tell which one is 1990 and which one is 1991? (I also want to make sure that the result works in other cases where the distinction might be [Japan] and [US] for the versions, and not necessarily the year).
Because right now this is what I get. Yes, both are listed under Tracks so I could just click there but this isn’t always the case. Why aren’t both versions showing up under Albums? This makes no sense.
I guess Roon force you to either treat them as separate albums/listings, or versions. And I can agree that Roon may have a bug when it comes to NOT present different listings, but treat them as more as versions anyway.
Myself prefer versions. In the version metatag I put everything like “Canada”, "Remastered 2018, “Deluxe”, whatever describes it. Even if I only have one version I strip anything like “(Remastered)” etc. from the album title and put it in meta. I want my titles clean!
Is this a Roon thing, or a standard flac tags? I can’t find a Version tag in JRiver. I might try it and see what happens in Roon, but I really don’t want to have to “Roon-ify” everything and screw up my entire library in a way that will be difficult to keep organized outside of Roon. I use a copy of the same library at my cabin, and I also don’t know if I will use Roon forever at home.
It is the place the info in brackets should be placed on import. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I guess Roon tries to match it with their central metadata source, but it gets confused when you tell it that a bonus disc itself is a version (which it isn’t).
Should do some tests and do a proper bug report.
One sure thing is that Roon never writes back metadata to files, so it does not mess with them. But everything you add and alter in the Roon database is also lost if you give it up.
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Very interesting. It seems like Roon is not populating the Version in the square brackets, even though I have set it to do so. That would definitely explain why I’m having so much trouble with this. Maybe Roon staff will give an answer tomorrow.
There is no Version Tag in JRiver, you need to create a Custom Tag
Roon however will ignore it as far as I know
The only Auto way I know is the Square bracket
Make your folder name
AlbumName [version]
Maybe Roon ignores [1990] , as numbers , who knows
See the screenshot that I posted just above where you wrote that. The folder location is at the very top in brown. Correct, no?
I can only think it ignores numbers
Have you tried a Forced Rescan ?
Yep, forced rescan several times. Tried labeling them [UK] and [US] instead of [1990] and [1991] – same search result as here – however, I do now see something in the Version tag. So ignoring numbers (years) as versions, and showing incomplete search results, seem like they might be different problems.
Unless I’m missing something, it seems impossible to browse my library in Roon and see ONLY the stuff that’s actually in my local collection unless I go to the extreme and completely disable Tidal and Qobuz. There’s an option to show only my library in search results, but if search results are broken, and this option is ignored once I browse anywhere beyond the search results page, I’m apparently screwed.
I guess I can do it by Focus>Inspector>Storage Location but that’s also tedious.
So for Roon these are probably separate albums.
But the album you posses was not (never?) released in that way (split up disk 1). If Roon is able to match your files successfully to the correct metadata it will display it as a multi-disk album of 3 disks. To help Roon correctly identifying multi-disk albums see:
As others already wrote, try unidentify your albums with special treatment so Roon leaves them alone - but then better not try and mark them as version of an identified album.
One of the benefits (distinguishing feature) of Roon is that it uses it’s own enriched set of metadata for your library, so you don’t have to have perfect metadata in your files or perfect file/folder organization in your storage. This also means that your metadata or file/folder structure is mostly ignored by Roon.
Okay so rewinding back to the original problem:
In the case of Deluxe releases where Disc 1 contains extra non-album tracks, is there any way to segregate them in Roon such that I can play the album but not hear the extra tracks?
I’d like to “exclude” the extra tracks from playing when I play the original album AND also from playing when I do other things, like shuffle an artist. Many bonus tracks are kinda crap but I’d like to keep them around for archival purposes, such as when I want to purposefully play it to see what an early version of a track sounded like. Sometimes bonus tracks are interview clips or talking, which I never ever want to hear accidentally.
I guess this could also apply to Disc 2 and Disc 3 of such sets as well, since it seems impossible to exclude on a per-disc basis.
If the album is correctly identified by Roon as 3 disc multi-disc album, there is no easy way to avoid the playback.
Play the album and the tracks from all 3 discs get added to the queue. Play “Disc 1” and all the tracks from disc 1 get added to the queue. Roon doesn’t know what you expect, talking about the original album - the 3 disc multi-disc album isn’t even a version of the original (single disc) album. You have to bulk select the tracks from the first disk that you want to play and add them to the queue or create a playlist for these tracks or hide the tracks that don’t belong to the original album (don’t forget to to set “Show hidden tracks and albums” to No - only set it to Yes in the rare cases you want to play the bonus tracks and thus need to be able to select them).
If you don’t hide the bonus tracks you might want to ban them so Roon Radio leaves them alone too.
Can’t really comment about this because having streaming services active might be a complete game changer as these bonus tracks might be available for playback there anyway (key word: Roon Radio). Maybe other users can provide some insight here?
To summarize, I’m totally confused:
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The Import preference for having Roon get the Album Title from the File info seems to not work, as everything that I have re-titled in the flac tags still shows as the official album name that Roon is getting from the internet. I’ve also tried changing this in the “Edit” for individual albums. Nothing makes a difference. It’s broken.
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Similarly, Roon ignores track numbers that are different from the official release, despite ticking the correct box in Settings and even editing an individual album. Nothing makes a difference. It’s broken.
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I don’t understand the point of separating Versions by using Square Brackets, IF albums that are otherwise identically named (only the square brackets differ) do not show up under ONE album listing, and then show the different versions under the Versions tab. This also seems totally broken, as every version of an album shows separate listings and I can’t find a single case where the Versions tab shows more than 1 version in my library, despite having different versions of several albums (generally, US vs Japan releases, for example – where the Japanese version has an extra track or two… or an original and remastered version where track listings and runtimes are nearly the same… or even an identical album where I have the 16/44 version and the 24/96 version… they’re all listed separately).
Here’s just one example of why some of this is a problem. Which one is the original master, which one is remastered, and which one is the 24/192 version? On the desktop app the album covers are overlaid with this info. On the phone app, there’s nothing and the titles are cut off.
I don’t know why these aren’t showing under the Versions tab, where I would readily be able to spot the differences. I tried turning off “hide duplicates” thinking this might cause them to be grouped under Versions tab, but it changes nothing.
Here’s on the desktop app:
Works for me on non-version albums. As for Roon versions have to be the same (see the definition above) this might be why in your case it’s not working as expected.
Might be the same reason as 1. Versions as per Roon’s definition can’t have differing track numbers.
This is expected, see the quote from the documentation above. Feel free to read the whole document.
This should be versions but if you still have “Show hidden tracks and albums” set to Yes …
Or it might be caused by your metadata and import preferences - just guessing here, don’t really know. But as it works for others, there is most-likely some issue with your files/folders or how you configured Roon.
I’ve read that page about Versions a few times. I still don’t understand why it’s not working in the case of [Original Master] vs [Remastered] vs [24-96], where the track listings are identical and the individual runtimes are generally the same (might differ by a few seconds). I tried with “Show Hidden Tracks and Albums: NO” and they’re still not grouped under the Versions tab. I don’t know what else I can do, I have messed with this for hours in every which way I can think is possible, I have re-scanned my library, flipped every possible setting on and off, and Roon just will not behave.
I’m done for today, this is taking way too much time to figure out how to do in Roon what is super simple in every other music library app I have ever used. When it’s a better experience to browse my library in iTunes than in Roon, well, that’s a problem because generally iTunes sucks.
But thank you everybody for the help so far. I will wait until Roon Support replies with some suggestions before I put any more energy into this, because in my opinion a lot of the issues I have documented above seem like bugs / Roon failing to do what it’s supposed to do w/r/t respecting the square brackets, using file tags for album titles and track numberings, etc.