Cannot add existing artist to album's primary artists
When editing an album, I cannot add an existing artist to the album's primary artists.
I downloaded an album from Bandcamp to my Roon Library: Day Breathes Night by Phil Dadson, Simon Allen, Rachel Shearer and Hermione Johnson. A single primary artist is initially shown for the album: "Phil Dadson, Simon Allen, Rachel Shearer, Hermione Johnson". I want to replace that with four primary artists, referencing artists known to Roon where possible.
Searching Roon, I find Phil Dadson, Rachel Shearer and Hermione Johnson, because they are already associated with albums on Tidal. Phil Dadson and Hermione Johnson are definitely the same artists on the Tidal albums and the downloaded album. I'm not sure about Rachel Shearer, as she is a performer on the downloaded album and only listed as a producer of the one Tidal album with which she associated, and that Tidal album does not look like her style. So, while I would be content to create a duplicate artist name Rachel Shearer, I want to associate the existing Tidal artists Phil Dadson and Hermione Johnson with the downloaded album as primary artists.
When I try adding Phil Dadson as a primary artist, he is not found as an existing artist and I am forced to create a new artist. Hermione Johnson is found, and I am not asked to create a new artist. However when I save the album edits and search Roon for Hermione Johnson, I now find two artists with that name, one associated with her solo Tidal album and one with my downloaded album.
So the Roon application's behaviour is inconsistent for the two artists, though in neither case am I succeeding in my objective of linking existing artists to the downloaded album. I've not been able to find any documentation stating that this is not supported. If it is not supported, please consider this a feature request.
I’ve moved your post from the Support category to the Roon Software Discussion category, since your issue is more of a “how best to use Roon with metadata” than a technical issue that the Support team are equipped to deal with.
The first point I would make is that Bandcamp has poor metadata for this album. They have used commas as separators of artist names instead of semicolons as specified by the ID3 standard. The result is that Roon sees the whole list as a single artist.
Personally, I would use a third-party metadata editor such as Mp3tag or dBpoweramp to rectify this before importing the files into Roon. Roon is not designed to do more than light editing of metadata (and editing is confined to Roon’s database content, file metadata remains untouched by Roon), and it can get tedious dealing with poor quality metadata in albums.
The second point is that Roon best recognises artists once you have at least one album of theirs in your library. So if Phil Dadson is known as a primary artist in a Tidal album, first add that album into your own library, and then you should be able to use him as a primary artist on this Bandcamp album.
If you end up with two artists having the same name, you can always merge them in Roon - making sure that you choose the correct one for the “ghost” to be merged into.
I believe just being in Tidal is not enough as Roon cannot use that as a metadata source to apply to non Tidal sources, it can search its Tidal database but that’s it. Artists need to be in MusicBrainz or AllMusic to edit or add them to albums. Same thing exists for albums that appears in Tidal or Qobuz that you have locally may only show as unidentified.
I may be wrong here but this crops up all the time for albums.
It’s the point that you need to have a recognised album by the artist in your Roon Library first for Roon to properly add the full artist information into your library and have the artist properly added into the Artist browser list.
Adding Tidal albums by the existing artists to my library fixed the problem. I could then make the artists primary artists of the downloaded album. Thanks!
After some experimentation, I left the commas in the artist metadata alone rather than changing them to semicolons. That worked for me. The album now has an ‘artist’ consisting of all four names. But below that are the individual artist names that I can click on to see their other albums:
There’s still one oddity, though one I think I can do without solving. Before I added Hermione Johnson’s Tidal album to my library, the album editor already found her existing artist name, unlike Phil Dadson. After I added Hermione Johnson’s Tidal album to my library, the album editor finds two Hermione Johnsons. I guessed that I should select the first one and it worked:
In the Artist browser, you can select duplicate artists (right click on each) and then you get a “Merge artists” button showing top right in the screen…
That method of removing the duplicate artist worked. Thanks! (I was nearly there, following your previous message mentioning removing duplicates. I had selected the two artists but failed to spot the “Merge artists” button up at the top right!)
I don’t believe it does, providing that another (imported) album has also been associated with the artist. I’ve not tried the experiment for myself, however, only gone by what’s been noted in the forum.
I can confirm that. I did the experiment by removing Phil Dadson’s Tidal album from my library. The downloaded album was still linked to Phil Dadson. And I could add him to another imported album. (Afterward the experiment, I put the Tidal album back in my library, as I’m keen to listen to it later.)
I also posted many times about this artist identification problem because the issue comes up many times - usually because people end up with duplicated artist names (without a bio etc) when they import local albums that have credits for which the proper identified artist is not yet in the library.
I think my most comprehensive post is this one, and the thread links to many others (and those link to more threads…):
