· Hi, I have games and movies soundtrack albums. Subsequent game releases often use both Arabic and Roman numerals. For example, Baldur's Gate, Baldur's Gate II, and Baldur's Gate 3. Roon uses alphanumeric ordering here (when sorting by album title), which leads to exactly the opposite result. A similar thing happens to The Witcher, The Wither 2, and The Witcher 3. The Witcher is sorted as the last one, instead of the first one. I have tried adding albumsort ID3 tag, but it did not help. I can see that the artist edit screen allows editing the sort order by last-first name. I cannot find any way to do so with albums
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Weird. I have e.g. “Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light, Vol. 1” and “Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light, Vol. 2”, and the order changes for me. (This also works if I first create a Focus):
It works for you because all your albums use the same numeral convention, i.e. title Vol. 1, title Vol. 2 and so on. The issue occurs when it is mixed among albums, e.g. my album, my album II, my album 3:
I am really surprised that Baldur’s Gate without 1 in name goes first, while The Witcher without 1 goes last. Removing ‘The’ prefix from The Witcher fixes things. Looks like a mess to me. ‘The’ should be omitted in sorting, and this is how Roon usually behaves.
As a workaround, I edited album titles in Roon, but I would definitely prefer to be able to define sorting using ID3 tag. This way I would not have to provide fake album names.
I see. I suppose it does not see I, II, III as numbers at all but just caps letter “I”. I guess it’s difficult to know when “I” is just an “i” and when it is meant to be a roman numeral.
The first Witcher example makes no sense to me either
And now I understand what you meant by a sort order option for album names. Yeah, I guess it should have this. (Actually my “Angels of Darkness” albums are in a temporary state because I just added them, and I was going to change “Vol. 1/2” to “Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light I” and “Angels of Darkness, Demons of Light II”, as those are the canonical names. I supposed I’ll scrap that plan Thanks for the warning.)
Thank you for the detailed explanation and screenshots — they’re very helpful.
What you’re seeing is not a bug in the traditional sense, but a limitation of how text-based (lexicographic) sorting works in software.
When sorting by Album title, Roon performs a pure string comparison:
Roman numerals (I, II, III) are treated as letters, not numbers
Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3) are treated as digits
When both systems are mixed within album titles (e.g. Album, Album II, Album 3), there is no unambiguous or universally correct ordering rule
From a software perspective, it is impossible to reliably infer whether:
I means Roman numeral one
or simply the letter I
without explicit metadata telling the system how to interpret it.
This is why:
The Witcher (without a numeral) and The Witcher 2 / 3
Baldur’s Gate, Baldur’s Gate II, Baldur’s Gate 3
may not sort in the expected narrative order when mixed numeral conventions are used.
At the moment, Roon does not support a dedicated album-level “sort title” tag (unlike artist sort names), and ID3 ALBUMSORT is not currently used for display sorting in the UI.
Workarounds:
Use a consistent naming convention (all Arabic or all Roman numerals)
Prefix numbers explicitly (e.g. 01, 02, 03)
Or adjust album titles locally within Roon if strict ordering is important
Since this is not a current feature of Roon, I would recommend also posting your suggestion in the Feature Suggestions section of the site.
Thank you for the thoughtful report — feedback like this helps guide future improvements.
Thanks for the warning.)