Issue with singles album names after update

[aronson (Adam Aronson)]

Here’s another bug/undesirable behavior introduced in 1.7… Any single files I have are being auto categorized into an album for the artist called “Audio”. I may not be describing this correctly so I’ll illustrate here.

I have three Amon Tobin flac files all released as singles (without a parent album). Here’s how they appear in Roon:

Here is the same for a single flac file released by Braids:

I would expect each single to be its own “album” as I think it used to be pre-1.7.

Update: My master folder where my audio files are stored is called “Audio”. Could this be where the title is being derived from?

[Xekomi]

My master folder where my audio files are stored is called “Audio”. Could this be where the title is being derived from?

Yep.

You might want to try fixing your metadata by running the files through either MusicBrainz Picard (free) or SongKong.

[dylan (Dylan Caudill)]

Hi @aronson,

Using the Two Fingers example, can you share a screenshot of the file tags for this album?

[aronson (Adam Aronson)]

Using the Two Finders example, can you share a screenshot of the file tags for this album?

Hi @dylan,

Here’s the tags for the file “296 Rhythm”:

Here’s the tags for another file “LED Moon Rhythm” that Roon is putting into the same “Album”:

You might want to try fixing your metadata by running the files through either MusicBrainz Picard (free) or SongKong.

Not sure why… I’ve never had to do that before and these files were not combined into an album before I updated to 1.7.

[Xekomi]

Not sure why… I’ve never had to do that before and these files were not combined into an album before I updated to 1.7.

Yeah, definitely weird. And a good case for RoonLabs integrating MusicBrainz matching for when the others fail.

[aronson (Adam Aronson)]

And a good case for RoonLabs integrating MusicBrainz matching for when the others fail.

Ooh! NOW yer talkin’!

[Xekomi]

Ooh! NOW yer talkin’!

Somebody smarter and more prescient than myself already put it up as a feature request (as Integrate SongKong into Roon)

[dylan (Dylan Caudill)]

Thanks, @aronson.

If you add an ALBUM tag with the album title does that resolve things for you?

[aronson (Adam Aronson)]

It does. Did you guys change the code to group all files without an ALBUM tag into … the same album? If so… I look forward to 1.7.1!

[dylan (Dylan Caudill)]

Thanks for confirming, @aronson.

Are these files all “loose” in the Audio folder, or are they organized in sub-folders for each single/album?

[aronson (Adam Aronson)]

They’re loose in the audio folder.

[aronson (Adam Aronson)]

@dylan… any update on this?

Thanks!

[dylan (Dylan Caudill)]

Hi @aronson,

This issue is due to Roon not having enough information to go on. You can organize your media into folders (so that instead of pulling from Audio folder it will pull from the correctly named folder) or you can add file tags to your media.

[aronson (Adam Aronson)]

But this is a change in behavior and an undesirable one at that. What is the thinking behind changing this behavior versus the way it behaved previously? I am now forced to find all of the single audio files in my master audio folder and add them to folders using the “album“ name Or automatically retag them. A daunting task when considering I have roughly 6 TB of audio data managed by rune. Why not just change the code to automatically make the album name equal the track name when the track has no album name… As it did prior to the 1.7 update?

If I make it up on my soapbox for a moment… I am in the software business specifically custom software development. I know all too well that pain that users feel when a behavior is changed for a (at best) unknown purpose. Can you please explain why this was changed?

[mike (Mike Fass)]

Did you guys change the code to group all files without an ALBUM tag into … the same album?

Nope, no changes in this area I am aware of.

We’ve always had handling in place that helps us understand the difference between:

• A folder full of loose files that should not be “clumped” together into a single album
• A folder that contains a single album but limited or completely missing file tags (think about WAV files, for example)

The handling here is pretty complex and came out of analysis we did of millions of pieces of media so we don’t make changes here very often, precisely because regressions like these are annoying.

It’s possible some other improvement (or regression) in how we are understanding the tags made a change here, but I would be surprised.

In any event, we didn’t intend a change here and without a significant amount of feedback on this it’s pretty unlikely we’d make any changes to current behavior.

Ultimately, a folder full of tracks by the same artist with no album tags is pretty ambiguous situation, so I’d definitely recommend adding the tags if you want these “clumped” that way.