Jack Hammer != Roon's Jack Hammer

This Jack Hammer is in my library:

http://www.jackhammer.co.za/index.html
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/93f0201e-0a2c-4f4a-8a51-0f50ba75521f

and is associated with this artist, who is also in my library:
https://musicbrainz.org/artist/43505787-357e-4272-b981-2669f4d5818d

Whilst Roon assumes Jack Hammer is the following artist (aka Earl Burroughs):

Please correct.

Hi @evand,

Can you share some additional details about what you’re seeing in Roon, including screenshots? What albums are you seeing this incorrect Jack Hammer on?

@dylan I’ll provide screenshots tonight when I’m home.

Thanks
E

1 Like

@dylan

This is one example. It seems any that are Unidentified in Roon get assigned to the wrong Jack Hammer albeit Roon is aware of the correct one also for albums it has identified.

Thanks for the info, @evand.

Just to verify, you didn’t previously have this other Jack Hammer in your library, correct?

In the meantime, the best option is to manually add the correct Jack Hammer as a Primary Artist Link in Roon.

Yip, never heard of the other one till Roon assigned albums to him.

@dylan This is an area where Roon’s album ingestion logic could be improved. Before posting the above screenshots I moved all Jack Hammer albums to a folder Roon doesn’t monitor, ran a library cleanup to remove all traces of these albums and restarted Roon. Thereafter I added one album at a time to see what decisions Roon was making. The first album I added was one Roon correctly identified and assigned to the correct Jack Hammer. The second was Unidentified and assigned to the incorrect Jack Hammer. There was more than enough performer, composer and personnel metadata in the Unidentified album for Roon to be able to infer that it’s the same Jack Hammer as the one that already exists in my library. Roon appears to completely ignore this file level metadata when trying to figure out what to do with an album it is unable to identify. I’ve seen this exact same behaviour before with an artist called Karma. I guess this post could be seen as a bug report/ enhancement request.

Hi @evand,

Thanks for the additional testing here. Would you mind sending the first and second albums that you mentioned above in a PM? I’d like to get them over to our technical team so they can take a closer look at this.

Sent you a Dropbox link with 3 albums. Two are known to Roon, the third isn’t.

Thanks @evand — The albums have been downloaded and sent over to the team.

I merged the artists, selecting the correct Jack Hammer as the target. That worked for a while till I added the other albums and Roon decided it knew better and reassigned the lot to the incorrect Jack Hammer and in the process making the correct one invisible :exploding_head:

Amusingly, Roon has kept the correct country information and web link but concluded Earl Burroughs must have left the US and relocated to South Africa.

Thanks for the update, @evand. I’ve updated my ticket to the technical team to reflect this new information. This is still in their queue to be investigated but once they get back to me I’ll be sure to update you here.

Hi @evand,

The team has been attempting to reproduce the behavior you’re seeing but so far we have not had any luck doing so. In all cases we are seeing the correct Jack Hammer credited.

Moving forward, we were hoping you could do the following:

  1. Create copies of the Jack Hammer albums and place them outside of your watched folder(s).
  2. Delete these albums from Roon.
  3. Re-import the identified albums first
  4. Re-import the unidentified albums

After doing so do you see any change?

@dylan

I moved all the albums to a folder within Roon’s folder tree named ".z ". I also have three compilation albums with tracks by the same Jack Hammer - I moved these to a “.z” folder too (which I’d not done previously when I reported the issue).

I then ran a library cleanup, following which I restarted Roon to ensure there’s nothing hanging around in an uncleared object / variable etc. and then moved one album back into the regular folder tree making the album visible again. Here’s the end result:

As you can see, despite the album being recognised by Roon, it’s still assigned to Jack Hammer AKA Earl Burroughs.

No idea why the behaviour would be any different on your side?

Interestingly the band artwork you see in the first screenshot is something I assigned to the correct Jack Hammer when I’d merged the two Jack Hammer artists, selecting the correct one as the Jack Hammer to merge into.

It seems to me there are update issues/ omissions in the Roon code pertaining to keeping the database current and getting rid of crud e.g. data pertaining to artists that no longer exist in a user’s library.

Hi @evand,

Thanks for giving that a try, I’ve updated the ticket to reflect this and will reach out when I have further feedback from the team.

@dylan, thx. Any update on this one?

Hi @evand,

I had a chat with the team about their findings here. We’ve tried a few different ways but, so far, we haven’t been able to reproduce this behavior on our end. We are thinking there may be specific data existing in your database that we don’t have that is causing this behavior to occur on your end. We are continuing to look into this, but so far we haven’t had any luck.

If possible, it would be interesting to know if you see this same behavior when using a fresh database.

In the meantime, we recommend using the manual identification process.

Hi Dylan

Not quite sure how to go about this?

@dylan

I’ve now removed all instances of “Jack Hammer” and Piet Botha within my library.

I think the problem lies with you guys not having any Jack Hammer aka Earl Burroughs in your library when testing. There’s clearly a conflation error here in your database or your upstream provider’s:

As you can see, there remain 4 compositions credited to the Earl chap…yet he’s assigned as being from South Africa?

@joel, perhaps this is one for you re undoing the conflation in Roon’s database?

@dylan I’ve now moved all compositions by Earl Burrroughs out of my collection. I’m going to run a database cleanup and tonight reintroduce Jack Hammer (not the Earl Burroughs version) and see what happens.

image

Post library cleanup Burroughs still exists in the database despite no compositions or tracks:

This looks to me very much like it’s a Roon database cleanup issue/bug leaving redundant data behind rather than doing a proper cleanout of unlinked objects. @brian, your thoughts?

@dylan

I’ve now added Jack Hammer albums to a fresh database and the Earl Burroughs conflation has disappeared, confirming for me that Roon’s database cleanup leaves unassigned objects behind rather than removes them. Seems like a bug fix is required here.

In the meantime I’d appreciate some guidance re the manual identification process you’ve referred to which will result in the correct Jack Hammer being assigned to the Jack Hammer albums in my library.