Is there anything that can be done to improve scrobbling on Roon?
Ideally, I’d like to be able to scrobble the Primary Artist only.
As an example, I’m currently listening to the album Harvest by Neil Young. However, when it scrobbles the artist tag is credited to all artists listed in the metadata. This results in messed up stats on my last.fm account. Some tracks are credited to Neil Young and others to the “London Symphony Orchestra, Neil Young” and others to “Neil Young, London Symphony Orchestra”.
This is just one example. It’s particularly bad with Jazz albums on the ACT label. It’s a lottery when scrobbling Lars Danielsson or Wolfgang Haffner (for example). Classical stuff is terrible for this too.
Sometimes last.fm correct the errors at their end but quite a few slip through.
It wouldn’t be realistic or desirable to amend the metadata for every track and it affects Tidal tracks too. However, scrobbling direct from the Tidal desktop is fine, with very few of these issues.
Is this something that can be addressed in future releases. Please…
I wholeheartedly agree! It would be much better for Roon to scrobble to the main artist, omitting all those who are featured. Instead I’m now forced to be extra vigilant and manually correct these incorrect scrobbles every time. Can we have any official comment on this issue? Cheers, m
We used to just scrobble albumartist and people complained that the right thing to do was to scrobble track artist (mainperformer credits), so we started doing that. It currently only falls back to albumartist when there are no track mainperformer credits.
There is no notion of “main” track artist in Roon, it’s always a list of N artists with no implicit or explicit priority.
It is sure a tricky case if the perfect solution is the goal…
But perfection doesn’t exist (sadly ), especially when Last.fm data quality is concerned.
Scrobbling all primary artists instead of album artists only adds mess to the growing mess that Last.fm data is, but that is not your concern.
However, Roon current strict behaviour adds incoherence to the data of users who scrobbles for a long time or simply a lot before using Roon.
I’m only scrobbling for a year now (with dedicated plugin in foobar2000, and now with Roon in trial) but I’ve paid a lot of attention to the data scrobbled to have decent results.
Since the plugin I used allow customization of the data scrobbled for artist, album and title, I created a simple rule for artist value :
If the track artist metadata count is greater than one I use album artist metadata for the artist scrobbling value.
The only exception is when album artist is a standardized (in my library tags) generic value like Various Artists. In this case I scrobble track artist(s).
In my view, a premium product like Roon should allow at least allow to choose the source for artist data scrobble, either track artist(s) or album artist.
The exception management I described (or a more advanced one) would be an even better solution, maybe later.
Let me know what you (other users or the Roon team) think of my suggestions.
Thanks.
Wouldn’t be better to continue this discussion in the Feature Request section ?
In these cases, Mavis Staples and Jay-Z (respectively) are primary artists, and its seems you would want to scrobble them too…
However, looking at what’s actually on Last.FM, it seems like no one actually does the “right” thing – these three tracks are generally scrobbled as Neil Young, Van Morrison, and Beyonce, respectively.
We are going to make a change here – unsure if it will make the next release, but in the future we will use album level information, as opposed to the more detailed track level data that Roon retrieves. Based on what I’m seeing on Last.FM, I think that should improve things, but let us know how it’s going guys. Thanks!
), especially when Last.fm data quality is concerned.
