Good Morning,
After the last update I’m having a problem with Roon splitting the same artist in two and in one case not showing all the albums by one artist. The artists being split are Count Basie, Michael Martin Murphey, Richard Bennett (the Bluegrass guitarist not the rock guitarist), Richard Thompson, Rodrigo y Gabriela, and Sting. When the splits occur they show for example 3 albums under one Richard Thompson and 19 under the second Richard Thompson out of the total 22 albums I have by Richard Thompson. With the exception of Richard Bennett (Bluegrass) the artist data is the same for both listings.
In the case of Sting not only is he being split into two artists but only one of the eight albums I have by him is showing up under the Artist category and it is the same album for both listings. All eight albums I have by Sting do show up under the Album category.
For Richard Bennett all seven albums are by the Bluegrass flatpick guitar Richard Bennett but Roon has been splitting them in two assigning some to the Bluegrass Richard Bennett and some to the Rock/Pop Richard Bennett.
There does not seem to be any pattern in when these incorrect changes occur and the splits don’t occur for all the listed artists at the same time. Sometimes only two or three will be split other times it will be 5 out of 6 are split.
Needless to say it’s a pain to correct these errors only to have them show up again in a day or two. There may be more instances of this happening but these are the ones I’ve identified so far.
All the music files are stored on a Synology NAS and I’m using ROON ROCK on a NUC7i5 for my core.
Edit: I thought I should add that with the exception of Richard Bennett using the ‘Merge Artist’ function doesn’t do anything, I’m guessing because both listings have the same artist data. Second restoring from a correct backup appears to trigger the incorrect changes, they seem to occur at random as well but I’ve tried restoring from backup twice and both times it triggered the incorrect changes happening after the restore. Finally all my files are either FLAC or DSD.
I had the same problem with Jimmy Smith. Roon staff recommended I select all the albums and re-identify them. It worked, but the problem came back in a few days. I did it again and seems to be okay today.
I recommend the following things to be checked (which is a pain in roon, I wished there was a propper admin view allowing an easier adjustment of such things, mass editing)
Re-Identifying is a good idea as David_Gibson mentioned.
In case this fails I recommend the following thing.
Assuming you perhaps had artists unknwon to roon before, or without any data.
Settings > Library > un-merge aritsts
have a look if the ones giving issues are perhaps merged ones. This feature did work well for me in the past to for example merge “Police” with “The Police” but it resulted in a loss of albums recently (Police was just an example since it explains the issue, it didn’t happen with such well known artists in reality, more with unknown ones)
next thing you could check.
Select an album from an artist you feel another album is missing.
Use the 3 dots next to to the red heart.
Then Edit, then Edit Album
Now have a look at the “primary artist” and press the “Add primary Artist” button.
A popup should appear which entitles you to type in the artistname.
You don’T want to add another ones but it gives you an idea about how many artists your library is aware of all sharing the same name. In case the name appears multiple times and you’re aware that you don’t know more but one using this name it’s likely your aritist splitted up.
Happened to my like this.
1 artist … unknown to roon in the past
then the update between November and December I seem to remember
roon now knows about the artist but only knew about a subset of his albums
what happened … roon splitted up the aritst into the one with the known albums leaving alone your previous artist with the unknown albums.
Just an idea … worked for me …
best thing … don’t worry you never lost your physical files from the missing albums.
I checked my Richard Thompsons as well and had has as two artists: one with 5 albums and one with 1 album. I selected the Rumor and Sigh album and did a re-identify no it and all 6 albums snapped into place under one occurrence of Richard Thompson.
Had a similar issue with Neil Young and it was not quite as easy for him. Had heavily re-jig 46 albums!!!
yepp … damn frustrating … roon does behave like a Dieselcar at the moment. It was sold offering something and reality shows differnt, it asks for manual corrections day-in day-out. I think I simply wait now … and I’m happy the important metadata isn’t lost since the good point with roon is it doesn’t write what I believes into the embedded metadata of the files. Means one day when theres a better solution next to nothing got lost.
I’ve been able to correct the mistakes that Roon is making by in going into Album edit unclicking the artists name in Primary Artist link saving that then bringing Album edit back and clicking on the artists name again. To bring the missing albums from Sting back I’ve gone into the Album category using the sort albums by artist then going to all of Sting’s albums and doing the same reset of Primary Artist.
Some of the albums I have are unidentified by Roon so re-identifying doesn’t work for me.
I’m able to correct everything but it’s a hassle when Roon decides to change things on it’s own. This has only been happening since the last update so I’m guessing this is related to the update.
After it happened a couple of times I noted the total Artist count from the main page, whenever that count goes up for no reason I figure it’s splitting artists. So far it only seems to be doing the ones I listed. The missing album issue I only came across because it split Sting, there may be more that I haven’t come across yet.
As Stefan said it’s a good thing it doesn’t change embedded metadata, that could be a deal killer for me. Hopefully the next upgrade will correct whatever is causing this.
Well after a week or so Roon strikes again. It has done the same splits, this time only affecting Richard Thompson, Rodrigo y Gabriela and Sting. Again losing all but one Sting album. I think this time it may have occured after Roon doing an automatic Backup. This is really annoying. I tried reidentifying the albums by Sting this time and it actually made things worse.
Thanks for letting us know of this issue. Can I please ask you to send us your database so that I can ask QA to take a look to see if they are able to reproduce? You can use these instructions to get your database over to us and if you don’t have Dropbox or Google Drive just let me know and I can provide an alternate upload method.
Thanks for getting back to me. I don’t have Dropbox or Google Drive so I’ll need the alternate method. I’m running Windows 10 on my computer if that makes a difference.
You can find the duplicates, if I understand your question, by Searching and starting to type the name. As soon as you see both names, stop, choose one and see if this is the the “real” one. If not, select all tracks (of the fake), and change them to the “real” artist. May take a couple of tries.
You can also Merge Artists but I assume you have tried that.
Merge artists doesn’t have an effect since the splits are for the same artists. For example I have 22 albums by Richard Thompson when the split occurs it assigns say 3 albums to one Richard Thompson and 19 albums to a duplicate Richard Thompson. Both Richard Thompsons have the exact same artist data. For Sting the situation is a bit different, I have a total of 8 albums by him. When the split occurs two identical Stings are present each one only showing the same album. The other 7 albums are not showing up in the Artist category, they do however show up in the Album category.
Since it is the same few artists who are being split at this time, finding which ones are split isn’t hard.
I’ve been chasing similar duplicate artist issues and find that artists that exist in different iterations (like Richard Thompson, Richard and Linda Thompson) seem to be causing the issues. (Prince, P and the revolution, p and the npg…) was the biggest mess I had
Once I unmerged and separated all of them, the duplicates seemed to vanish (I was up to 3 “Prince” artists at one point.)
I agree @Mario_Bucco, the Merge artist idea wasn’t likely to be successful.
I think what I did to fix this was: 1) to select all the tracks by the “phantom” artist and 2) delete then re-add the Artist Credits. But its been awhile. You might try that on a small sample.
John; I can fix the issue at least temporarily. The problem is that the issue returns, apparently whenever Roon Rock does an automatic backup or is reset.
Derek; It does not appear to be related to different iterations as most of artists affected don’t have that, at least in my collection.
From minimal acknowledgement by one of the Roon team, the split or phantom artists with missing albums issue may have coincided with a Roon back end metadata change. Further evidence of a behind the scenes metadata problem is that my film composer artist pages around the same time became littered with dozens of additional Tidal links that are absolute chaff.
Too often, Roon leaves the low level customer support guys to respond to similar problem reports across multiple threads. That may be well and good for minor, individual concerns. But this is a fundamental, architectural issue. Roon right at the top really needs to cop to the problem and state how it is going to be fixed.
