So I’m trying Roon for the trial period after reading and watching many good things about it. I’m an iTunes user.
I don’t understand the sorting in Roon. Personally I think albums should be sorted by artist then by release date in this order: a-z, 0-9, then symbols or other characters. Compilations should be at the end but grouped together, ie Now 91,92,93 would be together.
Artists should be sorted by last name, and the ‘The’ at the start of a band name should be ignored.
I can’t figure out how Roon sorts at all and there doesn’t appear to be a ‘sort as’ option like iTunes has. This is handy for bands with 2 albums in one year such as the Beatles. Sort as enables you to tweak the sorting so that they are in the correct chronological order instead of by title.
I know different software may sort differently to how I wish but as long as I can override it that’s fine. I just can’t figure it out in Roon.
I was also a long time iTunes user, Roon took some getting used to in many ways but the sorting was never an issue for me, Roon has sorted my albums almost exactly the same way iTunes did baring a few exceptions (which I would love to correct, if I had the time).
Hopefully some of the more learned and meticulous users will be able to sort (no pun intended) you out.
Thanks Mark. I guess I’ve tweaked a lot of tags in iTunes to get it right over the years.
Roon is smart enough to know release dates and stuff but this is causing issues, especially when you have a re-release of a cd. A 1992 re-release of a 1984 album needs to go in 1984.
There is an option in settings to either sort by release date (which would be 1992 in your example) or original release date (1984). You can have it either way…
And those dates can either just be the year, or the day, month, year, so there is no issue with albums sorting if there are multiple release in a single year, like your Beatles example.
For me, there’s no need for a “sort as” feature like in iTunes, since you can tweak the sort order settings pretty effectively and gives you more flexibility, i.e. in your example, I can go back and forth between sorting by release date or original release date whereas if you hardcode it in iTunes in “sort as”, you can only have it one way.
To me, sorting in Roon is much more logical than iTunes, and “sort as” is just a kludge solution requiring a lot of manual editing.
I know its a pain but you can also edit a lot of stuff in the album editor and set your own personal preferences, this can be set globally to prefer the metadata from your files instead of Roon:
