Merge Artists with Performers?

#1

Artist merging is undoubtedly a very useful new feature of 1.3. However, I’m unsure how to handle duplicity of Artist and Performer pages. This comes up in multiple places through my collection, but will use a representative example here. @joel

Beethoven Orchester Bonn is listed in the Credits as both Primary Artist and Performing Orchestra for two albums. Therefore, there are two results when searching “Beethoven Orchester Bonn”: one Artist and one Performer:

BOB-search.jpg1049×781 114 KB

The Artist page is light on details, and the image I added myself:

BOB-artist.jpg1049×781 379 KB

The Performer page has many more details, including a summary of the history of the ensemble:

BOB-performer.jpg1049×781 218 KB

Is there any way to merge the Performer and Artist identities to both point to the most data-rich entry (Performer in this case, but not always)?

1 Like
Merging artists (performers?) often not possible
#2

I have had multiple such cases and keep finding new ones. I have helped myself by temporarily assigning both (or more) as “Primary Artists” to a particular album, so they both show up in the “Artists” view. Then I can merge them and revert my Primary Artist edit. Not the most elegant solution, but better than nothing.

#3

Any news on future functionality that would fix this @support? This is one of several instances in my library of Artist/Performer double listing on the Album page (mostly classical).

#4

I’m running into this same issue. I didn’t create either the Artist or the Performer. They are the same person, but depending on whether or not the music is under her name or if she appears as a featured performer, it shows up on different pages:

search
search.jpg1856×1406 347 KB

Capture
Capture.jpg1856×1406 388 KB

Capture 2
Capture 2.jpg1856×1406 468 KB

Any news on how to resolve this?

#5

They are not the same concept.

An artist is the person, who may sometimes be a performer, sometimes a composer. For those artists that do both, such as Thelonious Monk, you will see a very different set of albums in each category. And it would seem appropriate to have very different discussion of Monk the performer (successful and prolific but not extremely so, and Monk the composer (the second most covered jazz composer after Duke Ellington, even though Monk wrote 70 compositions and Ellington 2,000). And in a discussion of the artist you might see both.

That’s not to say that the existing metadata is always good…

#6

While that is true in the strictest sense, there certainly are many cases where artist and performer are interchangeable. In such instances, why should it not be possible to merge their metadata entries? Taking this a step further, the entry could even be tabbed, identical to what is already done for Composers who are also Performers. Since Roon has already gone down the path of a tabbed approach with 2 entries, why not 3 tabs for Composer, Artist, Performer?

#7

The thing is, there are plenty of similar situations in my library where the artist and the performer concepts are all in one place. There’s even a dedicated part of an Artist’s page for appearances on compilation albums and as featured performers on other peoples’ songs. For example, my Artist page for Elvis Costello looks like this:

Capture
Capture.jpg1848×1406 622 KB

If this is possible, I don’t see any reason why there should be two Phoebe Ryan pages in my library, other than issues with metadata or a bug in Roon.

#8

Hi @allan. Any hope of progress on this issue, now that your are a Roon insider?

#9

Reviving this conversation… it seems as if Roon 1.6 has eliminated the distinction of Artists vs Performers. For me, this is great…it never made any really coherent sense before how Roon distinguished between them, and it was frustrating that one could not merge an Artist with a Performer. Was this the intention?

#10

Don’t you just love :cricket:.

I’ve been doing some work on my file based metadata via a sqlite table and am about to eliminate all performer tags where the performer and artist tags are identical. Going forward I’ll be using performer tags only where an artist other than the albumartist makes an appearance on a track.