Merging artists (performers?) often not possible

@joel, When I import this Nash Ensemble, Elgar disc I get this:

A minor quibble is that it is a “violin” sonata, not a “viola” sonata. It’s on the cover.

But the real problem is that I have tagged it “The Nash Ensemble” rather than “Nash Ensemble” as that is also what is on the CD cover. Roon on the other hand has tagged it “Nash Ensemble”. So now I have duplicates. I have 3 choices:

  1. I can remove “The Nash Ensemble” from the roon credits.
  2. I can re-tag my file to “Nash Ensemble” to match roon’s incorrect metadata supplier

But that means I have to do 1) and/or 2) pretty much every time I have a Nash Ensemble album. What I would really like to do is:

  1. Merge all instances of “The Nash Ensemble” to “Nash Ensemble” so it no longer matters which artist equivalent is in my tags and I never have to worry about it again or duplicate the tagging effort. The problem is I cannot because when I go to the artist page and filter on “Nash” I get this:

So I only see “Nash Ensemble” and not “The Nash Ensemble”. I don’t really know but my guess is that roon is not classifying “The Nash Ensemble” as an artist. Maybe it is classifying it as a performer? So my question is, what exactly is going on and why does roon not support this use case?

I find this a really common problem. It is very time consuming as normally I will first do 2) above and then often as not I get duplicates anyway so I have to do a variation on 1) above as well to remove a duplicated primary artist from the credits. I have now been trying to migrate to roon for over a year and I find this to be a very common and time consuming use case. Is there anything that can be done to reduce or eliminate the work created by this extremely common use case?

2 Likes

What I typically do in this case (if I understood your merge problem correctly, I clean up album credits other than the performer this way) is to temporarily add the other artist I want to merge (in your case “The Nash Ensemble”) as “Primary Artist” to an album. Then both should appear in Artist view and you can merge them. Then you can revert the Primary Artist edit. It’s not an elegant solution, but I don’t know of any other way to accomplish this.

Thanks for the work around @ruediger. I’ll try that and see how I get on with that when I get home.

But I would still like to understand what roon is doing. For example:

  1. I often get duplicates on the album page. For some reason I would say that was the norm rather than the exception. For example, the credits might show orchestra, performing orchestra, ensemble and primary artist as all the same and result in duplicates on the album page but I discovered from trial and error that unticking the primary artist on the credits page de-clutters the album screen and removes the duplicate. The thing is I really have no idea what the impact is. Have I in effect deleted the artist and now it does not show up in searches and groupings?

  2. Another use case, very common with opera but also other programmatic CD’s is that roon will identify all the soloists (composers as well) as primary artists. The problem with that is then it will not display who is playing/singing what at a track level. So I just routinely untick roon’s primary artists so that the individual soloists show at a composition/track level (if they are in my tags because this level of detail is rare from the public databases). Again I don’t really understand what the impact on roon searching, grouping, hyper-linking etc. is if I keep on breaking the link with the primary artist.

I wholeheartedly agree. This has been an issue since the initial release of 1.3, and I would love to see a better solution than the current workarounds.

I had no idea that was the distinction between an artist and a performer. I had assumed there was a deep technical reason. Maybe the artist was identified but the performer was unidentified, because it just seems so bonkers otherwise.

I can see the sense at a technical data modeling level distinguishing composer/performer attributes. But at a presentation layer level I can’t see what would be the issue of rolling up the available composer/performer metadata into a single much more intuitive artist screen, maybe with consistent sections including composing and performing activities. Seems a little bonkers maintaining separate screens from a user perspective.