Metadata in Unidentified Albums

In an unidentified album,the composer is not shown if that composer is not also a part of an identified album. So for some albums, I can have tracks whose well known composer is shown (such as, “Composed by Franz Schubert”) and other tracks that are blank because the associated composer is not present in any identified album in my collection. In another disk, a collection of works all composed by Henryk Wieniawski, the composer name should be at the top (all tracks composed by…), but nothing is present.

The files for an identified album can have a lot of junk in the metadata; (it appears that) the identification will hide all that. Unidentified albums are always going to be present in any large collection and they are unidentified partly because the metadata isn’t consistent or complete or matching Roon requirements. I can think of six ways to spell Sergey Rachmaninov. I’ve seen files that specify composer via three tags (TCOM, COMPOSER, and composer) that don’t always agree. So I would like to see unidentified albums gain some additional support, perhaps a separate identification process that allows the user to select which metadata tags to use and to select, or provide, bio and album information. For instance, Wieniawski has a fine bio at allmusic.com. Even if the album can’t be identified, I could be offered the bio for my database. Likewise, artists. If I then provide an album cover, I’ve got almost everything an identified album offers. If I could also supply text (or pdf) for the album text, then the unidentified album is just about a full fledged Roon citizen. Albums might then be tagged as “user identified”, which is somewhere between unidentified and identified.

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Hi Richard,

As discussed lets drop a flag for @mike to check if the first paragraph of your post describes a bug.

As I understand it the issue is that a composer is shown in an unidentified album only if there is at least one identified album in the library which also shows that composer. The expected behaviour is that a composer should still be shown for the unidentified album whether or not they are also listed as composer in any identified albums.