First, I posted a lengthy analysis of current Roon behavior wrt non artist-related meta last night – just want to point to it here so it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle. Would love to hear Roon’s feedback & answers, when you find the time: ETA until the build with the better metadata editing capabilities
There, I hypothesized that the artist/album-artist issues were certain to be even more problematic than the symbol/sort/search issues, but I just did a few basic experiments, and I’m beginning to think (from a meta-groomer pov) that those issues are somewhat easily resolved by an end-user workaround I’ll describe in a moment.
I didn’t want to muddy up this excellent philosophical discussion of artist <-> album-artist issues: Untangling artist/artist/artist
Anyway, my issues wrt “artist” & pre-existing meta is that (as mentioned by several others) a vast majority of my artists are now split into two big piles: Doors & The Doors, Beatles & The Beatles, etc. Also Ayers, Kevin and Kevin Ayers, Cash, Johnny and Johnny Cash, and so forth. So all the albums that Roon didn’t “recognize” (a lot, in my special-needs enthusiast case) are reverting to pre-existing meta.
FYI this is because I stripped The off groups, and used Lname,Fname, in order to overcome Sonos behavior that would have sorted/listed all groups as The xxxx, and all artists as John xxxx…
So today I quickly changed all Doors (in album-artist field) to The Doors, and all Ayers, Kevin to Kevin Ayers. Then I took a look in Roon…
Voila! Now each separate pairing of 2 artist variants is combined in Roon as a single artist, as it should be. I no longer have about 50 Doors albums in one searchable box, and 70 more in another – all 120 are in the same box.
Certainly, this involves some work. Specifically, I’d have to:
- clone my music files to another NAS, so I have a Sonos-friendly version.
- in my case, this pushes me over the edge into ~$700 purchase of additional NAS & drives
- spend some significant time in mp3Tag to enact changes. Probably the better part of a day or two.
However, as I stated in the big thread last night, any reasonable burden to “make things work” should be placed on the meta-groomer end user rather than negatively impact the Roon experience for the great majority of users.
The three bullet-points I listed above? I’m willing to file that under “reasonable burden”.
But before I traipse off into mp3Tag and get all gushy & excited about things, I’d love to get some definitive answers to two specific questions:
1) Is there going to be a quick, global way within Roon to solve the album-artist pile-pairs, or is the mp3Tag method outlined above the best way to do it? I mean, I’m willing to do the work, but would like to avoid any needless masochism…
- What about the problems listed in last night’s thread pertaining to symbols/sorting/searching?
- Can you definitely solve them?
- If so, approx. when will this happen?
- If you already know that you are unwilling to change that behavior, or are technically unable, please tell me now so I can set my expectations to a realistic level.
Standing on the verge of gettin’ excited…
