I’ve deleted this box set completely from the server, cleaned up the deletion in Settings -> Library, and reloaded it to the server. The problem is unchanged - Roon seems to identify the album, but misses many of the tracks. Note that these are wav files and many have no tags, while some do. That may be related to the problem, but I have not set Roon to use the file tags in any way. The files all have the same security and were ripped using EAC with the same settings.
There are 3 CDs in this set and all have this problem, but to save space I’m only going to show the problem as it exists in the first CD.
I can’t make much sense out of this screen and never have been when trying to use it to correct metadata. Could someone from Roon please, please, please create a FAQ showing, annotating, and explaining it, including how to tell what changes will be made if Save is clicked.
In any case, the other 2 editions available for this album aren’t any better.
The missing tracks don’t have album name or album artist tags. Roon probably has imported the missing tracks but just not grouped them under this album as without the tags it didn’t know what to do with the tracks. It can be difficult to find missing tracks when roon does this. It is much easier just to put in a few basic tags so roon keeps all the tracks together as an album.
An external tagger would make short work of this. Just make sure that each track has the same album title, each track has Etta James as the album artist and that each track and disk is numbered. This album is on Qobuz with very complete meta data so you should in principle get good results without very much manual tagging effort at all.
Thanks for the good info, but I don’t think it explains what’s happening.
Most of my albums contain wav files for the tracks, and Roon has no problem getting correct metadata for them.
I thought Roon was using the file structure as a starting point for getting the metadata, along with the title of the file. If that’s not true, I’m surprised I haven’t seen this behavior before, since this is far from the first compilation album I’ve put into the database, and my track names don’t include the album title.
In any case, the mixture of tagged and untagged track files was caused by a tag editor (MusicBrainz Picard) in the first place.
Maybe Roon has a problem handling the mixture of tagged and untagged files in an album structure like this, and ends up assuming all the track files have tag info, misclassifying or losing the metadata for the ones that don’t.
I have had the same experience you describe. If I have a set of files with few or no tags I just chance my arm and see if roon will make any sense of it. But it is hit and miss. Certainly doesn’t work for me all the time. Not sure if deleting all the tags just so its consistent would help though. Interesting theory. In a fail like this I would just put in a few basic tags like album title and album artist and also track and disk numbering and see what happens. 3rd party taggers like mp3tag provide a lot of tools to make that quite straightforward.
You can filter by path on the tracks browser to find tracks that might have been imported elsewhere (not included with this album). You can use this to help you merge them.
Making sure that the tags are thoroughly filled out as Tony suggested is also a good option.
Sorry to be so slow in responding, but I needed to find time to re-rip this album without any tags and see how Roon handled importing that.
As it turns out, if none of the track files have any tags, Roon (at least now) picks up the metadata fine and shows the album tracks correctly.
However, based on my original experience and also the last reply from @Tony_Casey, it seems as though Roon has a problem in this area. Why having some track files with tags and others without produces such strange results is beyond me, and certainly doesn’t seem like expected or desired behavior.
In any case, with the help from @Tony_Casey to get me on the right track to detour the problem, I’ve now gotten this album into my Roon database with the correct metadata.
