Multi disc sets with different titles for each disc

I desparately try and make a box set with 18 discs display properly in roon.
I tried to follow this guide: https://kb.roonlabs.com/FAQ:_How_can_I_ensure_multi_disc_sets_and_box_sets_are_identified_properly%3F
All files are properly numbered, but they don’t have the same name in the album section.

For example, my structure looks like this:

Music/
Various Artists - Dive into Jazz/
Dive into Jazz - Better cool than square/
1.01 Track.flac
1.02 Track.flac

Dive into Jazz - Folk roots/
2.01 Track.flac
2.02 Track.flac

Roon shows the box and its name alright, but the individual disc titles are not picked up. It only shows Disc 1,2…
how can I make it display the titles of the discs in the box set?

Short answer is you can’t at the moment.

This has been asked for, but not yet actioned. See

and

2 Likes

Thank you, I somehow missed these threads.
Pity that it is not possible… yet. :wink:

@Kopftelefon

If I’ve understood your nomenclature correctly, a work-around is -

Edit the metadata ‘Album Title’ for e.g. Album 1, which I think is called ‘Better Cool Than Square’ to -

Dive into Jazz [1 - Better Cool Than Square] …and the others to…
Dive into Jazz [2 - Folk Roots]
Dive into Jazz [x - abc]
Dive into Jazz [y - def] …etc…

Keep the track filenames as they are, otherwise you’ll get into a horrible mess!

This will give you 18 albums of course, but it’s a way of showing them in your collection…just play with whatever text you want to within the square brackets…

1 Like

And there’s the rub - I want just the one top level album for a multi-disc set, not dozens of extra albums at the top level. I appreciate that you’ve given a workaround, but it’s one that does not appeal, at least to me. Been there, tried it, dropped it.

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. For me it’s literally what @Geoff_Coupe says. Been there, done that. My goal was to have just one album showing.

@Geoff_Coupe
@Kopftelefon

Yes, then, as you say, I don’t think there’s another option (currently).

And remember, it’s not a permanent solution - as you can always change your tags back again - plus when the Roon team finally work out a way to do this to everyone’s satisfaction, you can just highlight all 18 albums-worth of files & correct everything in a click !

I also have plenty of multi-disc albums which are a nightmare because of this - which I clearly don’t need to tell you about (!) - and it usually ends up with several discs all ‘titled’ the same, although they’re different, and it’s a lottery trying to pick the right one ! And this often ‘spoils the moment’…
Pink Floyd’s one of my many examples -

The Wall [Immersion Box Set] -

  • Disc 1 The Wall (Remastered), Pt.1
  • Disc 2 The Wall (Remastered), Pt.2
  • Disc 3 The Wall (Live), Pt.1
  • Disc 4 The Wall (Live), Pt.2
  • Disc 5 Work In Progress, Pt.1
  • Disc 6 Work In Progress, Pt.2

But of course there are so many other examples where every album within a set are completely different albums…which doesn’t work at all… I bought some multi-album CD sets recently & after I got home & started ripping them I was thinking ‘oh no, what a mess, what have I done?!’.

The only thing we can do is to use such workarounds, or live with the mess, but keep pestering the Roonies to try & do something about it !

One possibility that occurs to me is changing the ‘Disc 1 / Disc 2’ tab (which you see above the track listing area with multi-disc albums) into a text-based tab, e.g. ‘Title 1 / Title 2’ etc, but then of course there are the Classical (and other) collections that you read about on the forum which have up to a hundred sub-albums - so that might turn into a horrendous problem appearance-wise !

First-world problems eh ?!

1 Like

I’d really like to see this for sets like reissue 5-CD box sets (ie, Quadrophenia or My Generation, as The Wall above), and for sixty CD classical box sets where grouping together all 60 CDs is both good, and really bad.

1 Like

I think it’s completely reasonable to add this to our data model, not least because the likes of MusicBrainz and Discogs have a disc title field. However, having an editable descriptor in the data model and creating good product are completely different things; for example, huge box sets already present a problem with just the small string “Disc x”.

Just replying to let you know that we’ve seen this. No promises or timescales :slight_smile: .

3 Likes

Really looking forward to improved box set handling in general and disc title should be part of that. I used to use disc title with the Foobar 2000 music manager which seemed to work well.

When selecting a ‘Disc x’, then there is sufficient room to display the disc title somewhere on top of the tracklist. Not perfect, but a start?