Multiple album instances - not versions

1

Okay, this is way inside baseball, but I fiigure if there are any people on Earth who knows the answer to my question, this is the likeliest place to find them lurking.

A couple of months ago, I installed Spleeter at home with a Windows GUI. This is a freeware that does a remarkable job of separating vocal tracks from instrumental in existing recordings (it also does a remarkable job of further separating stems, but the short first description is how I’m using it).

So I’ve been popping AIFFs of pop recordings into it and getting out, basically, “instrumental versions” and “vocal-only versions” of the recordings. It’s mostly a novelty, but I’ve found that I like playing the instrumentals of recordings I know well.

So after the conversion, I have three sets of files - the uncompressed AIFF of the CD in my attic, the .WAV of the instrumental and the .WAV of the vocals. I edit the tags sensibly on the .WAVs (so all three sets list Stevie Wonder as the artist, but the AIFF is still identified as Innervisions, and the other two as Innvervisions - vocals and Innervisions - accompaniment.

The short version, though, is that that isn’t getting me anywhere. I often get one or the other of the “new” directories to show up, but usually it’s just perplexing. They don’t show up as versions of each other; often, Roon identifies one as the original item, and usually the other doesn’t appear at all.

I’m not upset, because I know this is kind of a perverse use case for a software that’s trying to match up against a directory based on file size & title.

The “new” files aren’t listed under the main artist/album directory structure, because I want to keep them all in the same place on my hard drive.

They are .wav files, and I’m wondering if that’s part of the tag / ID problem - I think I knew that .wav tags aren’t written in the file itself. Maybe I want to look into file conversion?

Any input welcome.

2

I assume the other 2 versions are unidentified by Roon. Are you able to find these unidentified albums in Roon?

If so, you can try and manually identify them. Then, if Roon doesn’t add them under Versions, you can select the 3 albums, Edit, then Group Alternate Versions.

Let me know if I’m understanding your issue properly.

Cheers, Greg

3

With all of the above as the context, here’s specifically what happens:

When I drop the 2 “new” folders in, having edited their metadata outside Roon’s purview, often one of the new ones gets displayed and one doesn’t exist at all in Roon’s layout.

Sometimes the original ‘Roon entry’ gets associated with the new sound files, so I have all the ‘new files’ but not the original recording.

I have not yet found what I would have expected, which is Roon identifying the new recordings as an alternate version.

4

Or, to be even more literal, since I just happened across this:

There are 3 copies of Never mind the bollocks on the hard drives Roon sees. It’s decided that the one in the directory Spleeter conversions / Never mind the bollocks / vocals is the real album, associated that with the pertinent metadata, and shows me no indication of the tracks in Spleeter conversions / Never mind the bollocks / accompaniment or the ones in Sex Pistols / Never mind the bollocks.

In all these cases, the original files are fine, so I don’t have any real problem. Just wondering what’s a reliable way to make this work.

5

If your add square brackets after in the Folder name , Roon will define it as a version and show it along with other versions

Never mind the bollocks [vocal] etc

There is a setting

Is that what yo want ?

6

I guess ideal would be three separate albums, attributed to the Sex Pistols:
- Never mind the bollocks
- Never mind the bollocks - accompaniment
- Never mind the bollocks - vocals
which is what I thought I was going to get by tagging the latter two.