Check out the (many) threads about box set and multi-disk handling in Roon. It’s not without pitfalls and certainly not perfect. Many people have developed best practices.
If albums end up as unidentified in Roon, it doesn’t break anything, they just don’t get automatic metadata. Once the metadata is added in some way, they work just like identified albums.
- Add the metadata as tags to the files as well as you can.
- Before you import the album, ensure that you first add albums to the library from Qobuz/Tidal so that every artist from the to-be-imported local album is already credited on a streaming album. Then Roon usually finds and associates the artists from the new import correctly with the correct artist entries in the database.
- If the artists on the to-be-imported album are not yet represented in your library, it can happen that Roon duplicates them and creates a new artist stub with the same name, which isn’t linked to the proper artist entry.
- If different artists with the same name exist, Roon can sometimes pick the wrong one regardless. In this case edit/fix it within Roon. Just like before importing, ensure that an album with the proper artist credit is already in the library before starting to edit. Otherwise, Roon doesn’t find the artist during the editing, and if you create a new one because you think it does not yet exist, this becomes a separate artist stub.
- If you end up with duplicated stubs, you can merge the stub artist into the proper one (select both artists and click the Merge button that should appear top right), but I think it’s better to avoid this to begin with. It’s a PITA…
- I complained about it in this thread among other places
