I digged till arists starting with B and had 10 till now.
And some by now have 3 in a row (3 times Alice Cooper, 3 times Al Anderson)
Granted Alice Cooper must be 2 since the band vs, the individual.
I do think to know what happened, since the pattern shows that only artists are affected which were unknown to roon till yesterday.
A short workflow from the day in day out roon user suffering from huge gaps in metadata which might be part of the issue, better said I would bet a tenner it got to do with it.
you add an album to roon and not it goes like this
if roon already knows an artist with the same name it adds the album to this artist
else
roon creates a blank artist with the name given
this works as long as the user doesn’t find out that roon knew about a country singer while the album added was one from a Metal group.
So the user now does the following thing. Select the album, remove the artist, create a new artist identically named and add this one to the album.
Result 2 artists with the same name on being the country dude, the other one the metal band.
Everything fine apart from the fact that the metal one misses the bio and credits, but one could add at least a small chunk of information such as formed, disbanded, or birth, death and an artist artwork. Suits if you ask me since way better but the metal album with a country dude bio.
Now assume one adds another album .and sticks that one to the correct artist.
Then we had black-roon-nightmare yesterday
I assume the following.
roon got aware of that metal band and simply provided this artist + bio and so on.
And it was aware of 1 (not both) albums belonging to that artist.
So what happened it moved 1 album from the user-created-artist to the newly available artist and the result was 3 artists
the country singer
the user-created metal band (which had 2 albums attached and not reduced to 1 left)
the newly known to roon metal band (which ripped one album from user created artist)
The intelligent way would have been … “stack things which aren’t 100% precise” and present the user a query in the form … we found artist information and detected you already have 1-n of them. Should we merge the data with one of them, if so select, if not press skip"
Not to mention that it’s very complicated to find out which artist entry is which one in the end, especially if they share the same artist artwork. I spend more but an hour to find out why the hell 7 Bob Seger album tend to get show by 2 Bob Seger dudes with the same picture. And in all the selected boxed I can’t even tell you if I select on of the entries which one it exctly is. Should I renew my request for a flag in the setting which would show a database object ID if being turned on, so that one does precisely know which object one works at?
Anyway … found a pretty poor way which helps adressing this misery. I can simply selected both entries of duplicated stuff and revert all changes. This most times leads to a single artist, but then I epxerienced that I do loose manually attached hi res artist images while roon provides thumbnail alike ones. And there’s no way to export them first.
if you could point out on how to generate a list of all artist it might be way easier to tell you the exact number. Normally one would use an sql query upon the database or such like …