@mike This has to be a bug. Why is it a complication that isn’t in Roon’s database will not allow you to see who the artist for the individual songs? Is this on purpose? See attached screen capture, there is no way to see who the artists are who are performing the songs (the info is in the metadata though).
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Can you post a screen shot of the track meta ? I just did a focus on all unidentified various artist albums (of which many are my rips of mojo mag also😄)… No issu
e seeing track artist where it is tagged.
Wonder what is different about yours here??
I have many unidentified comp and they are all like this, it seems all that Roon uses is the Album Artist tag, which makes unidentified comp useless. Attached is a SC of my tagging app (Metadatics).
Here are some other unidentified comps.
Kinda useless in Roon if you don’t know who the artist is for each song.
Can you just check what happens if you put various artists in the album artist tag ?
Thanks Nick… I just tried that and it has fixed it, unfortunately this means messing up how things work in Audirvana and iTunes for me.
It’s quite common to have VA in the album artist tag. Why might that be an issue for the other audio apps ?
In so much as it’s the way iTunes / PonoMusic / Audirvana has always placed comps. which is at the end of the library (or beginning in the case of A+) and not part of the A-Z artist library. Think of it when you go to a record store, the Various Artist section isn’t located under V just after Van Halen, but at the very end after all the Z artists.
It’s not a huge issue I would rather just not have VA listed in the middle of my music library is all, as that’s how I’ve always treated them.
I had the same issue: Oh dear, no track artist and I agree with @anon94274355. Putting VA in the album artist tag seems unnecessary.
In iTunes it displays ‘various artist’ under the titles through checking the option ‘Album is a compilation of songs by various artists’; so there is no need to have the text ‘Various Artists’ in the Album artist tag. See image:
Could Roon manage the issue @anon94274355 and I have through some check-box saying: “Album is a compilation of songs by various artists”?
I’m pretty sure that Roon does have logic to recognise albums with many artists and no tag that says VA.
@mike, can you confirm ?
@mike, @ncpl I don’t think so. If an album is unidentified, I don’t think Roon knows what to do, which is why it corrected the issue when VA was put in the Album Artist tag, which points to me thinking that AA is the only tag it uses.
Agree that what it looks like but I am pretty sure I had some tickets on this scenario in early alphas. So, it may be that it isn’t working 100%.
@anon94274355 in my case, the album was identified, and still needed the various artist text to solve issue.
So whatever logic is used doesn’t work whether identified or not.
Interesting, I just assumed it was only with unidentified albums only.
Nope, as with you, I am really hoping that the requirement to put the text ‘Various Artists’ in the album artist field will not be required, and that another method - see my other post above on how iTunes does it - perhaps using a tag can be used so as to avoid ‘Various Artists’ appearing as an artist in the original iTunes source and also in Roon. No one searches for ‘Various Artists’ do they.
Looking at a m4a from iTunes in mediainfo there is: ‘Compilation : Yes’. Could Roon use that instead?
Can @ncpl or @mike comment on this as regards to the future, meta-based, 1.3 update?
If you haven’t read this thread, give it a read.
I think that in cases where Roon’s metadata provider cannot match the compilation using standard methods, Roon really relies on VA in Album Artist as a sign of a compilation.
Hans Beekhuyzen has recently posted a video about audio metadata and best practice:
He actually suggests putting ‘various artists’ in the album artist tag for compilation albums, simply because different software handles things differently, and using an explicit tag works for most cases.
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I was hoping that roon has the hinted logic; any new users of roon, such as I, could find this confusing; thus a specific option inside roon to specify as a compilation of various artists makes sense (to me) and avoid this confusion, and doesn’t involved chasing the album artist meta data.
Sorry for the slow response here guys – I know you’ve both been waiting on some clarity here, and I didn’t get to this last week.
There are a few issues intermingled issues here and what @anon94274355 is describing is different from what @Afullmark is seeing. I’m going to provide some detail about the current behavior, but I should mention that significant metadata work on our metadata infrastructure has started, and we’re not married to the current behavior.
Feedback is absolutely welcome, but keep in mind that whatever changes come in 1.3, they have to work for people who’ve painstakingly groomed every tag in their library, and for people who’ve been accumulating content forever and have never edited a tag. My plan is to end up with some clearly documented rules for default handling of file tags, which will go hand-in-hand with full editing.
Unidentified Compilations With No Track Artists
The first thing to understand about @anon94274355’s question is that when you see an artist name next to a track row, it’s because Roon has a credit for what we call the track’s “main performer” – this is generally going to be metadata that comes from one of our metadata providers, in the form of a credit for a role like “Main Performer” or “Featured Performer”.
Making sure we use the right data for track performer is one of the reasons you’re less likely to see nonsense artists in Roon such as Santana ft. Rob Thomas or Various Artists, or incorrect performer credits such as DJs (who may have selected the song, but didn’t perform it themselves) or, say, Beethoven (who may have composed the work, but didn’t perform on the recording you’re listening to).
Right now the general rule is that we use track artist tags when album artist is also present. We may consider changing this in the future and things will be a lot more flexible when full editing is released in 1.3. That said, across the millions and millions of files we’ve analyzed we’ve seen enough inconsistency here to be wary of making assumptions about these tags.
The tags in your files are always imported into the Roon database, and used to group files and identify albums, but for now the Album Artist field needs to be present in order for us to pass this data through and turn the artist tag into the “track main performer” credit you see in Roon.
@anon94274355 – if you want to upload an album or two in the state you’ve described to Dropbox and PM me a link, we can look at the file and see if there’s another pattern we can look for here as we update the file tag handling rules. It’s possible we can do better here.
Identified Compilations With No Track Artists
As for @Afullmark’s issue, this is a separate issue where our metadata for the compilation is itself missing track artists (or “track main performer”). In that case, an album can be identified with full metadata, but because there’s no info in our database, you won’t see a performer at the track level.
I’m a big collector of compilations myself and I can understand how frustrating this is, so after a lot of discussion we implemented a workaround for cases like this last year. Because we use artist tags when album artist tags are present (as described above), we will expose these tags as track main performer when this data isn’t already present. We’ve found this type of mixing tends to be pretty clean, because the album artist tag is a good indicator of quality tags
I should also mention that the album @Afullmark flagged actually had an additional issue. Because it wasn’t present in AllMusic, we were depending on secondary metadata providers. After looking into the report, I noticed we were poorly handling the track level artist credits from one of our secondary sources and failing to use it properly as the track’s main performer. So once that’s fixed, this album would get track performers automatically, regardless of the tags.
For now the work-around is to ensure you have Album Artist tags, but I want to be clear that although the rule appears to be working as designed, ensuring we handle track artists properly is a huge priority for us and something that we are planning to consider and possibly revisit with some of the metadata changes we are scoping right now. Again, feedback is welcome guys.
@mike - are you able to say something about your approach to “full editing” in the 1.3 release?
So, for example, will edits affect only the content of the Roon database, the track metadata, or both?
In the world of photo metadata, I’m a great believer in the maxim of “The Truth is in the File”, that is, metadata you apply to your photos is part of the photo, and available to any application that knows how to read it. In that world, we have the advantage that there are some well-defined standards that have been around for a while.
For audio metadata, it would seem things are a little trickier. The de facto standard of ID3v2 tags is a start, but not sufficient. As I understand it, Roon has an extra layer of metadata (meta-metadata?) that it uses. So for 1.3, will you aim to manage both “standard” ID3v2 tags as well as your own Roon-specific metadata? Thanks.