I’m thinking that 'various artists ’ should be invisible in terms of album artist; if there is no album artist then the requirement to put the text ‘various artist’ is being justified as a workaround to satisfy many music management programs. Tagging as various artist should be a firm, selectable (checkbox etc) but invisible (in terms of populating the album artist tag) feature of roon. The current handling holds no aesthetic value; an album artist called ‘various artist’ should not be apparent/visible in terms or album sorting or visable to search: I only have experience with iTunes, and ‘various artist’ appearing as an actual artist just to appease how a program identifies compilations is not very beautiful.
Appreciate the reply @mike. The learned responses from @Rugby and @Geoff_Coupe were helpful too.
I couldn’t of said it better… I have no issue with “Various Artist” as a tag but I really don’t want VA comps populated within the regular A to Z named artist, my feeling is that all comps need to be at the very end of your library. @mike, @Rugby, @Geoff_Coupe.
BTW I’m starting a new rock band called “Various Artists” so where does that fit in with all my comps.
The editing we are working will allow for full editing of metadata in Roon, including editing of artists, performers, composer and works, as well as the links between them. We don’t have any current plans to extend that to the editing of file tags right now.
Interesting. I’m a big collector of compilations myself, and they represent nearly 15% of my collection. Even in Sooloos, we’ve always sorted compilations by name, since Various Artists isn’t an actual artist, and because we wanted it to be possible to “jump” to these albums. Looking for Dusty Springfield? Type D-U-S. Looking for the Pulp Fiction soundtrack? Type P-U-L.
I haven’t heard a lot of feedback about this, even going back to the Sooloos days before we offered the “Sort To Various Artists” option. The thinking behind this was that if you don’t own many compilations, having them bunched up around V wouldn’t be as bad as it would be for, say, me and my thousands of comps.
I have a ton of VA comps as well. I prefer them at the end. Failing that, at the beginning. Or at V. But not the way you prefer. Still, seems like the toggle choice under setup already works well for either preference.
@mike - thanks. that’s helpful, and useful to know. It means that (for the time being) I can assume that Roon will not alter metadata held in my Watched Folders’ tracks in any way. It also implies that Roon needs a good, automatic and transparent backup mechanism for its database…
This was the very first default setting I changed when I first started using Roon. In my case, when I feel like listening to a comp I always need to go to the section because I don’t always remember the title of the CD, but I do remember the covers. For example the reissue label Numero Group puts out so many great comp, I buy each one when they are released and I’m a big Krautrock fan and have 10-20 VA comps but only remember a couple titles but can remember all the covers… What I’ve done which works best for me is to create a “Various Artists” bookmark which has been the fastest way to find what I’m looking for.
I am not sure if I’ve got this slightly off topic or missed the point, but this is one thing that really matters to me. Anyway, I feel there is a general issue with Roon’s use of album artists, rather than track artists. Take the overview screens above, iTunes lists the track artists, JRiver does the same, Roon insists on only listing album artists, or very many tracks by the ‘various artists’ combo. It strikes me that this is a pretty fundamental factor behind many artist / ‘various artists’ issue. Can this be improved, is this just a fundamental quirk as to how Roon works and utilises metadata?
That’s presumably because in the Track view, Roon only displays the Album Artist for each track. There’s no separate column for Track Artist (and I agree that it would be a useful addition).
However, in the Album view, the Track artist is shown for each track on the Album…
Hmm, that looks like a bug to me. It would certainly seem logical for the track lyrics to show the Track Artist, rather than the Album Artist. @mike, what do you think?
This is exactly my issue as well. I’ve posted elsewhere about this and only now I found this thread, so sorry for any duplication.
The very core of the problem imho is that Roon displays Album Artist, not only in Track view, but also in Playlists, while the Track Artist tag is properly set (and I set Roon to prefer file tags).
Wouldn’t it be much more logical to display Track Artist in Track view and in Playlists when the file has the Track artist tag set?
I agree. @mike - the display of Album artist in place of Track artist in the Track view strikes me really as more of a bug than a feature. Can this be addressed?
And really, I agree. Various Artists would be a hilarious name for a band.
