In all seriousness, probably best to look elsewhere then.
all seems bit weird but thanks to Ulf for his comments.and a couple of others for some suggestions.
It weird because I am not attacking anyone individually yet as happy end users many of you seem to take it personally.
With regard to the car reference, the analogy is more like another car designer taking a car for a test drive.
I will keep banging away at this and try some of the suggestions.
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yes there is
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hmmā¦
all tagging is as per the EAC ripping softwareā¦
I was correct about the audaciousness then. 
.sjb
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glad to see a couple of you have a sense of humourā¦
anywaysā¦ I will try a larger selection and see where I end up.
My mistake, looked at TIDAL again but now using roon UI. Much preferred compared to the random order on TIDAL. With chronological order it is easier to find both master albums and others. As mentioned both Wednesday and Thursday were released live 1990. As far as I can tell roon can handle everything in TIDAL and then much much more.
There is a badly tagged soundtrack to lord of the rings the return of the king in tidal which does not make Howard Shore the artist. By searching for howard shore and return of the king you can properly identify the album with good metadata.
This community has a great sense of humour, shows patience, and is very generous - some contributors here devote literally thousands of hours helping others.
I donāt think anyoneās taken anyrhing personally, probably just a bit bemused by your post - which seemed just be to tell everyone you didnāt like Roon. Iām not certain but it seemed like youād been using it only a very short time so perhaps hadnāt even explored how it works yet.
If you needed any advice about how to make it work better for you, or other questions, Iām sure people would be happy to help. But you didnāt seem to want any?
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EAC only does the ripping and gets its tags from somewhere else. That āsomewhere elseā might provide wrong or incomplete tags. You canāt expect Roon to get everything right if the tags are indeed a mess.
You did check the tags on your albums that were not recognized, didnāt you?
as with many rippers, EAC uses the āfreedbā database (with the add check of there accuraterip check sum)
My rips are all WAV files with no tags (unlike say flac), such that the artist/album name (followed by number of tracks and names) would be the text based datum that could be used for matching.
Obviously when ripping a CD, I would check that the artist/album name returned from freedb matched (with the obvious exception where the OS couldnt store a special character such as /).
I am very confident that the text based datum as noted above are good and as pointed out by someone, there are some different ways of tell Roon how to search, which I will try today.
Indeed. I use XLD on my Mac to rip CDs (which uses CDDB), and Metadatics (which uses Musicbrainz) to help fix up missing or broken metadata. Iāve had exactly the same experience that the metadata retrieved by those apps is sometimes wrong. In many such cases, Roon has been able to fix the problem automatically or with minimal manual intervention. But thereās a fundamental problem with CD metadata, which none of these systems is able to solve completely: for older recordings, there are often many different issues, with different formats, release markets, masterings, and A2D conversion processes, not all available in the metadata databases or easily identified by algorithmic means. Iāve both observed this for my own collection, and worked with people who do this professionally for widely used music services and taught me about the many problems they faced. For my own Roon collection of 759 albums/8977 tracks (mostly jazz, world, and classical), I have 23 unidentified albums. One is a digital download HDtracks re-issue with a track selection error (got a refund from HDtracks for that one), 16 are pretty exotic relatively recent jazz and world issues that are missing in metadata databases (some of these are distributed by Bandcamp, but Bandcamp expects the artist/small label to do the metadata upload themselves), and the rest are really old CDs (some from the very dawn of the CD) where the ancient version I own does not match exactly anything in current circulation or in the metadata databases. But I have quite a few jazz and classical CDs from the 80s that were identified flawlessly by Roon.
if you look at my 1st post, I said I tried a sample and had some mis-matches.
I described some of these mis-matches and the idea in posting here was to see if anyone else had similar issues and if there was some options in Roon to help (which it appears there is)
I also stated that from my personal perspective, the GUI was very busy and it would be good if it would be possible to tailor the GUI to not display some panes.
As an example, I listen to dead people (ie artists that came of age in the 40ās, 50ās and 60ās) so I kinda know the artist and their peers. Thus I dont specifically need a pane that lists similar artists, having been collecting music for 40 years (not saying I know it all, just that I have been creating my own connections with similar artists for a while)
For others, the similar artist pane would indeed be an excellent way to broaden ones horizon.
So each to there ownā¦
You have to scroll to see that screen, so just donāt scroll!
You really donāt get what you sound like do you?
āIāve used the program for an hour or two, Iām not impressed and hereās how you could make it more to my liking. If it was half decent it would have read my tagsā.
What was it the bard said?
There is more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in your philosophy.
(Heās dead too! 
.sjb
Thatās why I suggested jriver media centre or one of its equivalents as I believe Roon is meant to look glossy and with a simple upfront UI with the power hidden away in areas such as āfocusā.
Lots of us are experienced IT professionals and as such know there are many ways to cut the gui cake and the gui should reflect the intended use case and audience not be bent to do what that one bloke in accounts wants so screwing the pooch for everyone else.
I have picked roon as the gui does a great job of allowing us to focus on the music and investigate links, discover links, plumb the hidden and recalcitrant depths of Tidal etc which it sounds like you arenāt interested in.
If you want a programme built on a different set of premises such as column driven database without links, info etc then roon will, probably, always be the wrong software for you.
Perception is everything and starting a thread off which you intended as a general query as ānot impressedā is, I would suggest, either deliberately provocative or a bit daft.
I re-read your first post again. It didnāt change my opinionā¦
I do hope you find something with a UI thatās up to your design standards though.
Perhaps you could report back what you choose.
I had never heard about Albert King until this thread, but using Tidal as the the answer to whether or not an album exists is pretty lazy.
Itās easy to do a Google search on āalbert king Thursday Night in San Franciscoā to verify that this is indeed an album by Albert King. It is also easy to do a Google search on āalbert king Wednesday night in San Franciscoā to verify that it, too, is indeed an album by Albert King.
Edit - I just read further down the list and see that you discovered that both albums exist in Tidal. I do stand by my point though - thereās a shitload of music out there in the world that isnāt on Tidal, so I wouldnāt use it to settle any bets!
For our purposes the original poster needs a detection rate greater than 60% for his complete library.
We are only talking about a single example here and from what I can tell it should have been detected and conflicting tagging compared to roon metadata seems to be the problem.
Obviously there are albums that donāt exist in the metadata like some computer game soundtracks and the like.
Without metadata we end up in roon basic mode and manual tagging.
But this is me speaking with <50 CD library.
Had a huge problems with the Metallica Collection breaking out by album.
This is totally off-topic, but Iām curious about your PCM to DSD conversion. Does it sound better for you? (Iām not bagging on it ā itās just not something Iāve attempted, and am curious).
Man this is a pretty disappointing thread. Not so much because of the OP (although he does use some emotive language which might get peopleās backs up). The only positive I see from it is that Roon folks didnāt come on and defend the product so vigorously. With features people talk about ādeal breakersā (also emotive) - the deal breaker for me with Roon will never be a feature (software isnāt the sum of its parts) but attitude. Roon is a great prototype. And in 10 years time I hope to still be enjoying the Roon Prototype (Iām a lifetime member, so I feel a commitment to Roon). Because in 10 years time I hope it is still a prototype. And I hope in 10 years time we still have a forum and we still have people debating things.
As for the car analogyā¦ not entirely a fair one (IMO). Cars have a development lifecycle, and are then released. They will have to exist in the market for a number of years with the occasional facelift. We could say that software is the same - Roon is on 1.3. V1 and its third facelift. But to build software like cars isnāt ambitious. With things like the cloud there are companies releasing every 2 weeks and constantly improving. Iāve worked in motorsport where we had 3D printers in the trucks behind the pits and use Friday practice days to test new components. That is how I want Roon to be - the pinnacle of software like the pinnacle of motorsport. Sure there are big lumbering software companies that behave much like a big lumbering car manufacturer.
As for dissenting voices on the forum - that is great. Like motorsport, you want to constantly improve. When we all come here and say the same things, and nothing much seems to be happening, it will be pretty dull.
Regarding the OP - there are things in the Roon UI that drive me nuts. Iāve still decided to back it for the long term and it isnāt because it is the āleast worstā option for me. The race for mediocrity only runs in one directionā¦and not the one we want. I donāt think Roon want mediocrity either.