I can see now that there is a general misunderstanding that you can blank your artist/album artist tags and roon will somehow work better. It is not really like that. What roon is really saying is that they will interact with your library much better if you use ENSEMBLE, SOLOIST & PERSONNEL instead of ARTIST/ALBUM ARTIST.
So what they would prefer you to do is re-tag in that way and not just blank your legacy tags like I have inadvertantly done. I have nothing to loose so I have customised mp3tag to write these new tags. The trick is to map 1.3 tags to unused mp3tags. With some of them the choice is easy, but with others it is not and it all smacks of the old days when everyone put the composer in the artist field which is what created most of the mess we have today. The other thing is that depending what you are doing in mp3tag you have to remember the name of the original mp3tag tag rather than the name of the 1.3 tag you have mapped it to. Other than that it seems to work. I mapped this way:
WORK → WORK
MOVEMENT → PART
INVOLVEDPEOPLE → PERSONNEL
GROUPING → ENSEMBLE
ORIGARTIST → SOLOIST
I end up with an mp3tag that looks like this:
It sort of works with flac (at the moment I have huge numbers of artwork that hasn’t loaded but that is another story). I haven’t tried other file types. But there are other problems. I don’t know how much of roon is really geared up to using these new tags. You can see in this screenshot that none of the primary artist / album artist fields at the top of the screen are being populated. Also the identification screen doesn’t work either because roon is still looking at the artist fields etc. not the 1.3 ones. I’m not sure how in practice this will all work. Are we now expected to maintain two sets of tags?
