Not possible to merge artists when Roon has no meta-data for one of them?

Got confused. I can see I actually fixed Weiner Symphoniker featuring Weiner Symphoniker by removing the primary artist instance in credits. But I still have absolutely no idea why that works or even if it does work without having a knock on effect elsewhere.

:astonished:

ok: I will not touch anything else in my tags 'till an explanation of all priorities/dependencies between user tags and Roon metadata is published :cold_sweat:

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 ā†’ WORK
MOVEMENT ā†’ PART
INVOLVEDPEOPLE ā†’ PERSONNEL
GROUPING ā†’ ENSEMBLE
ORIGARTIST ā†’ 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 hasnā€™t loaded but that is another story). I havenā€™t tried other file types. But there are other problems. I donā€™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 doesnā€™t work either because roon is still looking at the artist fields etc. not the 1.3 ones. Iā€™m not sure how in practice this will all work. Are we now expected to maintain two sets of tags?


1 Like

The more I read about that, the more I try to understand, and the more I get confused.
@support Could someone please throw some light on all this and explain what is really going on ?
Thanks all.

1 Like

Thanks a lot @Tony_Casey for your thorough investigation. I am totally with @Andre_Gosselin insofar as Iā€™ve currently given up to understand. I wait for an explanation.

And I donā€™t have the energy to investigate myself and discuss anymore, since it is not clear to me what to discuss about. Unless there is a documentation on what Roon does with external tags and how these interact with Roons metadata it really makes no sense to discuss further. We are all speculating here and thatā€™s not a good thing.

Iā€™m afraid I have come to the same conclusion.

It is not much help I know, Iā€™m just saying the same thing in different words, but the roon metadata model doc has a long list of metadata sources: http://kb.roonlabs.com/Metadata_Model and says:

ā€œThe ā€œandsā€ and ā€œorsā€ in that column are significantā€“they tell you whether data is being chosen from one of the sources, or blended across multiple sources. When blending happens, it is usually not a simple unionā€“there is a merging algorithm that tries to make good choices to produce a clean result.ā€

Mostly the blended ā€œandsā€ are the credits and of course the merging algorithms are not specified.