Odd effect in association and linkage

Support
1

Are these just odd effects, or are they bugs?

  1. I have three versions of Patricia Barber’s Modern Cool: a CD, a DSD, and a 96/24 FLAC converted from the DSD. Roon shows the CD rip as one album, and the two high res files as two versions of the same album. This is confusing and makes it hard to navigate: for example, in the “other albums by this artist” I see two covers from Modern Cool, not three.

  2. Under Tom Waits, “One from the heart” with Crystal Gayle shows up under Singles and EPs. And the songs on that album are not cross-referenced as “other performances” on other albums, either from this one, or from others (e.g. Holly Cole’s Temptation) to this one. These look like unrelated problems, but since they apply to the same album they may be related.

2

Have you tried grouping them and how do you have “show duplicates” set.

3

@nick Grouping them works. I was just wondering about the automated behavior: why did it choose that?

Wrt “Show duplicates”, where is that setting? I remember that from before, but now I don’t see it in Settings.

Sigh. So many twists… Not Roon’s fault, the world is messy.

4

Hi Anders,
General/Show hidden.
As to the automated behaviour … Gallic shrug

5

When you do an @, please use the name on the left. I’m @Nick and it causes me to get an email for a topic I’m not interested in. Thank you.

6

I have three versions of Patricia Barber’s Modern Cool: a CD, a DSD, and a 96/24 FLAC converted from the DSD. Roon shows the CD rip as one album, and the two high res files as two versions of the same album. This is confusing and makes it hard to navigate: for example, in the “other albums by this artist” I see two covers from Modern Cool, not three.

Albums are automatically grouped as alternate versions if:

  • They have the same album title and album artist string
  • The sets of (medianumber,tracknumber) pairs present on each album are the same

Some evolution has happened since that criteria was developed. Back then, hiding dups was seen as a convenience, and the goal was display oriented: if they would look like dups in the UI, then hide them so the user doesn’t have to look at things that look like dups.

That feature has evolved into a navigation mechanism between alternate versions, which are now user-editable, and navigable from the alternate versions dropdown. None of these things were anticipated at the beginning of the design process for this feature. So maybe there’s a case for being more liberal about grouping alternate versions. The most obvious criteria that we’re ignoring right now is: “An editorial source says that these are different versions of the same release”. We obviously have that information, it’s just never played into this UI.

Under Tom Waits, “One from the heart” with Crystal Gayle shows up under Singles and EPs. And the songs on that album are not cross-referenced as “other performances” on other albums, either from this one, or from others (e.g. Holly Cole’s Temptation) to this one. These look like unrelated problems, but since they apply to the same album they may be related.

The expression of non-classical content as works and performances was slotted into a place in the architecture that limits how good it can ever be. We are planning to pretty much rip it out and start over on building the feature the “right way”. This will solve a whole class of problems, including probably this one. I don’t think it’s related to the first issue you mentioned.