Having a re-think about the wisdom of some collated albums [a lot of my collating was VERY unwise], I’m going through the library reappraising earlier mergings.
The results of breaking up a set appear to depend on the order of the approach. e.g. with a set of 5 collated albums, if one uses Edit -> Fix Track Grouping -> Edit tracks -> select to remove all tracks of album 1 the result is usually the album retrieved with the original cover but needing an edit of the title.
But if the same approach is used on album 5 the result is often a repetition of tracks once or twice which means a further editing of the tracks on the removed album is needed to weed out those track duplications. Sometimes there is such a mess it is simpler to delete the corrupted album an re-enter it by a re-rip or copy from Sooloos or elsewhere.
Bottom line is to be careful not to “bury” albums from sight with merges but if a collation is to be broken apart, always start from album 1 and work down from there.
It appears Roon has a completely different approach to Sooloos where breaking up a set entailed no similar complications.
My experience with breaking up merged sets is that you should start from the end, and work your way up. To be clear, starting with an album with n discs :
Edit > Edit Track Grouping
Select discs 1, 2, …, n-1
Click Remove Album
Dialog box asks to confirm removal of n-1 discs > Click Yes
Click button "Create Album ( 1 disc, …)
You are now left with 2 albums : one with discs 1 to n-1, and one with what was the last disc of the original merged album.
Repeat the procedure with the album with n-1 discs, and work your way up until you get n albums with one disc each.
In my case, I systematically get numerous duplicate tracks if I proceed the other way around, eg break up the merged album by first keeping disc 1 and removing discs 2, 3, …, n. It was a real pain to weed out the duplicate pains after each break-up.
@support I suspect this is a Roon bug, because this behavior is systematic.
Wow, your experience appears to be the complete opposite of what I experience.
So it really does appear to be a Roon bug. The outcome of breaking up sets must depend on some other factor in the collection, maybe where the albums came from. In my case they were all from Meridian Sooloos with most ripping done on Control 10 but some via dbPoweramp CD rippper which was later given preference because it was better at identifying albums than Sooloos + it was much faster.
@JOHN_COULSON My experience have been mostly with CDs ripped with MediaMonkey (which obtains its metadata from freedb), bust also with downloads from Qobuz and PrestoClassical. But in all cases I had to proceed backwards starting from disc n up to disc 1 in order to painlessly break up merged sets.
This is not a great start. Who knows what your tags are like. I would split such arbitrary multi-disc sets into the original separate albums outside of Roon, and make sure the tags are correct. Clean up Roon library. Then give Roon a chance to reimport them.
Not at the start Ludwig. I’m half way through the 12000 classical albums and the tidying up is going OK. Yes, if an album is too messed up I’ll reimport it from Sooloos but I’m managing.
That said there must be a bug in Roon as obviously I’m not alone in experiencing this problem.