One Album, Multiple Issues

I added this album from TIDAL:

Here are some disappointments:

  1. It was treated in Roon as 26 1-track discs. This mistake is a frequent occurrence, at least with classical stuff. This shouldn’t happen, and it didn’t start that way in TIDAL. The fix was to merge 26 discs into one.
  2. As classical albums go, tagging should have been easy. However, the Composer (Gounod) was not tagged as such. Instead, his name and a colon were prefixed to each track. So, the original album displayed “Gounod” as a Composition/Grouping Title (got there by Roon munging I guess), followed by an indented list of the entire album contents. Not correct or good. Fixing this required manually deleting “Gounod:” from each track, then adding Charles Gounod as the Composer.
  3. Additional credits were sparse. Missing were: dates recorded, label, catalog no; recording location missing; engineering credits.
  4. None of the 26 works/compositions were linked to other metadata. Their titles seemed complete, including opus numbers (and they should be complete if coming from partner TIDAL!) Thing is, this user could not tell if: the title was mangled, hence no link; the opus number was mangled, hence no link; there was nothing in the Roon database to link to: or, Roon has not yet finished the link process. Stymied. Not good.
  5. One set of tracks is shown below:

    I edited each track title, putting a colon after Paroles and removing the colon after the number, i.e., “No. 4:”. My thinking was simple: Roon’s munging routine should group these similarly to when “Gounod:” appeared on each title. But it was not meant to be.

None of these issues are new to me, but what made this special was how many issues were wrapped up in one album was different. (And, it can be replicated.) TIDAL doesn’t pass along Composer tags on a classical album. Roon munges when it shouldn’t, then fails to munge when (I think) it should. Not just some, but all compositions fail to link to any metadata. Credits are incomplete.

I may be crazy for suggesting this, but Roon and TIDAL should be in sync about tagging customs and formats. And it should be well done.

Some of this should probably go to feature requests, but I’ll leave that decision to others.

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If Roon gets it wrong, I have found that the first step to try, after adding a TIDAL album to your library, is to re-identify the album:

Choosing the second item in the list seems to get everything aligned properly: