Personalised Artist Equivalents

The effects of artist equivalents mismatching from roon’ s metadata suppliers runs very deep. It can create all sorts of unintended effects like duplicates, missing links, nonsensical groupings and reachability issues when interacting with local library tags. It is often possible to achieve a cleaner result by editing combinations of primary artists / album artists, credits, ensembles, soloists and personnel. But this is very time-consuming and a bit ‘hit-and-miss’ and impractical with larger libraries.

Several lengthy threads have emerged on this topic. This one collects together requests to clean up the problem at source with the metadata suppliers. But it is an ongoing issue, new cases arise all the time, it is difficult to imagine an end-point with such a piecemeal approach.

Other threads try to address different aspects of the manifestation of this common root cause. This is an example but there are many others on the roon forum:

Some have started to use the “artist merge” feature to address this problem, but this was not it’s purpose and it is unclear what the consequences are or whether that approach is storing up problems for the future. In many cases what is really wanted is an “equivalents merge” instead.

Is it possible to provide some kind of personalised artist equivalents functionality so that local libraries can be configured for better metadata performance and future proofing whilst the suppliers piecemeal fix their artist equivalents metadata?

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