Sorry about that. This is what I meant for you guys to see:
The criteria for automatic duplicate detection is not related to the idea of releases–we tried this approach in an earlier iteration (pre-alpha) and it led to a lot of confusion. Currently, we automatically detect a duplicate when two albums have the same title, artist, and set of track/disc#'s in their track listing.
Also, in general, we want to be conservative here, because duplicate content is pretty difficult to access, especially for a new user–discovering that stuff is missing unexpectedly is a nasty surprise. This means that Roon will automatically detect duplicates only when they are obviously fungible.
Here’s a nasty (but very common) example that plagues many popular/significant albums:
http://www.allmusic.com/album/bitches-brew-mw00001880194
http://www.allmusic.com/album/release/bitches-brew-40th-annivesary-collectors-edition-3cd-1dvd-1lp-mr00029519154
These are considered different releases of the same album by all of our metadata sources–but they’re clearly not the same thing. One is a boxed set with a bunch of extras, and one is…Bitches Brew as I’ve known it forever.