As far as I can say:
whenever (=always) there exist in roon-db 2 or more artists with the same name (e.g The Beatles), and the track files are tagged somewhere with “The Beatles”, Roon does not associates the tag to the correct artist (id est the artist already present in roon metadata for that album), but to one of the others.
this does not happens only in first import of an album in the library, but can happen in any library database periodic update. so, for example, my beatles albums are there unchanched (same file tags) but at some point in roon metadata has appeared a second “The Beatles” artist… and it propagated in my (our) local db.
Since this is a really old problem (i would call it a BUG) I’ve not made experiments recently. But if i’m not wrong this happens when:
-an artist is credited in the PERSONNEL tag (present in most of my files…)
-or if the artist is credited in the ARTIST tag
-it does not happen with the ALBUM ARTIST or ALBUMARTIST tags
about this: the Roon KB file tags best practices are not so clear, as they don’t really explain if there is any difference in its use of these tags (ARTIST and ALBUMARTIST).
since the beginning of my using Roon, and experimenting with tags, i now use this simple rule:
-in ALBUM ARTIST i put all the artists that should have a link in album artist displayed in roon, separated by a / (which is also commonly used by roon for multiple album artists)
-in ARTIST i put other artists i would like to be present as primary artists.
so for example, for John & Yoko albums i have both “John & Yoko” in ALBUM ARTIST and “John Lennon” “Yoko Ono” in ARTIST
in some cases, when mixed up artists appear, removing the ARTIST tag helps.
but in my case, the PERSONNEL tag (if present) mixes up.
in my opinion: roon should simply have a rule like “file has this tag and it’s literaly the same as my metadata here, so i match them!”
and this would solve 80% of the problems
but the rule would not work if roon does not have rich metadata for an album (in general track personnel are very poor, expecially in non mainstream/UK/US music) and find some file tags that it doesn’t know how to match.
in most cases, if the artist is already in local library, and there are no other artists with same name, the match works. but there are also errors.
in this case, it would be useful a shortcut to correct a match.
Now you have:
-locate and select the tracks with the wrong artist
-edit the tracks removing he credit.
-then add a new credit with the correct artist, selecting the role (=impossible in cas e of many roles/instruments)
the shortcut should do this:
-in album edit, button REPLACE MATCH, then you select a credited artist and have the choice to replace it with any other artist (at least present in local library)
-the replacement should take place in ALL credits, at album level, track level, composition level
