I’m reaching out to see if others feel the same about how Roon handles “Various Artists” and compilation albums. As a user with a large library (nearly 10,000 albums), a significant part of my collection consists of compilations (e.g., “Absolute Music” and “Mr Music” series).
I’m struggling with the philosophy of how these appear in my library:
Volume Management: Since I have a very large number of these compilation albums, the current “Various Artists” view becomes a cluttered mess. It is difficult to curate and navigate, especially when mixed with streaming recommendations.
Artist Discography Integration: When looking at a specific artist’s discography, their appearances on these compilations are often buried or scattered, making it hard to maintain a clean overview of the artist’s full footprint.
Library Integrity: I have invested a lot of effort into high-quality ripping (using dBpoweramp) and metadata cleaning. However, Roon’s current handling of “Various Artists” makes it feel like my own carefully archived compilations are treated as secondary to streaming content.
My question to the community and the team:
Is there a “Pro-flow” for managing a large archive of compilations so they feel like a natural, prioritized part of the library?
Would a dedicated, customizable “Compilations/Sampler” section or a more robust filtering system in the Artist profile be something others would find useful?
I am currently experimenting with Tags and Bookmarks, but given the sheer volume of these albums, I’d love to hear how other heavy users manage large-scale compilation archives.
My wife is a Librarian, and more specifically, she manages the Catalog team and the software packages that they use. So, maybe I tend to think differently than others would.
For me, Compilation albums and Movie Soundtrack albums would be similar in that the actual album has all of it’s common meta data associated with it, and then each song or track is varied with specific artist information (vocals, instrument, etc.)
So then the album is part of the music library and can be a unique identified and searched item. But, when searches for a specific member of the group, say a drummer, it is identified in the discography and can be duplicated from an artists main titles, as well as associated compilations.
Roon generally does a good job of this, but I understand your position…and it’s not too far from what Classical listeners have been requesting for over a decade now.
I don’t think a Single software solution will ever make everyone happy, as when companies try this, it gets too cumbersome and clunky and doesn’t actually have all the individual choices and capabilities that are desired. So, unfortunately, I believe your best bet is to figure out what your “Pro Flow” in utilizing and managing your meta data needs to be to get the output you desire.
For movie soundtracks, I differentiate between ‘soundtrack’ and ‘music from’, where soundtrack is music specifically for the movie and forms a ‘composition’ in it’s own right (each segment being the equivalent of a movement). The album artist is then usually the composer eg Howard Shore, John Williams etc.
For collections of compilations by a common entity, I use the entity as the album artist eg ‘Putumayo’. Roon will still identify these albums, keeping performing artist links, but it does not respect your album artist tag until you manually link it to the ‘artist’. This can be done in bulk by selecting all the appropriate albums and then using edit.
Until Roon properly respects an album artist tag there may be some side issues: It incorrectly conflates ‘Primary Artist’ with ‘Album Artist’, assuming that an album artist is a performer on every track.
This may seem convoluted but the appearance of albums (when sorted by Artist) reduces mess and the number of compilations appearing only by title. As a side benefit, album title length is kept to a minimum enhancing readability.