This feels like a corruption of metadata in Roon or maybe at the source in Qobuz.
Album’s “Primary Artist” has the exact same 14 artists in hundreds (if not thousands) of albums. This resulted in a huge number of incorrect albums showing up in an artist.
In the screenshot above, the upper screenshot in roon has 14 artists in the Primary Artist metadata. The one below is from Qobuz’s app. It shows “Various Artists” in Chinese.
This list of 14 artists seem to be used in a copy-n-paste fashion across hundreds of album. Take artist Stefanie Sun as an example. She only has two albums available in Qobuz. Because her name is one of the 14 artists listed in hundreds of albums, I’m seeing huge number of albums in Stefanie Sun’s discography.
Below are the screenshots of her discography from Roon and Qobuz respectively.
How do I go about troubleshooting issue like this? Is there a way to reset all the data coming from Qobuz to make sure my Roon database isn’t corrupted or litter with garbage information?
Have you made any edits to this content in Roon?
No
Is the album identified in Roon?
Where is the info section? These albums are not added to library. i.e., they are album from Qobuz streaming services.
Is this content from local files, TIDAL, or Qobuz?
We don’t pass through credit metadata from any single streaming service verbatim; we build “Roon metadata”. For this album there are more metadata sources providing multiple album artists than not.
There are two points here that I’m thinking about:
Are we showing too many album artists? (period)
The main artist translates from the Simplified Chinese as “Stars” which I think is basically “Various Artists”. If so, we should treat the album as such.
I don’t see where Roon stores the “main artist” metadata. All I see in Roon’s UI is a list of “Primary Artists”.
If Roon is using Roon metadata for the album, how did it end up with the exact list of 14 artists for 1700+ albums? I’m happy to use Room metadata. It’s part of the strength of Roon. But I think the question is where and how these erroneous metadata crept into Roon’s metadata database.
群星 are two characters in Chinese. The second character is translated as “star” but these two characters combined means “Various Artists” plural. That’s what I see in Qobuz’s album artist. Not trying to make things more complicated but if Roon is using some sort of string matching algo, you’d want to match both simplified and traditional chinese character string. This is kind of brittle. Does the streaming service provide some sort of tag in the file to tell Roon that it’s an album with “Various Artists”? Kind of similar to the “compilation” metadata.
P.S.: Regarding “Is Roon showing too many album artists?” I think the answer is generally no. Those 1700+ albums with the exact list of 14 “primary artists” for sure don’t have all 14 artist in the album. In fact, most of these artists are not even in the albums.
Incidentally, if I search for this album in Roon using the string ‘if you love me’, this album won’t show up. But when I browsed to Taylor Swift’s discography and Brownstone’s discography, I’ll see two different versions. The one in Brownstone has ACAPELLA at the end.
This is driving me crazy knowing that my Roon database is messed and some stuff doesn’t turn up in search.
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@sound.wave I think this is a completely different issue and maybe not a metadata one. Please would you open a separate support request for it in the main Support area?
Sure I’ll open a separate issue on the Brownstone album. @joel is there any update on the first issue I reported? The list of albums having that ridiculous 14 album artists is getting longer everyday.
No update. I confess that I don’t understand or have enough information to diagnose why you are reporting 1700 albums with the same artist list. You’ve only provided us with one example album.
@joel are you not seeing 1700+ album under Stefanie Sun’s discography? If you’re not seeing that then my Roon database is corrupted? How do I reset that? What more information do you need from my end to get this resolved? This is clearly a bug in Roon whether it only happens to me with Qobuz or to a subset of people under an edge condition. In any case, this is rendering my Roon experience very poor. How do I determine if my Roon database is having data integrity issue?
Ah okay, I see what you are saying. It looks like some label has done bad here with a ton of Various Artists albums. We need to figure out the best best way to remove these bad credits programmatically.
I found a bad equivalence between Sun Bolun (Gary Sun) and Stefanie Sun on MusicBrainz. I’ve entered an edit, but it will take up to a week to be accepted. That still leaves a problem of around 1700 Gary Sun albums…
We’ve received your latest metadata report regarding Hacken Lee’s Concert Hall album (李克勤 李克勤演奏廳), including the two screenshots below. However, we’ll need a little more information to make this report actionable.
Can you please elaborate on the specific inconsistency you’re encountering? You mentioned that you can recreate this issue in the Qobuz native app - can you please also confirm if that’s the case?
We’ll split your response into a dedicated thread as necessary if there’s a separate underlying cause.
Thanks @sound.wave! We’ll watch for your response.
My sincere apology. When I was submitting this support ticket, there isn’t any place for me to put in additional comment to explain. Thank you for reaching out to get more clarification from me.
I notice that a lot of Chinese albums have genres “Asian Traditions” and/or “International”. So I went to Musicbrianz and Allmusic to check the genre. It has c-pop and cantopop as the genre, which is correct.
Here is the link to the musicbrainz page for this example album.
I agree that “Asian Traditions” is lame for C-Pop – the TiVo genre hierarchy which we’ve used since the AMG days is very Western-centric and is showing its age badly.
For this album and other Asian releases, our code hasn’t tied up the Qobuz and other streaming service versions of this album to either the MusicBrainz or TiVo versions. That means we’re stuck with the genre provided to us by the streaming service; and as you’ve noticed, all we have to go on is “Asia Music” (which maps to International / Asian Traditions).
Unfortunately the metadata for non-Western music are, in general, very poor and/or inconsistent. In this particular case, did you spot that the MusicBrainz release you linked to has the title 李克勤演奏廳? (Hacken Lee Concert Hall), but the Qobuz version (which comes directly from the labels) just says 演奏廳 (Concert Hall)? Having 4 words represented by 6 Traditional Chinese CJK characters with no word breaks poses challenges to our code which we need to rectify. We also need to figure out how to handle releases where either English or Chinese or both languages might be used in the metadata.
We’re increasingly aware of this and have a number of longer term action items that we need to address when it comes to non-Western music, but I’m afraid there are no short-term fixes here.
We really appreciate you reporting these issues; knowing about them is the first stage in getting them put right.
Your screenshot shows a Qobuz album. Did you do a manual identification to get the 李克勤演奏廳 title?
I’m curious why Roon is able to match this album in musicbrianz and use the title from musicbrainz but not use the genre from musicbrainz.
Two reasons:
We require a minimum of 2 votes on a MusicBrainz genre for it to be admitted; we may need to revisit this, but it was a deliberate choice to ensure a minimum level of consensus.
Unfortunately, MusicBrainz genres need to be mapped manually to their TiVo/Roon counterparts. At the time of implementation, genres with less than 1000 total votes across the entire MusicBrainz database were ignored. Those ignored include C-Pop and Cantopop.
There’s a further complication which is that we don’t currently merge genres from different metadata sources; again a deliberate decision to prevent “noise”. The pecking order is TiVo, then MusicBrainz, then streaming service genre data.
My bad. I did rename the album title because it was incorrect. Roon and Qobuz had the incorrect name so I renamed it. Not sure why Roon didn’t use the album title from Musicbrianz. Do I need to explicitly identify an album to pick up MusicBrainz’s data?
