Not sure if this is the case for you, but this happens if no album with the “real” Gieseking is in your library. I see this all the time with indie music.
- I import an album and Roon does identify it but it has missing credits.
- Then I edit the credits and in the process create an artist playing on the album, because Roon does not find this artist, neither in search or when editing credits.
- Roon creates an entry with the name, but like @Tony_Casey wrote, if a “real” (i.e., having cross-referenced metadata from Roon’s metadata provider) version of this artist is not yet in the library, this is just a text string of the name, with no picture, bio, or any other metadata.
- If there is no other work that references this artist, this is where it has to end (you can then pimp it up a bit by adding a picture, birth/death information, whether it is a person or a group, etc., in the artist editor, but you cannot add a bio).
- However, sometimes the “real” artist exists, but Roon does not find it if no album containing this credit is yet in the library, which is why it creates the “fake” text string artist. Then you can actually add such an album and suddenly Roon finds two artists by that name, the “real” and the “fake” one.
- Now you have two options: Exchange the artist everywhere, like @Tony_Casey wrote above. Or you can select both artists and merge the fake one into the real one. Then the real one will appear in your credits with much less work, but it is a bit less tidy behind the scenes (there will be a merged artist entry in the library settings)
After being bitten by this much too often, I now go through the list of artists that performed on an album that I am going to import. Then I search for each artist and ensure that a proper entry is found (if the artist already appears on an album in my library). For every artist that is not found, I find an album that references the artist in the credits, and add that to the library. Only after this do I import and edit the album that I really wanted to add. If I edit the credits now, the real artist is found by Roon. (You can then even remove these other albums from the library that you just added so that Roon can find the artist, if you don’t want them. This does not affect the real artist anymore)
It’s frankly a giant pain in the behind and together with “what makes a composition a composition” (@Tony_Casey knows too well what I mean) is the area in Roon that makes me pray most for improvements