Roon won't show and play properly ripped compilation albums as single albums

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hello,

I’ve searched high and low, and cannot find a solution to this. Roon refuses to see properly ripped compilation albums as whole albums. Instead, Roon shows each track as being an album by the artist but with the compilation album name. It can’t be true that Roon can’t do this; it’s an essential task.

Albums are carefully ripped with Album Artist as Various Artists, Compilation checked, etc. etc. I’ve ripped 13,000 albums in dBPoweramp and am a bloody pro :-). Folder structure in my HDD is Artist/Year/Album.

J River MC has no issues with this.

Are there any solutions apart from the extremely inelegant and time consuming one of forcing it in Roon by that tedious process?

Thanks -

2

Roon works as you have described. I and others do this all the time. Something else is amiss….

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3

Thanks for responding. What is the second page, and how is your folder structure set up on your HDD? I wonder if it has anything to do with that.

4

JRMC treats “Various Artists” as a special case to group tracks exactly as in your situation. (and “Various” as well)

to get a compiled album in Roon 3 tags must be set (bit like box set rules) as in @DDPS second image

[Album Title] tag must be the same in each track you wish to include eg “60’s Greatest Hits” or the like ,

[Artist] can be anything

[Album Artist] must be the same for the whole album , in your case Various Artists

is this the case

5

I hope that you mean that you have got this album in a single place as

Various Artists/Year/Album name

and not scattered the album amongst different folders named after the track artists?

6

The bottom right corner of the screenshot identifies it as the Tag Editor app, which is this:

7

Which is nearly fine, but like previous poster says, you need to make sure your folder structure is:
~AlbumArtist~\~Year~\~Album~\~Track.flac~
If you spread the tracks over several folders, named by the individual artists you’re essentially requesting the library software to “aggregate” albums by album name, and that is a truly bad idea (Twonky does this, and i have a few albums with very eclectic contents named “Anthology”, and “Best of” as examples…)

8

Yeah, that’s exactly how my file structure is, by artist first. That way it makes perusing my HDD much easier. It’s how libraries work, and how I catalogue my books and LPs so it’s how I decided 16 years ago to do it when I started ripping CDs. It works perfectly with JRMS; Roon’s way seems silly. Now to see if it can be fixed!

9

Thanks; interestingly, that’s how my metadata is for compilations, but it seems my HDD folder structure may be at fault. Artist\year\album\title, but JRMC is clever enough to pull it together, as album name is the same and it is marked as a compilation.

10

Roon has the starting point that all tracks of an album are held in a single folder, and are not split over multiple folders. This mirrors what dbPoweramp does when ripping a CD. Thus a compilation CD will be in a single folder, while each track may have different performing artists. For example:

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Note for boxsets, each CD should be placed in its own folder and named CD1, CD2…CDn. These folders should be placed in a root folder that has a suitable name, e.g. the title of the boxset.

See:

FAQ: How can I ensure multi disc sets and box sets are identified properly?

11

A big help, got the issue sorted, thank you all.