Hi Guys - I’m not sure what others think of this, but I don’t consider two versions of the same album, with different sample rates, as a duplicate. I treat these like two “masters”.
Example:
Pearl Jam - Vitology (Remaster) (Release 25 Mar 2011) at 16 bit / 44.1 kHz
Pearl Jam - Vitology (Remaster) (Release 25 Mar 2011) at 24 bit / 96 kHz
All the tracks on one of these albums are listed as duplicates to the other album’s tracks.
Just a recommendation -> Don’t mark tracks with different sample rates as duplicates.
There are a lot of strong opinions about this, and our plan is to sidestep all of them by allowing users to edit duplicates as they see fit. The database already supports this kind of editing, and the UI should be done shortly after launch.
I can see some benefit in making some of Roon’s behavior configurable based on user preferences. I’d much rather tell Roon up front how I’d like it to handle certain things than have to go back and manually change things afterward to suit my preferences.
Yeah, there is almost certainly more we can do here, even beyond the editing. The biggest issue is that there are so many different use cases for hiding duplicates, and we need to make sure the feature works sensibly for all of them.
Some people want all 11 versions of Miles Davis “Kind Of Blue” shown as one album in the browser, since they think of them as variations of the same album, regardless of track count, format, etc. Some people want only exact file matches deduped. Some people want sensible behavior when watching folders with content that overlaps, and they may have lossy vs lossless vs high res copies of the same album that they want to pick their “primary” copy for once.
The current behavior will likely dedupe the versions of Kind Of Blue that have the same number of tracks, but may leave versions with bonus tracks (or bonus discs) untouched. If you want to add those into the set, you’ll be able to. If you want to “ungroup” them all and see every version separately, that will also be available. And of course, even now you can turn off deduping completely in Settings.
We can add more options in here, but my opinion is that this often ends up being a matter of personal preference, even on an album by album basis. For me, it’s likely to involve some grooming to be exactly right in my collection no matter what.
Hope that makes sense. Interested to know how are you guys thinking about using this feature!
Hi Mike, I understand the subjectivity behind it, that Roon cannot cater to every need out there, and that there will always be some manual grooming left to do, but I also definitely agree with Chris’s suggestion to not mark albums with different sample rates as duplicates.
This could just be a user setting as per audiomuze’s suggestion, which defaults to off for fresh installs if that is more in line with the current thinking.
I’m a big fan of having extended user settings available. And if hidden under an “advanced” tab, people that just want the program to work will leave them alone, but the settings are there for people that really want to go down and dirty with the program.
I’m one of those that only wants a single piece of album art for an album. If I want to play it, I will then drill down into my “Kind of Blue” sub-library
Not sure that “duplicate” is the correct term for collating different releases though.
I’m personally with @VirusKiller – I’d rather see the album once in the browser and drill down once I’m in the album details page. I also prefer listening to my highest quality release by default, so it’s nice that it picks that one by default when doing duplicate grouping.
For those that don’t like the above default behavior, @mike has given me a new duplicate grouping editor design that I plan on getting in sometime over the next month.
@Christiaan – we plan on adding more settings after a while, once we know what defaults people want to keep, and what defaults people want to change. This is going on my list of what’s a polarizing default.
I think flagging tracks as “duplicates” is just not the right way to do it. I don’t really want to see an album twice in the browser, because I’d want to be able to search for mono albums, which I tag with [Mono] after the title. But keeping them together might make sense, if, when you click on an album, you see both listed, not just one listing with, say, disc 1 and disc 2.
