Hi I am testing free trial of Roon as alternative to DLNA and I don’t understand how the same songs are linked among albums. For example, I have several Sting albums and three of the contain “Desert Rose” song. Next to this song in album view I can see small CD icon with 3. When I click it, it shows me all albums that contain this cong. This is cool. But I do not understand why for some songs I see this icon with 1 while for some songs it is not present at all. Please see screenshots: https://imgur.com/a/IK00Q39.
In general, we won’t show a link for a single Performance (which is what we call them), because there’s little point. However, sometimes, there is a bit more metadata about the Composition (song), so we will provide a link. For example, many of The Beatles’ compositions have descriptions, or dates, etc.
Actually, it does not, work that is.
Apparently it depends on so many variables, that it remains a big mistery why sometimes similar/alternative versions are presented whilst in ( a lot of) other cases nothing comes up, even when present in ones own library.
My advice: if info is presented - enjoy. Otherwise, just enjoy the music
Dirk
I was just about to quote that same answer by you from another thread.
But, just to be clear. If you have a song where you know you have multiple versions, but, they are not linked, then, the issue maybe lack or or incorrect Composer Data?
Close but the issue is more about metadata and while Roon is not really at fault here since Roon does not provide the metadata, Roon still gets the blame.
That’s the thing with Roon’s metadata based model, when there is good, correct and thorough metadata available the results within Roon are truly magical but bad, missing, incomplete and incorrect metadata results in a less than magical experience. Again it’s not really Roon that is at fault but the metadata and the metadata providers.
I pulled all my file based metadata into a sqlite table and ran some update queries to fill in composer blanks leveraging other performances of a track by the same artist that had good composer metadata. I then grouped the performances to identify anomalies, corrected them and wrote all updates back to the underlying files, adding one second to their last mod time, forcing Roon to automatically rescan them. Hugely improved the richness of the browsing experience albeit how much is Valencia vs what I did I’m not sure, I guess it’s some combination of the two.
Thanks for clarifications. I do not have any issues regarding opposite situation - not linked songs. I was just curious why it behaves inconsistently (by displaying mentiones 1 sometimes) as I have carefully meta-tagged all my CD RIPs collection. I slightly miss being able to switch off auto-tagging from Internet and rely entirely on my meta-tags. While auto-tagging is convenient and powerful, it leads to poor situations where I see stuff like “Performed by” dozen od artists from choirs. Auto-tagging should be an option, I believe.
Anyway, during last six months or so I have checked several streaming solutions and I must admit that ROON is vastly superior. I am pretty sure I will get a license when my trail ends.
Okay so you lost me at “into a sqlite table”. But if I understand you correctly if one has robust file tags than Roon will be more magical? The thing is I’m a minimalist when it comes to file tags and the “composer” tag is not one that I consider essential, if it’s there great, if not, then it stays blank.
In any event could you please post a screen shot showing your file tag import settings since mine are pretty much the default settings.
I’ll post that tomorrow when in front of PC. From memory I’ve got Room set to use its own metadata for everything, so the only time it uses metadata from tags is where a field would otherwise be empty. Given the diversity and number of unidentified albums in my library that’d be pretty often.
This is how they’ve been since 1.7, so Roon is basically running on its own metadata and only leveraging file tags where something is unidentified or it otherwise is missing a field that happens to have a file-based entry (which is where filling in the composer blanks came in handy):
