ok, this has been a difficult topic. There is something peculiar with roon and duplicate albums. I’ll try to summarize without details of side threads. Still, I can only simplify so much.
Lots of my albums in multiple formats only show up in one format. I don’t see the “versions” field in the album view. Its possible that I did not have “show hidden tracks and albums” turned on in the settings/general initially when the database was created - I’m not sure. But I did make sure it was on now - and it didn’t help, even with rescan. In my previous example I used Miles Davis, Sketches of Spain.
Since I have a big library, its tedious to make changes and force a rescan. I decided to create a small test library. It had only “Sketches of Spain” (both my flac and dsd copies) and a couple of bob dylan albums I also had in both flac and dsd. Well, after adding that test library to roon and rescanning, the version flag showed up and I could browse all these albums.
was I imagining my problem? no. I checked another album, peter paul and mary’s first album, also both flac and dsd. No version flag, only one version showed up (though if you scroll through all albums without search, both versions are there, as I reported above. this is a side note).
So… I put the peter paul and mary album in my test directory and forced a rescan on that small directory.
the versions field showed up and both versions were there.
A light has dawned. In another post (which has not gotten feedback or help from @support, Search/filter with tags and ruminations on advanced search) I pointed out that roon’s album scan was not picking up some of my metadata edits. However, in that case the individual album rescan did. Now I find that after turning on “show hidden tracks and albums”, and rescanning, version tags are not activated on duplicate albums (because the fast scan does not do the duplicate processing???: don’t you love closed source software?). Also whether the duplicates can be found at all depends on how you try to access them.
My conclusion, corrections welcome:
roon rescans can miss both metadata edits and (if you change “show hidden files”) duplicate albums.
there are ugly workarounds: scan albums individually to get metadata changes, and create storage locations to do a complete reprocess for duplicate albums.
I suggest:
- a revisit on how rescans are done and what processing is omitted.
- a way for users to force a deeper rescan, more similar to the initial scan though hopefully faster.
my post on rescan missing some changed metadata was ignored. I think this set of issues with scan should be high priority to address.