Sometimes Metadata Is a Mess (and it is not roon's fault)

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Back in 2015 Nilson Matta released an album (or perhaps several albums) titled East Side Rio Drive on the Krian / World Blue label. It has 10 tracks. But what 10? There are three versions of this album on 7 Digital with two different track orders and timing (at least in Canada) - neither of which agrees with the track order and timing given in allmusic (and hence in roon). The album doesn’t appear to have made it into musicbrainz but it is in discogs where the track order/timing is the same as allmusic. However, discogs has an image of the back of the physical cd with a track listing (no times) which turns out to be different than the track listing on the back of a cd whose image is on eBay. As an example of what level of confusion is out there here is the difference in two tracks at 7 digital.

Version A
Track 4 Mojave 4:17
Track 6 Blue in Green 3:51

In Version B the timing of the these two tracks is reversed, but the track order is different from A as well
Track 3 Mojave 3:51
Track 6 Blue in Green 4:17

And in the allmusic/discogs/roon ordering this is what we find - timing agrees witgh A but not track order:
Track 4 Blue in Green 3:51
Track 6 Mojave 4:17

Maybe one of these is correct? Maybe none are.

Unless someone has inside knowledge about this album, I do not think there is anything to be done about this. I just offer it as a cautionary tale for those who think metadata is easy.

Have you made any edits to this content in Roon?

Is this content from local files, TIDAL, or Qobuz?

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Hey @Stan_Jones,

Thank you for commenting on this. It paints a clear picture of just how difficult parsing out and matching release information can be. In many cases this problematic metadata goes back to the labels. Understandably, some metadata providers aren’t going to want to attempt to document every permutation of a release and decide instead to defer to the most common variation.

The exception being Discogs, where crowd sourced information is incentivized by their marketplace.