Sorting Albums for Artists who had various different names

Roon Software Discussion
1

I have my album view set to sort by artist and then each artist’s albums are sorted by release date. This is mostly working OK but there are quite a few artists in my collection where essentially (at least in my view) it has always been the main artist as the driving force but they have at times released albums under slightly different names (usually involving name-checking their band in the artist name). Examples include…

Lloyd Cole / Lloyd Cole & the Commotions
Elvis Costello / Elvis Costello & the Attractions
Kevin Coyne / Kevin Coyne & the Paradise Band
Robert Cray / The Robert Cray Band
Dexys Midnight Runners / Kevin Rowland & Dexy’s Midnight Runners

… and I’m sure the list goes on.

Since in all the above pairings I personally consider all to be the same entity as far as body of work is concerned I would like the chronological album ordering to span the various name variations rather than being treated as separate artists, e.g. for Lloyd Cole the default ordering gets me his later albums (when he was simply calling himself “Lloyd Cole”) first in the album view and his earlier albums (when he was with The Commotions) after that so to me the chronological order of his albums is disrupted.

I’ve fixed the above by using the “Edit Album” tab in the Album Editor to override Roon’s choice of Album Artist (“Lloyd Cole and the Commotions”) and instead use the tag that I already had in my FLAC file (“Lloyd Cole”). It works but the slight downside is that in the Album view I now see all the albums attributed simply to “Lloyd Cole” whereas I would quite like to see the subtle name changes over the years, I just don’t want them to mess up what I perceive as the correct chronological sort order.

Does anyone have any suggestion for better ways for me to get my sort ordering without suppressing the official artist name that any given album was published under in the Album view?

I know it’s an incredibly minor thing but I thought I might as well ask.

2

I’m not sure how it would turn out (side effects?) but you could try to experiment with the “Last-First Sort Name” (via Artist Editor). For the Lloyd Cole pair it would look like this:

Artist Name “Lloyd Cole” - Sort Name (probably already set): “Cole, Lloyd”
Artist Name “Lloyd Cole & the Commotions” - Sort Name: “Cole, Lloyd”

Album primary artists should probably be the original artist names (not the sort names).

You may have to restart the core to see sort artist name changes because Roon might have cached the view and will not rebuilt it for changes to the sort name value.

3

Where you have a paired Artist, maybe try adding the Primary Artist again as a second artist

You can do this through the Album editor 3 dot menu

So
Elvis Costello/Elvis Costello & the Attractions

Adds a separate line

Elvis Costello

Shold work

You should now Main Albums

Appearances split

4

I manually edit the Last-First Name Sort. So for instance, “Elvis Costello & the Attractions” becomes “Costello & the Attractions, Elvis”. That way all entries for Elvis Costello are grouped together and are sorted by date.