In my album list, sorted by artist, Huey Lewis appears under “H” :
as well as “L”:
I’m absolutely certain my tags are fine (identical across ALL files) - what might be the difference?
How many “Huey Lewis & The News” Artist are showing in your Artists browser (make sure to check under H and L too)?
Go to the artist in Roon > Edit and change the artist sort to „Lewis, Huey & the News“ or whatever, and check how many separate artists with that name you have as @BlackJack mentioned. If there’s not than one, you can merge them
It sorts fine if I “Use roon” for the album artist, theirs is “Huey Lewis and the News”, the file album artist is “Huey Lewis & The News”. Sort Album Artist starts with “Lewis, …”
That shouldn’t make a difference, should it?
Interesting. I think it should make a difference. If you tell it to Use File and it uses Roon for some aspect of names, somebody would be upset.
Isn’t there some artist sort name file tag that should be used for this?
Sort is handled by Roon automatically or the user manually. File tags get ignored, there is no prefer file option available for that. And there are no file tags anyway for streaming content (in case they are wrong too).
Note: Feature requests / suggestions go into Feedback > Feature Suggestions .
I would have expected that if the artist name is set to prefer file, other aspects pertaining to the name would automatically do the same, and there would be a sort name tag. Oh well. In this case I agree that the behavior is oddly inconsistent/incomplete.
Yes
Roon requires exact matches for Album Artist / Primary Artist.
You have two choices here to make ‘Prefer file’ tags work:
1 Edit your meta data to match (using ‘and’ )
2 Edit the Artist name in Roon to match your data (alter name to ‘&’ )
My preference would be the first in this instance (use ‘and’ in your names) as ‘&’ might be a confusing character (possible wildcard in searches etc)