Hey @Andre_Gosselin – thanks for the feedback and question. The behavior here can be bit confusing, so I want to give you a little background on how Roon’s handles compositions and why.
The recent changes were focused on giving people more flexibility with regards to multi-part grouping, so users would have more control of which parts were included within a given multi-part work.
The new implementation expects that users hoping for more control of composition grouping will have consistent tags for the composer, composition, and movement/work names, within a given album. The new controls will allow those tags to drive the grouping of tracks on that album into compositions.
So, while the new controls allow for file tags to drive composition grouping, they don’t take precedence over some of the larger goals of Roon’s Composition browsing, namely that all performances of a given composition are linked to each other, and to additional performances of that work in the wider world (ie TIDAL).
We also don’t assume that just because composition tags within an album are consistent that file tags referencing that particular composition will always be consistent across your library. Roon is still going to try to correct inconsistencies and link up all the performances of that composition in your library. Roon can prefer text from your file tags for text-based fields like track names, but compositions are more like performers, in that many features in Roon can only really work when they are modeled consistently in the database.
So, a few things are happening in your screenshots above: first, because the composition tag doesn’t include a catalog number and doesn’t match the “canonical” composition names we get from our providers, Roon is not able to match the composition tags to our metadata. You can see in the first screenshot that Roon has found 5 local performances and 85 performances on TIDAL of the Mahler composition. In the later screenshot, that link has been lost.
When Roon isn’t able to directly identify a composition, the composition name is normalized as it’s added to the database as a fallback attempt to match it up to Roon’s metadata. This is why your composition name isn’t coming through exactly as it appears in your tags. I think if your file tags are closer to what Roon is looking for, or include a catalog number, you’ll be able to control the grouping and preserve the link.
None of this is to say that you can’t edit the composition name in Roon. Like performers and composers, compositions in Roon are richly modeled objects, so editing a text string in some files isn’t really how you want to rename it in Roon – you’ll want to edit the composition in Roon directly, using the editing functionality.
Hope that helps!