· Good afternoon. I’m spending some time tidying up my music collection, both physical and on the server/ROCK. This includes correcting metadata.
As part of this, I’ve been customising and editing genres and have run into an issue whereby albums with created sub-genres do not show in created parent genres in the “Genres” view. If, for example, you look at an existing parent genre under that Genres view then it also shows sub-genres (e.g. Pop/Rock will show Surf albums even if the album is not tagged with Genre Pop/Rock). However, if I have xyz sub-genre and abc parent genre (both newly created) then looking at the parent genre view shows no albums. Clicking through to the sub-genre does. To be clear, this is when the album is tagged with sub-genre only, clearly adding parent genre would correct that but should not be necessary (given default genres work as expected).
However, if I look at the focus option on the albums screen then I can find the albums through the parent genre if desired. So the mapping is working behind the scenes but just not in the Genres view. Any ideas? Is there something I am missing? It feels like a bug as works on one screen but not the other.
Thanks for the clear write-up, leading with “Focus finds them, the Genres browser doesn’t” was exactly the right detail, and it narrowed things down quickly.
I’ve been through the logs (11 August through yesterday evening). The short version: there’s nothing broken on your Roon Server. Every genre edit you’ve made has been written and saved correctly, I can watch each one land, including the reparenting you did on Monday afternoon across the Hip-Hop genres and again yesterday around 16:40 on the Rock and Country ones. No errors, no failed writes, no sign of a half-applied or corrupted hierarchy. Your library now carries roughly 45 genres of your own on top of Roon’s built-in set, and your top level has gone from 47 entries down to 41 over the past week. All of that has saved as intended.
Three things would help before I take this to the team:
1. Exact spellings. Could you give me the precise names of one parent/sub-genre pair that’s failing, plus one album tagged only with the sub-genre? I ask because there are some near-duplicates in your library, I can see a “Hip Hop” sitting alongside Roon’s built-in “Hip-Hop”, and a “Pop Rock” and “Pop-Rock” alongside the built-in “Pop/Rock”. If the parent you’re testing is a newly created near-twin of a built-in genre rather than the built-in itself, nothing will roll up into it, and that’s worth ruling out first.
2. How the parent was created. Did you create it from the Genres screen, or did it come into being by typing a new name into an album’s Genres field? Those two routes aren’t necessarily equivalent and I’d like to know which one you used.
3. A restart. Your Roon Server has been running continuously since 17 August, every genre edit in this project has happened within that single session, so the genre caches have never been rebuilt since you started. Restarting the Server is a quick test that rules out a stale cache. If the parent view populates afterwards, that tells us something quite specific.
A screenshot of the Edit screen for the sub-genre, showing which parent it’s assigned to, would also be useful.
Yes, there are near duplicates as I was testing and genres stick around even if empty (which is also frustrating, we should be able to “clean” them). The ones I am testing are, for example, Hip Hop as parent and, say, G-Funk as child genre. I would expect the Genre screen to show the G-Funk album but it does not, only if look at Focus view when it does.
I am unable to create a brand new Genre as parent from the Genres screen (it needs to exist in the database already) so pulled them in using file tags and then made them parents. I then deleted the parent genre from tags, keeping the child (so removed Hip Hop from tags, kept G-Funk).
Roon has been restarted.
I tried a test on a brand new database, moving over only a few files and repeating the process. Exactly the same occurred. If you create a brand new parent genre with brand new sub-genre then the parent does not show the sub-genre albums in Genre view, but does in Focus view. This seems like a bug to me. Screenshots attached (first showing no albums for Hip Hop, second showing Album).
I also tried the same process with a Rock parent and Alternative/Indie Rock child and had the same result.
Thank you, and your reproduction on a clean database was what settled the description of this.
Albums tagged only with a sub-genre appear under Roon’s built-in parent genres but not under the parents you created, and Focus finds them by parent while the Genres browser does not.
We have passed it to our development team for review, along with your steps and screenshots. We are not going to characterise it further until they have looked, since the difference between your genres and the built-in ones may matter in ways we cannot see from here.
Tagging albums with the parent genre as well works in the meantime, as you found.
On your other point, removing empty or unwanted genres and genre editing more generally is a feature request rather than a support matter. tripleCrotchet linked the right place, and votes there do affect prioritisation:
We are closing this thread and marking it as ticket in. Any fix will appear in the release notes, and we will come back here if development need anything further from you.
