On the album - “Barry Douglas plays Listz, Webern, and Berg: Piano Solos” - I sought to upgrade the tracks with fully correct title tags. This action was prompted because Roon only recognized one of the seven works.
I hypothesized this was because: WORK and PART were not being used; and, the TRACKTITLE (which was used) wasn’t in the proper form. Usually, the errors were: including the composers’ last names; omitting descriptors like “…for solo piano”; and missing opus numbers.
After entering COMPOSER tags, I then referenced AllMusic to get canonical names and pasted that new wording into the WORK tags. [I did not change the Title tags, however]. Also, PART tags were entered for multi-track compositions.
All tag changes were made by YATE to the files as they sat in Roon Storage.
RESULTS
I expected: the canonical names would appear on the Album page as entered to the WORK tags.
I hoped: this change would cause the WORKs to be IDed.
What actually happened: five of seven works IDed, but (get this), no changes to the titles on Roon’s Album Page!
My question (today): why is Roon not reflecting my changes made to WORK and PART tags? It continues to display the TRACK TITLES. I claim that WORK titles are synced up to AllMusic; and the WORK tag is clearly superior to the TRACKTITLE tag. Why cling to the latter?
One other tidbit: the album is unidentified. I’ll provide.
I eagerly await your answer, perhaps with any known workarounds to this defect. Happy to document further as necessary.
This is not an answer. I experience exactly what you say on a semi-regular basis. Assuming you have “preferred file” for both track titles and multi-part grouping, as a workaround I often find:
I do have to re-edit the TITLE tags with canonical names to match the WORK tags
In the TITLE tags I find that that a colon “:” as a “work: part” separator works better than a dash as a “work - part” separator.
Sometimes the work/part formatting in the TITLE tag is using multiple colons, semi colons, slashes, full-stops and roon gets confused where exactly the work ends and the part starts. Sometimes simplifying that has worked. Mostly any changes are unpractical.
Sometimes I have to “check” individually the file track names in the track editor, even though roon has been told to do this globally.
In general it is easier to get roon to respect track edits for single part works. For multi part works I have recently learnt that roon will ignore edits at a work level (although part level edits are respected).
As I say, this is not an answer. Just a bunch of workarounds that have worked in some cases (by no means all) for me. I also would prefer that this level of manual intervention was not necessary. Painful.
This has been throwing me off. I’ve been interpreting that as sometimes I have to put the canonical name in both the WORK and TITLE tags. So for single part works does roon ignore the WORK tag? I see the logic of that now.
I think I have been using the WORK /PART tags primarily to get a composition ID and thought the composition grouping was a side effect. Looks like John might be doing the same.
No, WORK and PART tags identify the composition. In the case of a single track performance (which could be from a multi-part composition), we use the track title for display, because it will quite possibly contain something contextual, such as “(exerpt)”.
I think the confusion is that the TITLE tag can also be completely wrong, not just a small contextual variation on the canonical name. I see it all the time. Wrong opus numbers, wrong catalog numbers, wrong nicknames, even wrong symphony numbers. Sometimes it’s a typo from me, most of the time it’s from the DB lookups.
I hadn’t realised that for single part works I could just make a simple correction edit in the TITLE display name as long as I had the full canonical name in WORK. That will save a ton of work as at the moment I often re-edit both the TITLE and WORK tags with canonical names.
I was always puzzled. I can understand why the canonical name would also be the display name on the composition view. But on the album view it makes more sense to me that it’s an album view. That is, the display name is the same as the album artwork. It’s a lot easier to match up artwork, libretto’s pdf’s etc. As far as I can see that is possible with single part works but with multi-part work’s the rule is different. The WORK tag is both the canonical name and the display name.