I am finding albums in my collection that Roon has marked as “unidentified.” Some of these are from CD rips, others are downloads. If I click on “unidentified” and enter the album editor, I often find the correct match but Roon shows that the track times are different. I’m not sure how to handle this and I really don’t understand why track times should be off. I am reluctant to just click “save” as the data that Roon is pulling up seems to be in error for some reason. Is this a known issue, is there any explanation for what I am seeing? I’ve attached an example: this is the correct album but 7 of the 10 tracks don’t match due to track times. My times match what is shown at Presto Classical for this recording.
Roon uses a threshold (+/- 4 sec., as you can see 
) to determine if a local track is a perfect match to what it has in its metadata set. But the match could still be a good one even if a track is a few more seconds off than what Roon would have used as a safe guess. If - and from the file names in your screenshot I’d say so - you think the match is good enough you can use the identification proposal - especially if there’s just one release available. You still can unidentify an album later if you’re not happy with the result.
Track time differences could be just slightly wrong in the database or track length was measured differently by the label / metadata provider and therefore doesn’t exactly match the length of your locally ripped files.
@anon47919701 Thank you for your response and explanation. This gives me more confidence in manually matching these types of recordings up. I just came across one album where Roon reports no track times at all, obviously this one will not match my data.
I know that at musicbrainz - one of the metadata sources Roon uses - it’s possible to find albums which do not have track times. For example vinyl releases at times do not “report” track times and nothing is printed on the sleeve. So even such a case may still be better than no identification. It really depends on the individual identification case you’re dealing with.
I just added an album released in February ( Sony Classical ), which was not recognized. Roon has no track times. Very annoying. I supposed that new releases from major labels would be recognized, but unfortunately not.
There are lots of reasons why the track timings don’t match on a perfectly good rip. But it can also hint that there is a problem so it’s best to do a quick sanity check before accepting.
Assuming the rip is good and no files have been truncated (which should have been caught in the first place by your ripper or your download retailers ripper) the most common reason I find for miss-matched timings is different running orders in different releases. For example, with Classical music the running order of works might be reveresed from release to release. With Pop music it is common that the running order differs from country to country release, or there will even be completely different bonus tracks. Roon will interpret this as missmatched track timings when what you really need to do is edit track titles so they are not accidently miss-labelled.
Chandos itself gives the time for the first track as 10.20 and that is the time that musicbrainz and allmusic also report (remember they would have gotten their data directly from Chandos) and which roon is trying to match to (which I mthink it is getting from either musicbrainz or rovi/allmusic), but Spotify gives the time as 10:25 which also seems to be the time you are getting from roon. 10:25 is also the time that Presto Classical reports. My suspicion (without any data) is that the difference is whether the gap between tracks is attributed to a track or not.
Interesting that Chandos reports different timings. We wouldn’t want things to be consistent, would we? Cheers!
… not true for musicbrainz. Usually, volunteers, not labels enter the data there.