Often times when I select an artist, I will see variations of the artist name depending on who the artist is performing with on a given album. So for example, on Bird: The Complete Charlie Parker on Verve, Parker is represented as himself, and fourteen other variations. Here is an except showing three (keeping JATP as a separate entity):
Can these be eliminated? What is the recommended best practice?
David
I’ve grappled with this for months with classical and jazz albums. What you are seeing comes from the metadata providers. I’ve had a quick look at this particular album on Musicbrainz and Allmusic; Roon is showing all the artists credited on the various recordings, made over a 5 year period, included in this box set.
If you don’t want this, then you need to decide what you want to see here. In my opinion, there is no best practice - just your own personal preferences. If you want to edit the credits in Roon, then select all the tracks in the album, and at the top of the screen, click on the 3 dots, select edit from the drop down menu. And then edit tracks. See example below. You can then use “remove” to remove any unwanted credits (click on + below “remove” and select from the list).
Personally, I use mp3tag to get the embedded metadata how I want it and then unidentify the album. Roon displays the credits pretty much in line with embedded tags.
If the various disks in a box set match actual original releases, then I generally break the set up into the individual releases and tag them separately.
But, I emphasise, this is just MY personal preference.
You can also merge artists.
Note that sometimes Roon may create a duplicate artist (with the same name as an existing one) when you import an album from local storage. This happens most of the time (always?) only if the “proper” artist known to Roon (with bio and picture) is not credited on any identified album in the Roon library at the time of the import.
You can avoid this (end hence later merging) by ensuring that the proper credit exists, by adding an identified album with this credit to the library before doing the album import - this is easiest by using a streaming service.
In a related way, during manual credit editing Roon finds the “proper” existing artist only if they are credited on an identified album that is already in the Roon library. If during editing you can’t find an artist that you know should be there, once again ensure that you have an identified album with this credit in the Roon library before editing.
I encountered some cases of roon creating a ´ghost artist´ of the same name although everything was fine (correct spelling, correct artist assigned to identified album etc.). There are even duplicates sourced from the official metadata sources like MusicBrainz and Xperi/Tivo/Qobuz/Tidal.
A possible explanation might be that roon is detecting some contradictions stopping it from merging the artists automatically, like different place or year of birth.
Your method of having at least one album by any of the ghost artists added to the library, identified and subsequently merging artists, seems to be the best way to tackle this problem.
My experience is that with Qobuz plus the ´official´ metadata sources for roon´s identification process (MusicBrainz and Xperi/Tivo), the problem is not as huge. Naturally, having a lot of albums from the analogue era added, particularly Classical and Jazz albums subject to numerous re-releases, will contribute to a higher degree of ghost artists. Nevertheless when I tried to solve the problem, most of these ghost artists originated from Tidal or local file tags (tags created on the base of CD/SACD text in my case). Ditching Tidal and applying rigorous tagging rules for local files prior to importing helps.
As far as I know there never was a Charlie Parker orchestra or big band or similar. So a lot of those credits like “Charlie Parker with Strings” or Charlie Parker & His Orchestra" don’t make any sense.
Over the years he was paired with various small orchestras supplemented by a Jazz rhythm section by the producer Norman Granz. “Charlie Parker with Strings”, for example, is not the name of a band but the name of a famous Granz produced album. From memory the orchestra leader/arranger was actually Jimmy Carrol but other orchestra leader/arrangers featured on other big band/orchestrated albums. Especially on box sets this is all now a complete mess. It smacks of metadata errors being made a long time ago which have just been doubled down with endlessly repackaged artists like Charlie Parker. One of these days I will get around to tidying it up.
With small jazz ensembles like “Charlie Parker Quintet” I normally keep the ensemble credit at the track level but delete it at the Primary Artist level (where there is usually a duplicated solo artist credit). This is not a hard and fast rule. The members of these ensembles also changed over the years so that’s not clearcut either. I just personally find navigation easier that way.
If you make use of MusicBrainz tagger it should be able to match the Artist Entity not just Artist Text, and this means you can then choose between using the artist exactly how it appears on a particular release or using the name they are usually known by, therefore reducing the number of name variations.
For example the MusicBrainz Picard Use standardised artist names option
or the SongKong Use standard Artist name instead of name displayed on cover option
There are some additional flexibility/complications with MusicBrainz. Because we are dealing with artist entities there is also the option to translate artist names, and for classical the question of whether composers should be included as album artists. I think I explain this quite well in this thread
