I’m new to Roon, and have imported about 100 albums, all classical. It seems to mix names from its own database with those in the existing tags. So Roon lists “Bernstein, Leonard” and “Leonard Bernstein” as separate individuals. Or “Murray Perahia” and “Murray Perahia [piano]” as different performers on the same album.
Should I relax, and wait for Roon to fix this? Or do I need to edit the metadata to a Roon-compatible format before importing?
Thanks.
Most library software sees a name match or no match. It is not smart enough to know that all those variations relate to the same person. There are lots of worse examples than yours.
Think about the spelling variations possible with George Frederic Handel (accented versions, non-accented). I have 11 different hits for Handel as an Artist in my library (still not yet taken the plunge to trial Roon - may await Roon 1.1). It is an area I gave up upon trying to get better tagging. So I would be interested in Roon’s response to your query.
As an aside I always wondered who decides on the tagging for inclusion in databases. It would be nice if there was an International agreement like there is for Air travel.
Roon is very good at recognizing albums. When it does, the track listings are usually pretty complete. For example, it identified my set of Brahms symphonies conducted by Abbado as a Musical Heritage Society release, different from the DG release that it was based on. It even had a little blurb about how it was preferable because MHS had included an extra track. Amazing.
But there’s still a question about what Roon does with the metadata when it identifies the album. “Bernstein, Leonard” came from my metadata, while “Leonard Bernstein” came from Roon. It seems like Roon album listings will be cleaner if most of the metadata is stripped out. Maybe Roon could publish a guide to prepping the metadata. Minimal data for recognizable albums, and lots for unknown ones?