Various artist cds missing the name of the singer on each track [answered]

+1 for getting this sorted. No doubt the team are busy but it’s definitely on my list. :smile:

Is this looking better for everyone with Build 29? Let us know if you’re seeing any issues guys.

Thanks!

This has improved for me post version 29. The Various Artists metadata has improved, so thanks!

I’m having issues with DJ compilations showing only the track title and not the artist.

Can you confirm the tags are right? DJ name under album artist, track artist under artist? I assume these aren’t getting identified?

Album artist is “various artists” (this is my system) - though it still picks the DJ name and puts it under album artist in Roon. But the track artist is indeed under artist. The DJ name is in the album title (e.g. Nubreed 01 - Anhony Pappa).
Thanks

Any updates on this?

I’m having the same issue- I have a TON of CMJ New Music Monthly Compilations that I ripped into iTunes over the years. In every case, the Album Artist is “Various Artists” but every track has the individual artist’s name listed and also the track.

Roon only shows “Various Artists” and ignores the artist tags for Individual tracks.

Running latest Build (69)

Very strange @Jeffery_Coates – are these albums identified or not?

Roon seems to have some metadata, but in this case the Track Artist tags were all added by me manually in iTunes. Here’s a shot of the File Tag- artist is in there, but not being listed next to the individual track

Here’s what it looks like while playing

This is a good catch @Jeffery_Coates. We may have found a bug here. What would really help me confirm would be if I could look at the media directly.

Would it be possible to zip up the album and PM me a dropbox link, or something similar? It’s fine if not – if you can zip it up, I’ll send you instructions for uploading it to our server. Just let me know.

Thanks for the report!

Thanks again for the report – there actually seem to be two issues here.

First, while these CMJ discs aren’t that obscure, we don’t great data on them – it mostly comes from our secondary sources. However, I can see that our sources do tend to have track artists.

Our database should be retrieving these artists names and sending them down to your library, but that’s not happening. While this process works for our primary data sources, I’ve opened a ticket in our bug tracker to have this case looked at in more detail.

So that’s the Roon part of this. The other part is your tags. I looked at the media you sent and unfortunately there don’t appear to be any usable tags in these files. This is what I see when I put them in iTunes:

Notice how there are no artist, album artist, or album title tags.

Compare your screen shot above to what I’m seeing in Roon’s tag screen when viewing a different CMJ album in my library:

When I made a copy of my CMJ album and wiped the tags, I get a very similar situation to what you’re seeing. Roon didn’t fill in the track level artists, and there was nothing usable in the tags that might trigger our special handling of Various Artists albums.

When files are properly tagged, we do generally display track level artists even when Roon’s added metadata falls short (as you can see on the left side of my 2nd screenshot). Unfortunately, when Roon’s database doesn’t have any track artists and the file tags don’t either, you end up with an album that looks like what you’re describing.

At this point, I think your options are to either wait for our track artist information in this specific series to improve, or to use any of the various tagging apps out there to try and populate these tags properly. We’re going to work on the first one, but sadly there’s not more I can do on the second! Thanks for the report @Jeffery_Coates!

Mike- Thanks for the detailed reply. The crazy thing is that these files show the track and title information just fine in iTunes. Not sure if this is some oddity about how the file was named in iTunes, or how Roon reads tag info.

Sure thing @Jeffery_Coates – this is an annoying problem, and absolutely one of the use cases Roon tries to solve. And, once we work out the one data bug you helped uncover here, it should do that.

So you know, what you’re seeing in iTunes is the same data as the Title column in my screenshot above – each of your files has a single tag, which contains the title and artist, as opposed to more conventional format, where the ARTIST and TITLE and ALBUM ARTIST are each stored in separate fields.

When files are tagged this way, Roon will do better, and so will iTunes – you can see a similar compilation in my iTunes library is properly flagged as a “Various Artists” album in the top-left, and each track’s artist is separated out to a second row.

Exactly same issue here with “Greenpeace Rainbow Warriors” double CD.

Is there a way to manually tag individual tracks? all last 8 tracks from CD2 show no artist (performed by).

Thanks!!

Is the album identified? If not, it will say “unidentified” on the album page.

If it’s not identified, the best way to get full metadata is to go into the edit screen, click Identify, and match it your album up to the correct version.

I have the same album. In Roon, it is complete - all artists are showing for all songs. My files are FLAC, and I do have the artist tags filled in for every song. I notice Roon identifies the album with “Greenpeace: Rainbow Warriors [#1]” on AllMusic. Not sure why it has “[#1]”, but all the artists names are there as well. Maybe you just have to identify your album manually with this one on AllMusic.

PS… Thanks for mentioning this one. Used to be one of my favourite compilations and I bought it when it was first released, but I have not played it for a long time. Will have a listen to it now. :slight_smile:

Hi, I notice this thread is marked as [answered], but I don’t think it’s [solved].

The not so meaningful Various Artists is showing in the Artist field for compilation albums, even when Artist name tag is properly set.

I’ve posted a related thread here.

Hey @dibb – sorry for the slow response on some of these questions. I just posted a lengthy summary of some of the ways we’ll be improving Roon in the future, and some of the ways Roon is designed to ensure the context of your music is preserved.

One thing to keep in mind is that what you might think of as “artists” in other apps is pretty different in Roon. In other apps, an artist is a piece of text in a file, but in Roon performers and composers are driven by richly detailed information from our metadata service.

This makes it possible to accurately track multiple artists with the same name, or to track all thirty spellings of “Tchaikovsky”. This also allows us to sensibly handle aliases, or cases where you want an album sorted under multiple artists (like, “James Brown and The Famous Flames” or “The Miles Davis Miles Davis Quintet” appearing on James Brown and Miles Davis’ pages, respectively).

I think a lot of this is covered here, and to be clear, this thread is marked answered because it relates to display of track-level artist information on the album screen. Feel free to respond in that thread if you have any questions or feedback. Thanks!

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