I stumbled down the rabbit hole on this one and can’t figure out how Roon is classifying some albums with “Various Artists” as the primary artist.
My problem is specifically with albums that are collections of tracks by different artists, what most folks call “Various Artists”. Examples: The Complete Stax-Volt Singles, Sam Philips: The Man Who Invented Rock & Roll, Afro-Peruvian Classics: The Soul of Black Peru, and the like. I have a lot of them - 293 in my iTunes library. (I call these albums “Compilations”. Roon defines Compilations differently. I can live with that, it is the inconsistency I’m exploring here.)
When I try to find these albums in Roon, I can query “Various Artists” using the magnifying glass and a few of these albums show up, but most do not.
I inspected the albums that show up under the “Various Artists” search vs the albums that do not show up using some albums that I know to me there. BOTH show the Primary Artist to be “+Various Artists” and the Album Artist to be “Various Artists” (prefer Roon Data) in the metadata.
Further, the albums that do not show up in the “Various Artists” search are identified by Roon, ie they aren’t “unidentified” albums Roon-wise.
There has to be some data field inconsistency that is causing most of these “Various Artists” albums not to show up in the “Various Artists” search in Roon. Why would some appear and not others when all have “Various Artists” as the Primary Artist?
My end goal here is to have a Roon tag with all the albums I call Compilations to allow easy searching. But if I can’t id them in Roon, I can’t make the tag.
The magnifying glass search is not a great way to find these recordings, as it’s poorly tweaked for this term, which has special meaning throughout Roon. Your best bet is to go into the album “Focus” and filter on Album Artist in that view to find what you are looking for.
I’ve moved your post from the Support category of the forum to Roon Software Discussion, since your question is more a “how does Roon work…” rather than a request for technical support to solve a technical issue.
I don’t think that that works; Focus > Performers does not include “Various Artists”, but the individual artists.
I think @robert_vanarsdall is using the Filter in the Album browser (which does have the magnifying glass as the icon, and not a filter funnel; but that’s another story… )
The simple solution is to make sure all your compilation albums are tagged with “Compilation” using Roon’s album editor. Then you can use focus to find them all.
Focus in the Track browser does the same - only lists individual performers to choose from.
You can enter “Various Artists” into the filter of the Album artist column - and that gives all the tracks on the albums that would be found in the results of using “Various artists” in the filter of the Album browser…
If I had done that with each album individually when each album was added to Roon, that would work. Moving over an entire iTunes library makes that an onerous task. The second problem with that is what I am trying to get away from: Roon calls “Compilations” collections of all sorts, not just Various Artists. For example, BB King’s “RPM Hits 1951-1957” or Willie DIxon’s “Chess Box” are both classified by Roon as Compilations, when - to me at least - they are more easily found with the artist.
I seem to have answered my own question, though, as one does when on hold with technical support.
If you go to Albums, then query “various artists” with the magnifying glass, the Various Artists albums I’m looking for are there. I haven’t done a one-for-one comparison with the iTunes “Compilations” file, but the majority seem to be there.
Grrr. Just when you think you have the problem solved, another pops up.
Ok, so in the previous reply I found that Albums->Search (magnifying glass) “Various Artists” brought up most of the compilations I was looking for. Instead of making a Tag for them all, which would work but would be static, I figured, “Why not a Bookmark?” That way, any album with “Various Artists” that I add will show up in the bookmark.
You see 255 albums in the Albums->Various Artists search. “Various Artists” is still in the search box from the search. I created a new Bookmark and called it Compilations, also shown
Now, what happens if I go back to the Home screen and then go to the Bookmark titled “Compilations”. Nothing. It returns the Home screen.
So apparently Bookmarks works only with Focus selections, not with Search selections, and since “Various Artists” is not available in Focus as a Performer, there is no way to Bookmark what I’m trying to do.
Anybody got other ideas? I can make a static Tag called Compilations, and maybe I just have to settle for that. How hard could it be to add another Performer to the Focus list in Albums?
This is a known issue… Call your Bookmark “Various” rather than “various artists”. The term various artists has a special meaning in Roon and it can’t be used as a Bookmark name.
The bookmark is called “Compilations”. Do you mean Search on “Various” rather than “Various Artists” or name the Bookmark something other than “Complications”?
To be clear: is the problem conflict with the search term “Various Artists” or the bookmark name “Compilations”?
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