So, let’s suppose that Roon i wrong. or that its preferences are not mine.
For example, i have cd by
Ella Fitzgerald and André Previn
Roon primary artist is
but i prefer the right accents. so i ask roon to prefer my tags, which means
ALBUMARTIST = Ella Fitzgerald / André Previn
where / is my tag separator.
but Roon produces another order:
André Previn / Ella Fitzgerald
and it’s NOT the same.
so my point is: if i ask to prefer my tags… it should be LITERALY my tags.
This seems like a good example for going into detail about Album Artist vs Primary Artist links, so… get comfortable… 
The main thing to keep in mind that when editing an album, Album Artist is different from Primary Artist Links.
Album Artist is a piece of text that’s basically “the name of the artist on the front cover of the album” – it might be a special formatting or a name created just for that album, and this can come from Roon’s metadata or from your tags.
It kind of looks like our metadata is wrong here 
since I would expect the Album Artist string to match what’s on the cover, meaning it should read “Ella Fitzgerald and Andre Previn” but that’s besides the point.
So, the point is that Album Artist is a text string, which can come from Roon’s metadata, or from your file tags or edits made in Roon.
Primary Artist Links are not text – they are links to the actual people inside of Roon’s metadata system. This is a key difference, since Roon does not handle people like simple text strings – in Roon, people have biographies, birth dates, credits, influences, etc. You can also have two people with different data who happen to share the same name.This data doesn’t come from your file tags.
Roon can take text from your file tags and treat them like people for whom we don’t have any metadata, but this data is unique to Roon, because it represents a link within Roon. There’s more information about this distinction here.
You can see something similar in my library for the Ella and Louis Anthology, which was released with “Ella and Louis” on the cover. Roon shows both the Album Artist (a text string that is not a link) and the links to the Primary Artist (a link each for both).
The system has captured how the album describes the artist on the cover (“Ella & Louis”), but it didn’t create a new artist in my library by that name – there is no “artist” with that name, and this album is still linked to the two artists in my library who actually performed on the album, and each has their own rich metadata.
One of the nice things about Roon handling artists and composers in this rich way is that you don’t have to edit lots of text – if you think the person is missing an accent, you can just edit the person, and their name will be corrected on every album and track in your entire collection.
Finally, to get to your original question:
So, without knowing your library settings, I’ll say that you can use your Album Artist by selecting it – you’re using the Roon data in your screenshot, but we give you full control over how that text is displayed.
That said, right now there’s no way to choose how the Primary Artist Links. are sorted, or which ones appear first. Feel free to open a Feature Request for that sorting.
thanks @mike for your reply.
and yes, i’ve understood the logic…
but it’s not what i have been asking.
my point is: IF i want to change the album artist (assuming that roons one is wrong, OR that for my personal reason I prefer to change it…) THEN i ask Roon to prefer MY string text albumartist saved in my tags.
but in my example roon is not doing it… it’s changing it.
another example:
so, clearly here Roon albumartist is different from the text on the label “John Parish + Polly Jane Harvey” (and this is NOT an isolated case )
in any case, maybe you like it this way, and that’s OK for me.
but i prefer to change the albumartist in
“John Parish & PJ Harvey”
or
“John Parish + PJ Harvey”
or
“PJ Harvey + John Parish”
because it disturbes me to have a repeated PJ…
and i write it in my tags.
the point is that roon does not allow it, because it sorts the artist…
other examples (all of them… roon prefers, i have done no changes):
my point is: the albumartist=text-on-the disc rule is quite arbitrary, difficult to apply, subject to interpretations and applied in many different and non coherent ways by roon… so i just want to correct my way.
Interesting. Can you show me the Album Artist editing screen for this album?
you mean this ones?
in this case, my albumartist tag is:
PJ Harvey / John Parish
but as you see roon sorts them and shows
John Parish / PJ Harvey
exactly as in the fitzgerald / previn case.
From your screenshot, it looks like we’re preserving your album artist string, but you’re not using it – what happens if you select your Album Artist string and save?
sorry… you are right. i was experimenting with different tags on the files.
here
this is the actual situation, and i confirm that i obtain the same both with “PJ Harvey / John Parish” tags and “John Parish/ PJ Harvey”.
so, here i don’t understand what i did to obtain the opposite order.???
Did you mean to say Primary Artist not Main Performer here? Primary Artist is what I see in the Edit Album screen. Or are you referring to something else?
Hey @Niccolo_Terzi – I’m a little confused, but maybe I’m just missing what you’re asking. It’s possible we are conflating Album Artist and Primary Artist links.
Album Artist in Roon has no order or sorting, because it’s a single piece of information – a simple text field stored with the album. It could be “PJ Harvey / John Parish” or “John Parish / PJ Harvey”, and this can come from your tags, or from Roon’s metadata, or from edits you make in Roon.
Primary Artist links are a big part of what makes Roon’s metadata different, and more powerful. These are also editable at the album level (meaning they can be added or removed), but there’s no way to sort them or choose an order right now, since these are just links to people. Feel free to open a Feature Request for this.
We generally assume that if you want an album’s “artist” displayed with certain styling, that will happen in Album Artist, which is how we sort albums in the browser. That’s why it’s a simple text field, so you can easily choose between:
Again, ordering the links is something we could do, but that’s more of a presentation question. The distinction between Album Artist and Primary Artist links is about preserving information about the album and the context in which this music was released.
We really try to avoid concatenated performers like you often see on TIDAL and elsewhere. In the album above, an artist we’re familiar with (PJ Harvey) listed her name on the cover as “Polly Jean Harvey”, and unfortunately we don’t have that listed as an AKA, so we didn’t match this up. In many applications we would have a few choices here – create a new artist in your library (Polly Jean Harvey), or ignore the artist’s intent (just use PJ Harvey).
Because Roon treats these concepts separately, you can choose exactly how you want the album listed, and you can also find the album on PJ Harvey’s page, and on John Parish’s page as well.
In any event, you can set Album Artist to whatever you want it to be, but right now we don’t support sorting of Primary Artist links.
(btw you’re 100% correct @soundserge – Main Performer is for tracks, not albums 
thanks, I edited)
Hi @mike, thanks again
my answer is no, i’m not confusing “album artist” and “primary artist link”.
and it seems to me that…no, it’s not true that “album artist” is just a plain string.
here are my tags for the fitzgerald/previn album:
and here is what roon tells me
i see that (sorry my screenshot is in italian…):
with PJ & Parish it happens the same. and i can tell there are a lot of cases.
the only solution so far is i to edit manually the “album artist” in roon, here:
to read
Ella Fitzgerald / André Previn
so, i hope i’ve explained myself.
about your other point:
in this case, the name of roon primary artist is already correct (André Previn).
BUT because in Roon the “album artist” is as we see “Ella Fitzgerald with Andre Previn” (with no accent), i cannot do anything about it except change the “album artist”, and that’s what i’m trying to do.
In this case i can manually edit the “album artist”…
but i think here is a roon “wrong behaviour” , and that’s why a wrote the post.
in my library i have many situations like this one.
Thanks, I see it now, and I agree – this looks wrong 
I’d like to get a look at the files here. Can you upload the album to Dropbox or similar and send me a link over PM? If you need a way to upload the files to us directly let me know.
@Niccolo_Terzi Does your file tagging program concatenate separate tags and present them with a / separator? If “André Previn” and “Ella Fitzgerald” are actually separate tags in your files, I’m sure that we would sort them. But we wouldn’t manipulate an actual string.
i have sent you a PM
No, it’s just one single tag.
but in my roon settings / is a tag splitter
here’s another one
here everything is wrong:
-John Surman should be the main artist, not part of the title
-all those people should not be there, as they are part of ensemble london brass
-london brass is missing
in this situation, album artist should be (i guess) John Surman / Jack De Johnette / London Brass
I have the same album, and I agree that the metadata that Roon provides for it is confusing. One of the big metadata sources for Roon is AllMusic, and if you look there you see that mess already. Unfortunately, music metadata is not as carefully curated as the British Library catalogue 
In particular, labels, including otherwise careful ones like ECM are terrible at providing concise and accurate metadata to the metadata providers. And let’s not talk about old recordings, compilation boxsets, or small independent labels…
