[Moderated edit: spilt out to own topic.]
I’ll Dampen Euphoria …
I never had performance issues BUT …
Where is the 2 yrs promised Box Set Management improvements – still “coming soon”
OK don’t whip the willing horse 
The handful of people asking for this simply dont justiy the resources needed fixing or improving your classic box sets. Looks like a lost case. Comparable to the SACD Iso playback.
I suspect it’s not a handful, anybody who has a classical library is likely to have a significant number of box sets even if its just collections of Beethoven Symphonies or Sonatas
Its the definition of what constitutes a box set as opposed to a a “multi disc album” . There is so many back catalogue releases of famous artists and composers that present a 100 + disc box which is totally un-navigable by Roon unless you know what and where you are looking
This is from the Message From the Founders 2 yrs ago, where it was promised . The Internet Always On , Folder Browsing and Playlists were honoured but not the box set
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That’s great for your cause. Looks like there is a chance in the next 10 years.
I could just give up, I have it covered with Custom Tags and Views in JRiver. I can get what I want Roon to look like elsewhere but with the cost of manual metadata grooming.
I suspect the non delivery is about metadata , just where do you find the artwork by disc, disc contents etc it’s not readily available so Roon can’t latch onto it
I can dream
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I used to be a strong advocator of perfectioning (classical) box set handling, so fully understand your frustration with this forgotten promise. On the other hand, we should be fair, admitting that this most certainly is concerning a very small number of roon users even among lovers of classical music.
I agree, that such boxes like ´Bach 333´ or ´Complete Karajan´ are un-browsable. But I wouldn’t blame roon on not offering such feature, as the underlying metadata is just incredibly bad and unreliable, sometimes contradictive or missing, as these boxsets were oftentimes regional offers due to copyright restrictions. Some years ago, I decided to add streaming (Tidal, later switched to Qobuz) and cut my main local library being permanently enabled, to just a minimum, so removed all the boxsets. And guess what - I am not missing anything, as almost all recordings are still available, via discographies and recording lists on the composition pages. Not missing anything.
I’m just pouting !! I wouldn’t mind if someone from Roon explained as you have
I too have a workaround , I keep 2 libraries , one with mostly single albums or less than 10 discs (sonata sets etc), the other with the big boxes intact.
I do just like you I keep Library 1 in Roon supplementing with Tidal as needed sound familiaar
I keep both in JRiver where I can and have defined how box sets should look.
I keep Library 1 lean , often only one or two album per artist and then use Artist>Discography to get where I want to be.
I hate to say it but I think box sets in Roon is a pipe dream , as you say the back catalogue metadata is so poor it has to be manually supplemented and that simply isn’t Roon. That’s not to mention what he source of individual disc artwork would be
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Even if Roon can’t source the images allowing users to manually adjust things to work the way we want them to more would be good enough for me. In LMS you can set a custom name for cover images in a folder ie “Boxset Cover” and it will override that for the library view cover and then it will display the embedded images when a track is played which for me I want the individual disc cover. Works well enough for me.
Arc should also definitely implement the browse albums by random feature as well if they don’t want to compromise on the look of discover.
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This isn’t strictly classical music only as well. Case in point, I finally digitised a CD series of dub music, which is 8 releases, each containing 4 distinct albums, but there’s no way of nesting them with their individual titles and album covers within each of the series titles, so I’m stuck with merging them into 8 releases/4 discs per, and only the ‘boxset’ artwork is available across those 4 discs despite them being different albums.
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obviously I was only commenting from my experiences with Rock & Classical, other genres must have the same issues
individual artwork is always going to be a problem , where do you find it if you can’t scan the physical cover. In the classical world you can often find LP covers that approximate
when time permits I’ve also dusted off the old scanner/printer, but generally can find reasonable artwork online as well.
Certainly true, boxsets are a common thing with a lot of genres. Classical (and early Jazz) boxsets just in my experience pose the biggest challenge to tagging, sorting and getting useful metadata, as some of them also tend to be big (50 CDs and more). I personally have given up on having such in roon, and I am pessimistic regarding the quality of underlying metadata that would enable roon to establish a new sort of browsing logic for those. Of course that does not mean others have to follow my approach, and of course roon should be capable of handling boxsets on a technical level.
For other genres, I very much appreciated @Mike_O_Neill ´s systematic approach of boxset classification and implications on ideal browsing. Ignoring large classical and early Jazz boxsets, for pop, rock, electronic and modern jazz I mainly see the following typical examples:
- Sampler albums consisting of singles/tracks, usually by a large number of different artists, unrelated to existing album releases, like “100 best jazz tracks”
- deluxe editions of one album, enriched with lots of bonus tracks, live CDs, alternate versions of the same album, like the Robert Fripp example shown in another thread, typically 30-200 tracks
- anthologies and multi-album retrospective sets of a single artist (like Beatles Mono, “complete recordings of…”, Pineapple thief box which I mentioned)
Is there any structurally different type of boxset common, which I have forgotten (Classical aside)? If yes, an example would be nice. So my main question would be:
As roon is a multi-dimensional library browsing tool, centered on artists´, composers´ and album pages, not particularly a hierarchical database for a vast library, I was wondering what is the exact use case of box set management as you imagine it? How do you expecting roon offering browsing tools which would let you see and find what you want to find, but currently cannot?
Could you show this example pls? I still imagine something that can easily be broken down to the individual album releases, either via tagging, or the ´Fix group tracking´ option. That would mean the sampler artwork is lost, and the sampler itself will not appear under album overview. How much would you miss these two aspects?
Coincidentally, I have a boxset which is just that, and I have it in the library twofold (for the specific reason that it includes 2 different mixes, so I split the original 1970s mixes into album releases, and left the modern remixes as a box set “The Asylum albums”)
For other boxsets containing additional bonus tracks, live albums and alike, which are not part of original releases, I split away the albums which I would like to see as a separated release assigned to their original release date, plus a ´rest of the rest´ boxset containing the bonus tracks. That worked fairly well with Beatles, Pink Floyd boxes and alike.
Would that be a viable solution here?
Discogs?
Musicbrainz has a lot of artwork. That’s usually where I look first.
Such as complex issue since you rightly point out that there are so many different types of “boxset” - there is no single model. And there are no metadata standard that cover it. So we all have our own ways of dealing with it that require manual tagging. I’m mostly a rock and jazz guy (no classical), and these are the different varieties I see and how I deal with them:
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A collection of discrete albums from an artist’s back catalog, no bonus tracks. Ex: Led Zeppelin, The Complete Studio Recordings (aka, “the cube”). Contains all their studio albums. I just rip each individually and tack on [The Complete Studio Recordings] in the folder name and title so that Roon picks that up. Each shows up as a separate album in Roon, but at least I can tell where they came from vs. other versions.
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Collection of back catalog albums with additional discs of bonus tracks. Ex: David Bowie, Five Years. I rip each of the albums individually (with Five Years in brackets as above), and then the two bonus discs are ripped as the album Five Years. They all show up separately, but again, at least I know where they came from and there’s a separate entry for the box set with the credits and overview. I did The Beatles Mono in the same fashion, i.e. each album is separate, and a “mono masters” album
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A collection of a single album plus additional bonus tracks, live shows, etc. Ex: The Who, Who are You. I use the Work and Part tags and tell Roon to use the file tags for multi-part compositions. This will give a single “album”, with multi-part compositions for “2025 Mix”, the “Original Mix”, the “Sessions and Demos”, and the “Shepperton 1977” live show. These work well since the compositions can span across or within discs.
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A collection of live concerts, some that span multiple discs and/or start within a disc. Ex: Bob Dylan, The 1974 Recordings: 27 discs, multiple live shows. I put them all together in one album preserving the disc/track metadata, and add Work/Part for the names of each show so that each show is a composition in Roon. Works great, especially if you want to just select one show to play, just play the composition.
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I do the metadata and cover art for my box sets mainly by myself carefully with mp3Tag and the Roon metadata script, in which developement I was envolved. But if Musicbrainz does not provide data I do it completely manually with mp3Tag including the custom tags for Roon.
I do this mainly because I want to be independent from a media player. It is some kind of an invest in the future - a collection with clean metadata.
So I see no problem why Roon Labs should not give us more flexibility for box set handling in general independently of an existance of metadata.
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Thanks ! That gives me a few good idea how to fix issues with boxsets exactly like those 
so far I use the folder structure to navigate through them.
But it would be cool if roon could recognize them as a boxset without jumping through hoops.
Same for Blu-ray multichannel and atmos SDE. Sometimes it’s a major undertaking to add those to Roon without spending a afternoon tagging everything.
Those things could/should improve a lot since roon was sold to Harman. It’s not a „community project „ anymore.
Also support for SACD iso / mkv / mka please.
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I think the various workarounds above show what a complex problem this is , even if you follow my suggestions above it still wouldn’t cover all bases
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‘Just’?
Arguably the most profound music ever written 
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wouldn’t this be nice (especially if the overall box artwork was the “Box”) This is JRiver but you can get 90% with a Roon Tag
the who and Bowie examples I would personally leaves as a single album , as you say what do you do with Bonus Tracks. They are not that big to navigate.
An interesting approach for Dylan though
In the classical context many CD’s in big boxes are from LP’s ie 45 min packed out to 70 minutes which makes them differnt from the orgnal release.
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fortunately we are talking organization not musical content
I spent a quiet afternoon yesterday with Violin Sonatas and Piano Trios 
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