Why is roon creating so many duplicate artists?

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In almost every case in my library, roon finds a duplicate artist, usually an orchestra, choir or other ensemble. This is a very typical example:

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In order to delete the duplicate “Israel Philharmonic Orchestra”, I find myself routinely performing the manual step of removing the unwanted ‘primary artist’ credit which normally has no image or bio.

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Finally, I get what I expect:

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What is causing this? I would like to eliminate as many manual grooming steps as possible. Surely, roon is contextually aware that it has created a duplicate that makes no sense so that this very frequent and unnecessary step van be avoided?

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You can see that the two artists are NOT the same, from the fact that one has an image by its name, and the other not. This is essentially a metadata error, AFAICS.

Roon doesn’t just go on the basis of text: I believe there are artist IDs coming from the metadata service. And in this case there are two IDs when there should be one.

Just because an artist appears to have the same name, doesn’t mean it is the same artist. There are very many recording artists with the same name. That said, with Orchestra at the end, there are unlikely to be different artists… :wink:

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Hi Ludwig,

Yes, and that is how I distinguish them and why I routinely make the manual step of visual inspection and removing the one without an image. The question really is, if I am seeing a pattern, why cannot roon? And why cannot roon automate this unnecessary manual step?

I would say that in almost all cases it is some kind of ensemble (mostly an orchestra but also choirs, vocal ensembles, quartets etc.) where the name is identical but two ‘roles’ have been identified. Typically the roles are ‘orchestra’ and ‘primary artist’. I just remove the ‘primary artist’ because:

  1. The link does not work
  2. There is no picture
  3. There is no bio

but keep the ‘orchestra’ because

  1. There is a link that works
  2. There is a picture
  3. There is bio

So my question is, surely from the context roon can just as easily work out that duplicates are being caused by other logical combinations from the metadata suppliers, not just the obvious case of both having the same underlying identifying keys? I have the feeling this is ‘low hanging fruit’ compared with some of the other ‘smart’ choices roon makes. Maybe @joel can help explain here? A fix would really make a big difference. I find this is happening in almost every classical case.