Wrong playing artist displayed from DJ-Mix/compilation

Hello Support,
can I please get feedback on this issue?

Meanwhile I checked and compared further compilations in my Roon library with the info on the AllMusic website. Conclusion: The data provided by AllMusic is --sorry I have to say this-- of very bad quality. Here is another example with missing/bad data: Sander Kleinenberg ‎– Everybody

Here is the correct Compilation/Artist info:

This is what Allmusic/Roon shows for Disc 1:

This is just one of many more examples I have in my Library. Strangely enough, these faulty compilations are correctly tagged when I check the same compilation in my iTunes, mp3tag, Jriver MC etc. See:

Best,
Thomas

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@freelancr : I am glad more people are realizing the issues there are with the providers and my cases are not absolutely rare edge cases which I was told yesterday by other forum members. You really don’t find many mix compilations that get it really right. Did you compare them to discogs or only the one? I am sure discogs gets it right in far more cases and also has richer information in a lot of cases, right?

Although many of the mix-compilations are identified but on a more detailed look there are artists/performers missing in a lot of tracks then and you have only the track name in your tracklist then.

We will be loosening up our handling of track artists in the next release. Basically, we will no longer be merging negative information (such as “this track has no primary artists”) that comes from our metadata sources, so if your track has a trackartist tag and our sources provide no primary artist, you’ll see the trackartist tag in the UI. Same for the track composer tag.

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Now this is really great!

@brian
thanks for your reply. That should fix the problem.

@Machine
I checked many compilations in my library. A lot of them are not correctly tagged.
Discogs is almost always right. When importung a new album I use Discogs and the Album/CD sleeve to compare metadata to correct faulty imports from itunes or Jriver (their metadata provider isn’t that good either).

Discogs has the best metadata for my needs, because it is powered by large user/contributer base. Other metadata providers have only their payed staff. Therefore their QA capabilities are rather limited.

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This is exactly my point of view and my experience also. The difference in our workflow is just that I use a customizable discogs tagger and get the information directly from them via API. Track and file names I do at the ripping process already but then cross-check with discogs.

I think this is the point, the users entering their data might care more and there are also a lot of “reviewers” as you said. For my needs I also prefer Discogs over MusicBrainz but that might change with other collections, I don’t know.
What I really love at Discogs is the many releases they have on an album basis/master release AND good data.
I must admit that for some releases there is also only pretty much basic data but often there is more rich data in the release of another country or another year which you can use then. I then just grab the informations from the release with the richest data (of course only if it is an equivalent release and not another edition or remaster) and then just edit catalog number and label etc. needed to fit to my own release.

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And if you have releases where there is really ONLY basic information I found that either with other providers the release is not found at all or there are the same just basic informations there. At least often.

With the new build 29 the album metadata is much better. That’s really great.

But one issue still remains. Let’s take the DJ-Mix Compilation “Everybody”, mixed by Sander Kleinenberg, again as an example. Any track I play looks like this:

for the whole mix “Sander Kleinenberg” is scrobbled to last.fm as the artist of each track. Which is of course wrong.

"Sander Kleinenberg is only tagged as the “Album Artist”(because he is the Albums’ DJ/mixer) which works fine in other music players.

Can you please fix this? Some option like scrobble only “Artist” and not “Album Artist”?

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I had the same problem, and I noticed that in the transport it shows the name of the album artist, separated by a comma from the name of the artist (in the image above: Sander Kleinenberg, Pig & Dan – it should say only Pig & Dan). Maybe that’s why the scrobbles are still wrong.

Cheers

S

There’s a big problem that I don’t like if the Mixing Artist is tagged as the Album Artist. This is nowhere consistent at all done, not even at discogs which is really good at mixing albums as some (many) of you know. In many albums, especially where the Mixing Artist is a well known artist, he’s taken as the Album Artist. But there are also a lot of good mixing albums out there where the Album Artist is “Various Artists” and there are just credits to the mixing artist.
That’s why I switched to handling all mixing albums as Various Artists for the Album Artist, so it is consistent with mixing albums where the Mixing Artist is not known. And I put a custom tag DJMIXER in my tracks and pull that info from discogs or sometimes enter it myself.
I hope we’ll get a solution for this also in the future. I cannot wait until Roon releases the version(s) they promised for people with already highly groomed metadata. I hope that will solve a lot of my problems.

What is a lot better now is that the performers/artists are taken from the tags if there are none from the metadata provider as @freelancr already mentioned… Looks way better

Hey guys – I put a ticket in our bug tracker for the scrobbling issue a few weeks ago, but it hasn’t been a prioritized. I just bumped the status based on this feedback, so hopefully we get to it real soon.

I’m optimistic we’ll be able to get the scrobbling right, but the transport display is actually by design. We only show “Various Artists” down there if we know absolutely nothing else about the track (so you shouldn’t ever see Various Artists, Pig & Dan), but scrobbles aside, I’m not sure I agree that “Sander Kleinenberg, Pig & Dan” is wrong.

To me, this is important contextual information about what album you’re playing, and who compiled and mixed it. Just like scrobbling only Sander Kleinenberg is wrong, to me, displaying on Pig & Dan seems wrong.

This may be a matter of taste, and I may put more stock in the DJ/compiler than most. Personally, if I’m listening to a DJ mix, I want both pieces of information in the transport – who made the song, and who made the album. As long as my track plays are being accurately logged, and the data is good, that’s my preference, but interested to know if you guys feel differently.

Thanks as always for the feedback guys!

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So @mike : Are you always expecting the DJ mixer as Album Artist? Because this brings problems to my highly groomed metadata because of the above mentioned facts/reasons. They’re all “Various Artists” Albums. Maybe there will be a solution to this in one of your coming releases?

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@brian : I can see this works with trackartist tags but what about composers? In an unidentified album for instance I can see a lot of composers of my tags in the album credits, but not in the track credits.
EDIT I can see it in the track credits but not in the tracklist. Is the composer only displayed in the track credits and not in the list? I mean this is enough just want to know if everything works as it should.

I had a deeper look now and sometimes you show the composer with “Composed by” in the tracklist, sometimes not, even inside the same release. Composer tags are there in all of them and if you look in the track credits they are there in all the tracks. How is it decided to display or not?

I am completely d’accord with you here. I have no problem if it shows “Sander Kleinenberg, Pig & Dan”. But the scrobbling should be with the right artist “Pig & Dan” and not “Sander Kleinenberg”.

Composer tags are there in all of them and if you look in the track credits they are there in all the tracks. How is it decided to display or not?

It depends on an internal metric of interestingness and some contextual information from the album genres (Classical/Jazz/Vocal albums are more likely to show composer credits than other genres).

We use interestingness metrics to govern many aspects of composer and work display because if we showed them in every situation where we have data (keep in mind–every track with a composer credit is conceptually a performance of a composition by that composer), the result would be tedious and verbose.

We’ve tried to strike a balance that displays the information when it’s most relevant and keeps it out of your face (in places like the credits popup) otherwise.

I’m 100% sure we will iterate on this scheme many times before it becomes stable long term. I think there’s a little bit too much magic in it right now.

Album artist facilitates the identification, but it’s only one part of the process. I think the closer you are to how the album was “officially” released the better we’ll do, but this stuff is ambiguous all over the place, and I agree with you that the data out there is inconsistent.

Ultimately, I think “compilation” should just be a flag you can focus on, as opposed to using album artist to denote this class of albums. If an album was released under a DJs name, I personally want it sorted that way, but still, “Various Artists” isn’t wrong.

We’ll address those kinds of subjective display questions with editing.

@mike : Thanks! As you said I think it’s just all about personal preference here. Hopefully we can display tags like DJMIXER in the future somehow in a global way for the album… This will make it easier to handle that all under “Various artists”. Otherwise this would have to be split again in albums where you know the DJ mixer and put him/she as Album artist and leave the rest under “Various artists”

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Hi! Sorry for dragging up an old thread here, but this seems to still be a problem so I wanted to bring it back up in the spotlight.

Right now I’m playing Regis - Manbait, the collection of Regis best work both as a producer and remixer, he is listed as album artist on all tracks, but the performing artist changes when there is is remix and not just his original work. Regis is the first artist displayed in the transport area, and therefore “main” artist, and that seems wrong. It also says Performed by Regis, when it is actually performed by another artist, but remixed by Regis. Is there a fix to this?

I keep looking up this and similar threads to see if there are any solutions to these issues… as dj compilations are still a mess in Roon. I try to retag the albums I play the most, where I add the DJ under credits with the weird credit: “Mix-DJ” to keep it out of the way but still beeing able to search it, but it’s a crappy solution after all these years.