New database with old problems

I have imported my library files into a new Roon ROCK installation.
Those files were previously on a Win NUC but in a Roon database.
When importing I see that Genres are messed up: French is now a sub-category of “Western European Traditions” and Indian is a sub-category of “Indian Subcontinent Traditions” and both of those are sub-categories of “International”.

I just want a flat Genre structure where French and Indian are all on the same level as Italian Brasilian, Rock etc.
Roon is set to read Genre from file tags only, which it is doing but it is then imposing Roon’s genre hierarchy for these two genres. I need that to stop and give me back the flat Genre structure I had before.

Any ideas are welcome.
Thank you. Peter

Hi @Peter_Davies1 ----- Thank you for the report and sharing this observation you have made with us. The feedback is appreciated!

Moving forward, to help us understand what could be causing this behavior to occur, may I very kindly ask you for the following information:

  • Please provide a brief but accurate description of your current setup using this link as a guide. I want to have a more complete understanding of what your current setup looks like.

  • In your post you mentioned the following:

    “I have imported my library files into a new Roon ROCK installation. Those files were previously on a Win NUC but in a Roon database.”

    • Did you migrate your Roon core to completely new machine or was the OS just changed (Win - > ROCK)? If it is the former, please describe how you went about this process.

    • Please provide further insight into what you are referring to when you mentioned that the files were previously “in a Roon database”.

-Eric

Dear Eric

Thank you for such a prompt response to my vague complaint. I will try to be more specific below.

Setup
New installation of ROCK on new NUC7i3 with 267GB m.2 and 16GB RAM
BIOS was updated before installation
External USB 3.0 4TP WD drive with 100,000 FLAC library
NUC is using WiFi to connect to network for control and remote using iPad

Library
When I refer to ‘library’ I refer to my collection of music files
When I refer to my library previously being in Roon database, I mean that this same library of files was previously in a different Roon installation (Win10 NUC).
I have had multiple licenses since Roon launched
This is to say that I am familiar with Roon (but not expert) and I am very familiar with how my library should look in Roon.

Genre
I am one of the vocal minority for whom Genre IS THE DOMINANT attribute of my library. It is the primary selection when browsing and it is something that I groom carefully when adding to the library.
What I have been able to achieve with Roon is to have a completely flat structure with 27 Genres, some of which have few files others hold the majority of my collection.
What I do not want is any influence from Roon’s Genres – I do not want to know they exist.
So, I have the data loading set to use file tags (for pretty much everything) so that I see what I created with no blurring.
In this new installation, I see that French and Indian genres are presented within the hierarchy of Roon: Western European Traditions and Indian Subcontinent Traditions. Curiously my Italian genre is shown stand-alone and NOT within Western European Traditions.

What I want to achieve is to remove French and Indian from their Roon genre hierarchies and return them to a flat structure.

Is that complete?

Thank you very much for your kind assistance,
Peter

Hi Peter, if what you want is to turn off all of Roon’s genres; you can do that in Settings, Library, Import settings, Click NO to “Use genres from Roon’s metadata database” and Click Yes to “Use genres extracted from file tags”. After a rescan of your library, Roon should only display your embedded file tag genres.

Thank you, Daniel.
I tried to say that I had done that when I said that I set Roon to use file tags.
This is my fifth time round with a new Roon installation so I have learned the obvious things.
In this case, all the Genres are my Genres, but the French and Indian are placed into a Roon hierarchy of Genres, while the others (such as Italian) are not Why just French and Italian, I do not know.
My problem is that I know Roon can load all of my Genres from file tags and place them in a flat organisation with no hierarchies but here I am with two being put into hierarchies that are Roon and not mine.
Here are my import settings:

Thank you for the follow up and the clarification @Peter_Davies1, both are very appreciated!

Continuing forward, I am going to be enabling diagnostics on your account to see if there is anything obvious occurring that could be causing this behavior to occur. What this action will do is the next time Roon is active on your core machine a diagnostics report containing set of your Roon logs will be automatically generated/uploaded directly to our servers. I will confirm when the report arrives so you know we have it.

Additionally, when you migrated to the new installation did you restore from a backup? I would assume all of your editing would be carried over during this process without any changes being made. Can you please also provide a screenshot of the “mistake” you are noticing in Roon in regard to “genres”.

-Eric

Hello Eric.
Thank you for your response.
I apologise for using ambiguous language about previous installations. No, I did a fresh install and re-loaded all the music files but I did not bring over the actual database itself.
I always feel that it is best to start from scratch on a new machine to see if anything shows up.
In this case it showed up that two Genres from the file tags are being treated differently.

I attach the screenshot showing the genres in Roon. There now appears a top-level genre called “International”, then two sub-genres “Western European Traditions” and “Indian Sub-continent Traditions”. The former then contains the Genre “French” and the latter the genre “Indian”. Is that clear?

The second screenshot shows how my Genres appear in MeadCenter.

Thank you for your kind assistance, Peter

Hi @Peter_Davies1 ----- Thank you for touching base with me and taking the time clarify that information for me, very appreciated!

Continuing forward, I did some searching around the community site to see if this behavior you are reporting was raised elsewhere and came across the following post by Mike in regard to the “genre display” in Roon here:

Out of curiosity have you tried testing with a backup yet? I understand wanting to start fresh on a new system to let things “settle in” , but, if everything was structured the way needed in the previous install why not bring that over?

-Eric

Thank you for your well-researched response, Eric.

The behavior for French and Indian is new in this installation as the previous installation was all flat.
Perhaps that was with a workaround, but I know that I cannot accept that Roon imposes its hierarchies on genre so that I cannot see them the way I want to see them. I thought we had all moved past these battles!
I no longer have access to the previous library. As I said, I do not migrate libraries so I do not keep them.

I am sorry to be back in the place of trying to justify why genre should be something that your clients have control over, based on our tags. I do not know any other place where Roon behaves that way so why with genre?

Peter

Eric
One week on and Roon has now added other Genre groupings:
Pop Rock (Roon) contains Alternative/Indie Rock (Roon) which contains my genre “Cocktail” which is big band, vocal jazz etc.
Easy Listening (Roon) now contains my genre “Lounge”.
Comedy/Spoken now includes my genre “Comedy”
Please come up with a solution that I see my Genres in a nice flat structure with no contribution by Roon.
Thank you. Peter

Hi @Peter_Davies1 ---- Thank you for the continued feedback and my apologies for the slow response here.

I had some time to discuss this report in further detail with Mike this morning and all of this should be possible with editing. However, it sounds like, and please do correct me if I am wrong, that you’d like to have the option to bulk edit genres, or possibly to have different defaults or editing features. If I’m understanding you correctly, I would recommend opening up a thread in the “feature request” section of the community site, so Mike and our dev team can gauge interest on this request alongside other suggestions made by our users. Thanks!

-Eric

Eric

I appear to NOT have been clear as to my request.

What I am asking for is that Roon allows a user to load their tag data for Genre without any additions, subtractions or replacements, including Genre hierarchies.

Roon now allows users to indicate that Genre tags should come from Roon (yes/no) and/or file tags (yes/no). This is a BIG advance over the early days when there was no option to read the file tags for Genre. However, this seemingly simple solution still imposes Roon-derived hierarchies of Genres. Those Roon-derived hierarchies are imposed no matter what the user has selected for the treatment of Genre, which is pretty contradictory! So, maybe we now need another switch that says do you want Roon Genre hierarchies or not?

I DO NOT need you to enable Roon to Bulk edit Genre tags: I have all those tools to hand, which is how I get the Genre tags into my library in the first place.
I DO NEED Roon to do what it implies: use Roon Genre or use File Genre - INCLUDING FOR THE HIERARCHY.

Is that clear? It is not a complicated problem, really.

Thank you for all the great work.
Peter

Hey Peter, we absolutely understand what you’re looking for here. The problem is that this isn’t really a support issue.

That’s why Eric is suggesting you open a Feature Request here – Support can help when something is not working as designed, but in this case you’re asking us to change the design. That’s absolutely fine, but it should be posted in Feature Requests so we can gauge interest and make decisions about the change you’re proposing.

As always Peter, we appreciate the feedback here. Thank you!