Unfortunately, the Gesualdo case is far more representative of what I see going on in my Roon overall.
Btw. I note on the composer pages too only the “Overview” and “Compositions” rubrics. I take it that the touted “Discography” feature is only intended to work for those with streaming service subscriptions and does not refer to local collections, hence “Composed By”, which would be fine if it worked.
I’ve been looking at this problem again in the hope of finding some tweak that would coax Roon into displaying “Composed by” albums completely/correctly. So far no luck on that. But there is a hint that this is an interface/display rather than a database problem, which would be consistent with the major change in 1.8 and the apparent source of the major problems (crashes, etc.) reported with the release so far. When in the “Composers” window I select a composer, I see a brief flash of album-cover sized grey squares across the screen, as if Roon were about to display a row of “Composed by” albums, then it disappears and the composer screen appears without any “Composed by” element. Arguing against that hypothesis, however, is the fact that the problem is not platform specific. I see it both on the Windows 7 machine I use to manage the Nucleus+ and the Android tablet I use for playback control in my listening room.
In the process of that further exploration it seems that Haydn is the only one of the 357 Classical Composers represented in my collection that seems to be displaying “Composed By” correctly.
Hi @Little_Wurlitzer, I can’t guarantee that this will help, but in dealing with those kinds of composition problems in Roon I’ve often found that clicking the “File” radio button for “Multi-part composition grouping” in the album editor will sometimes jog Roon into behaving correctly. Just make sure you have your “WORK” and “PART” tags in order.
@Little_Wurlitzer, even with single track songs/tunes, this trick has worked for me in the past to coax Roon into recognizing different performances of the composition as such:
For each track concerned
Set the WORK tag to be the same as the TITLE tag;
Make sure that COMPOSER tag is is correctly filled in.
For the albums containing those tracks, Set “Multi-part composition grouping” to “File”.
Again, I can’t guarantee it will work for you, but I’d suggest giving it a try.
Hi, @WillK , thank you for your posts. Could you, please, do all albums which are on your screenshot (Albums browser focused on Carlo Gesualdo) have “Identified” status, or some of them do not? Am I right that you are not using any streaming platforms?
As far as I know, all the Gesualdo albums are identified (that is, I see no indications that any are unidentified - with the 1.8 interface changes, I’m not sure how “unidentified” would show up anymore if not on the main album screen).
I assume “strain” is a typo for “strange” platforms and no, I’m not running any. The core is on a nucleus+ & my displays are either Windows 7 PC for management or Android tablet for playback control and the problem appears in both displays.
In my book, the only “Classical” composers represented in my collection who are strictly speaking classical composers are Haydn, Herschel, and Mozart. These are the only three in my collection whose compositions are indicated as being “Classical” in the GENRE tag of my source files. All other loosely speaking “Classical” composers in my database write compositions that are are either “Early”, “Renaissance”, “Baroque”, “Romantic”, or “Modern” as far as the GENRE tag of the source files is concerned. (Gesualdo, for example, writes “Renaissance” compositions.) All of these composers, however, regardless of the GENRE tag in the sources for their compositions, are designated as “Is Classical Composer: Yes” in the composer edit fields of my database.
I just checked my database again and sure enough, Haydn, Herschel, and Mozart seem to be the only composers in my collection for whom the “Composed By” display seems to be working properly. I will do some experimentation in the morning with my file GENRE tags in the morning to explore this hypothesis. If you have a way to check, could you look into whether the Roon is not only using the “Is Classical Composer” checkbox in constructing “Composed By”, but also the GENRE tags of the pertinent compositions? In my opinion doing the former is fine, doing the latter is not (ref: the note on Roon imposing Genres on us above).
I made a little experiment this AM to test my hypothesis about Roon’s dependence on having “Classical” in the GENRE tag when it constructs the “Composed By” display.
Here is a screenshot of the Composer display for Hildegard von Bingen with the GENRE tag of the relevant source files marked “Early”, as has always been in my collection:
As you can see, there are no “Composed By” albums, even though I know one exists in my collection (additionally, Roon hasn’t blown up the cameo to create a background either).
Then I changed the GENRE tag in all of my source files for compositions by Hildegard von Bingen to “Classical” and had a look at her composer page again:
Bingo! Roon is obviously dependent on finding a GENRE:Classical tag in the source files for a composer in constructing (or not) the Composed by display for a given composer. (Note too that in this case the cameo has been blown up into a background too.)
I’m sure that both you at Roon and I will want to give this situation some more thought, but for starters I’ll note that: there is an obvious inconsistency and incompatibility between an Import setting that allows “Use genres from Roon’s metadabase: No” and “Use genres extracted from file tags: Yes” and the implicit requirement that files be tagged with GENRE:Classical in order for the “Composed By” display to be constructed properly. My immediate preference of course would of course be for Roon to depend on “IS CLASSICAL COMPOSER: Yes” and jettison scanning the source files for the GENRE:Classical tag.
Hello @Ivan, Further note on genre mappings and hierarchy. I was wondering whether genre mappings might solve my problem. They won’t. However, making my “Classical” genres subgenres of Roon’s Classical genre gives me 90% of a workaround – with a bit of additional incovenience when looking for a genre in the Genres display. All that said, I still don’t understand why Roon is looking at file GENRE tags when constructing “Composed By” in the first place.
Hi, @WillK , thank you fo this detailed description of the issue. I’m sorry to hear that even after assigning “Classical” genre you are still not seeing the expected result on these artists details pages. Nevertheless, I should point out, that we have an open issue with similar symptoms, which or dev team is working on. I hope that they will be able to find a solution for this soon.
Thanks for your message. Please note that I DO HAVE A WAY TO MAKE “Composed By” WORK to display all albums containing the works of a particular composer by using the genre editor to make my genres subgenres of Roon’s “Classical”. Here is the “Composed By” screen for Gesualdo that I now see:
That said, there are two questions I would very much like to know the answers to:
Why is Roon checking source file GENRE tags when building the “Composed By” display? I would think an inspection of the COMPOSER tag and a check of the “IS CLASSICAL COMPOSER?” value in Roon would suffice.
This problem and my encounter with genres I don’t use now infesting my Genres screen make me wonder if a fixed genre scheme is creeping back into Roon. See Roon 1.8 problem: Has Roon decided to impose a genre scheme on users again? Or perhaps a fixed genre sheme has always been there and I’ve just never run into it head-on before. Is that the case?
Here is another example where Composed By does not work as I expect.
tl;dr If the composer appears in any other tag of the work, the work does not appear under Composed By.
The album
And the album does not appear under composed by. File tags are fine
I edit the credits and remove Rolf Wallin from Liner Notes and Recording Producer
Now this album appears under Composed By
