A bouquet of flowers to the Roon development team

Feedback Feature Suggestions
21

I guess I’m one of those weird people who would be perfectly content to use Roon without all the “rich metadata” and (especially) shuffle and radio features :wink:

In fact, I have Roon configured to use only my own metadata, including album title, track, artist, album artist, date, et al. It’s rare that I actually look at the album notes, artist profiles, etc., and I certainly wouldn’t miss them if they were gone - for most of my albums, they don’t exist now!

Personally, I just like the look / feel of the interface and the way it lets me integrate all my music (my iTunes library, my DSD, and my multichannel audio files) into one consistent interface, to say nothing of Tidal integration).

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22

That is the problem. We Foobar, MediaMonkey or JRiver users will lose the immense effort (=value) of our personal collections if switching totally to Roon. Roon is good for starters or for discovery. As an example: How can I save my 80k track ratings with Roon? How can I use them with Roon’s Focus?

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23

Yes exactly! I have track and album ratings I would love to import into Roon. And anything I put into Roon I would like to be able to export back out.

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24

You miss the point entirely, if you have decent metadata in your tags you can have the same experience using that. Roon’s navigation is dependent on good metadata, not good metadata sourced by Roon.

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25

What I am missing in Roon is 20 years of hard personal collection “work”. Roon is not personal, if you don’t start from scratch. Roon is the collection of someone else. And there it is great. No doubt. If we only could combine both worlds…

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26

Someone’s missing it. No one is criticizing Roon for what it is.

My point is to say that to make Roon as good for me as Foobar was in the past, it takes time to groom my collection. Based on past grooming, we’re talking dozens or hundreds of hours over many weekends.

Just look at how long it takes to get Roon to recognize an album: I have about 800 unidentified albums in my collection; at approximately 3-5 minutes per album to get those identified, we’re talking minimum 40 hours of work. And that’s just on album identification; doesn’t address custom tags, designating favorites, thumbs up or down, artist photos I source, or designating preferred versions of a title to listen to.

(1) My metatags embedded in my media files, or the folder container for the album, already contain all of that info. It would be great to be able to leverage that without re-inputting it. (Roon only recognizes standard tag fields).

(2) Since I cannot do #1, I have to re-groom the collection within Roon. But then I lose it if I am not using Roon.

Those are the concerns. I’m just confused as to why anyone would not want such functionality. I can see that someone might have a different feature they want as a priority, but why argue against it?

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27

If the metadata is there, and readable by Roon, then it should not be necessary to re-input it. If you have so many albums that have not been identified, then this may point to a deeper issue with the fact that Roon can’t make sense of the metadata or folder structure that you have given it to deal with.

It’s certainly true that with multiple reissues of albums, Roon may need assistance in identifying the correct one, and in some cases, Roon will draw a blank, in which case it should use the metadata that is already contained in the tracks.

I know from my own modest collection that, as a result of years of grooming my metadata before Roon came along, most of my albums were successfully identified. A small minority needed some fine tuning, and wherever possible I did that using my third party metadata editor of choice, rather than using Roon. That way I know that if Roon ever does go away, that metadata will remain to be used by the next greatest album manager since sliced bread.

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28

I’ve been beating that drum for weeks. The metadata is not in standard metatags. It’s in custom tags I created so that my collection would be portable from software to software, as long as that software supports custom tags, which Foobar, JRiver, and MediaMonkey (among others) do.

Roon clearly reads those tags and they are in the Roon database, but Roon does not offer any means of utilizing that information. If I could do that, I’d put the necessary info into files and not need to get it back out of Roon. We just need one or the other. What I don’t want to do is put all that effort into Roon alone and never be able to port it back out.

29

That part we all get and understand, and nobody’s arguing against it, we’re just pointing out that Roon doesn’t need access to it’s metadata sources to provide much of the same if it’s in your tags. Your custom tags, as you say, are another story.

30

Fair enough. So if Roon boots without an Internet connection, then at least it will work with our standard data. Much better than not working, albeit not ideal either, and I suspect I’d migrate from Roon if it no longer had access to any Roon provided data.

31

Before I address your points directly, some of the higher-level view…

These are areas that we’ve worked on intensively over the past two years, generally in two areas:

  • By making export functionality more complete
  • By expanding support for reading metadata from file tags, and controlling how that data is used.

These go hand-in-hand, but for a serious metadata groomer, the second is the more important of the two. If you are interested in durability/portability, lean towards fixing how things show up in Roon by working on the directory structure or file tags using external editors. With respect to many of your concerns it is possible to solve problems this way and keep those changes outside of Roon’s database.

It’s possible to control how tracks are clumped into albums via directory structure. It’s also possible to tweak file tags on disk in order to motivate certain identification results, multi-part work grouping, and many other aspects. In some cases it’s necessary to use “prefer file data” features in Roon in order to get your data to “show through”. By approaching it this way, you create durability implicitly.

From our perspective, file tags are not a good representation for music metadata. They have limited expressive power, inconsistent capabilities from one file format to the next, and wildly varying common usage. It’s possible to create a certain familiar, lowest-common-denominator experience from file tags, but that’s about it. So for us, tags will continue to be there for interoperability–something that we handle at import/export boundaries, not the main place where the data lives.

We built Roon in large part because we are believers in automated metadata grooming. In some ways, thinking about how work done in Roon will “port” back to software built around the old paradigm is kind of like asking how to play CD’s on a phonograph. Having lived with automatic grooming systems for as long as I have, I can’t imagine going back to the old way. I assume that anything that would compel me to switch from Roon would do this stuff even better than we do, and that I would care about the time I have invested into file tags even less than I do now. :). In other words, our mission is not to trap your effort, it’s to minimize it.

Our database format is closed because we require much more expressive power than file tags can provide, and because we need the freedom to evolve the schema and database implementation over time. If there were a third party ecosystem reading/writing/understanding that schema, every decision we made would be set in stone from the moment some 3rd party depended on it. It would not be a healthy environment for growing a product.

Onto your core points:

To the point: I believe that any collection grooming work needs to be exportable with the media.

I agree with you–to the extent that well-established conventions exist, and meaningful portability to other software results.

There are limited options for this, and the obvious one to me is creating custom metatag fields that can hold multiple values - “Tags” is the obvious one,

Exporting “Tags” is a no-brainer, I agree. We have a work item in the queue to go through and support export of as much data as possible. This will be part of it.

but there is actually quite a substantial amount of media information that the user has to correct/input to get Roon working perfectly, and the vast majority could easily be stored in custom metadata embedded in the media files.

As far as I am aware, ideas like choosing preferred versions + identifying albums (the other two examples you mentioned) do not map in a straightforward way onto existing tagging conventions or other software–what are you thinking we would do here?

There are some straightforward things we could export (like LABEL and CATALOGNO) which would allow us to express the idea of an identification in a way that was not so tied to identifiers private to our world.

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32

I think that is not necessarily true. There are many media players that will work indefinitely if you ‘froze’ them at any given point in time. Take Foobar2000 for example. So long as you have a machine that runs windows (up to windows 10), with music stored on harddisc. It will work as long as the hardware continues to work. I think the same would be true of JRiver and many others.

Roon’s ‘Achilles heel’ is that it will require internet access for its rich experience for users, and the danger is that those serving up that rich information will cease providing it if Roon goes belly up.

33

that’s not correct. If you define a custom tag field in JRiver and set it to “save in tags” it will be written to your file as metadata tags. I can read and modify every custom tag I use in JRiver in MP3Tag for example.

Whether any other library management software will be able to read and use those tags is a different story, but I think most will.

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34

@brian thanks a lot for your comment. However, I am still trying to understand the interaction between Roon’s database and the user’s metadata. My problem is that it seems for example impossible to me to control work grouping behaviour with my metadata once the album is identified by Roon. I have a big library of classical music an the albums that are not identified usually get a very consistent work grouping whereas the identified albums quite often present either completely wrong metadata or wrongly grouped works.
This would not be a terribly big deal if “prefer file tags” would allow to override that. So what I am doing for those albums is “de-identifying” them in order to get my metadata right… That can’t be the solution. The “prefer file tags” seem to work for the standard tags but not for the custom tags like WORK, PART etc. that Roon offers for mapping. I’m confused about that.

Well I am not…:slight_smile: At least for classical. Talk about loclization, for example. And I am not thinking about GUI translations but metadata translations. Being a krauty german I’d like to have my german composers works in german, for example… I do not believe that any metadata provider would put effort into that direction, because for the majority of users it is just about song titles and artist names (I am simplifying a bit here).
I do understand that you can’t please everybody, but that’s one big argment for me to keep all my custom tags maintained. I’m just sorry, that I can’t use or map them properly at all. I even have reviews maintained in my tags that I’d love to display instead of the often lousy ones the 3rd party data is giving me…:wink:

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35

I agree with you and with the OP. I have the same fears that all this work will have come to naught. You guys who know all the audio patter and the computerese - you sometimes forget that those words are little better than honks because so many of them have little mnemonic associations (Turning on high gain is unlike setting an equalizer or, with some music, just turning up the volume, how?) Some people who aren’t stupid were not born with the innate understanding of x

For me it was def something to do. I became disabled and housebound in 2013 for 3 years and partially am still. I decided to back up all my mostly classical CDs, which are so many amongst my possessions they have their own bedroom with a private entrance. I spent I don’t know how many months ripping around 2000 classical cds and box sets.

Plus I’m such a librarian at heart, I had to get every track with maximum available information, so I had to acquire a sense of how things are spelled in Italian, German French, and English English without actually learning those languages as well as I could. Or Japonese.

A lot of this also included redoing wrongly assigned tags by whatever SE iTunes uses and sometimes creating metadata from scratch for albums that are too obscure (they don’t have a drummer) to match with anything there. I often would be up all night pecking out umlauts over words in every one of 47 - 170 tracks on hundreds of box sets. So when Roon came into my life and told me all that was now under different management, and I would have to learn a rather complicated new system, I balked at first.

But the GUI is so lovely and relaxing with the dark background, and there were all those reviews, and there was a 24-bit lossless library growing like a firstborn son in my iTunes music folder doing nothing. So I bit the bullet.

And I get along, though I still have little success usually when I am called on to to explain accurately to a friend what Roon even is, much less why I’d be paying a substantial fee to use it for a year (“it’s not a media player; it’s uh… uh… uh, it’s a database…”). But so what. It’s so … everything I’ve been waiting for since that dread day when the new file format, MP3 was announced (“The emperor has no clothes! Don’t you know that lossless and lossy files sound exactly the same??? that it has been scientifically proven that the human ear cannot discern the difference between mp3s and lossless files???” Here listen to this YES track…").

But it’s a bitch to use if your soul doesn’t thrill to decimal systems and filling envelopes. Why, for instance do I have to click 3 times and go through 3 windows to “hide” an album? I have all 55 volumes of Suzuki’s Bach Church Cantatas. Do you know how many copies there are of each volume, or that I don’t have it all memorized for 2500 albums and counting? Why can’t there just be a “HIDE” link and an “EDIT TAGS” link, or an IDENTIFY ALBUM" link? why do you have to know your way around string theory to find the right algebraic sets when faced with a new task? And why does the Roon folder only take up a few hundred gigabytes? And yes, if Roon and or I ever separate for whatever reason, how will I feel about our little 4 or 5 year fling?

And there are so many other little annoyances, as one would expect from people with the audacity to do such a huge thing that I use every day of my life to deliver to to refuge and that oasis that music is in this sorrowful, insane world. So anyway, I love it too. Thanks for giving me the impetus to get all that off my chest.

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36

You see that’s really my point. Tags are really only guaranteed for the originating program. A fur ball I got into in the WAV vs. FLAC go around. There is no ISO committee that specifies how one’s tags are to be interpreted.:slight_smile:

You left out an important part of the “save in tags”. The full message is “save in tags (when possible)”.

From JRiver’s Wiki (which, BTW, is terrible) -
"For many file types, Media Center can also save the Library Fields into the tags within the file on disk. These tags are then available for use by other programs that support the specific file types, and can serve as a backup in case your Media Center Library is damaged or lost. The tags supported by a given file type are file type-specific, but there is often commonality or overlap in various media or file formats. Media Center helps manage this by automatically mapping its own Fields to essentially similar tags with different names in the various standard tagging formats.

For more information on tag/metadata specifications for file formats, refer to the following external websites:

MP3: id3.org
Ogg Vorbis/FLAC: xiph.org
EXIF/TIFF: EXIF (on Wikipedia), or this handy reference guide"

So really, yes you can save tags, but there’s no guarantee they will be useful in other programs.

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37

The original poster wanted a guarantee that any work he does will be good 20 years from now. If, as he states, he has things from 30 years ago that he still uses, then it’s not software. I’ve got a t-shirt that’s 20 years old, but that’s it. Readability of CDs are only good for about 20 years. Five years is an eternity in this context.

As far as an 'Achille’s heel", what would you have Roon development do? They can’t guarantee the future availability of 3rd party supplies.

Truthfully, I don’t understand the point of the majority of posts in this topic.

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38

you are, of course correct. I just wanted to point out that it is not necessarily impossible to write those tags to file and use them elsewhere.

you are, of course, also right here :smiley:. Roon shouldn’t do the same mistake, i.e. let the forum stand for the software’s documentation. Having said that, there is room for improvement fro Roon here, too. It’s always hard to stay up to speed with documentation.

39

I think this states my point in an extreme manner to undermine the logic. No one can guarantee anything regarding 20 years from now. What I can say is that if Roon development stopped today without implementing what I suggest, that guarantees that I could not leverage or benefit from the work I do within Roon should I stop using Roon, or Roon stop working. [quote=“Slim_Fishguttz, post:37, topic:24934”]

If, as he states, he has things from 30 years ago that he still uses, then it’s not software.
[/quote]

No it;s not software but no one said it was - but I do have media files that I captured in digital format in the 1990s and have always been diligent about organizing and tagging in a way that most media software can recognize and organize around. My point is that I do not want to have to give that up or do twice as much work to make it work well within Roon and still have that software-neutral grooming being done.

Perhaps, then, you don’t organize your media as those others who are posting here. That’s fine, but it doesn’t mean we are not making a logical or useful point.

40

Have I misquoted you?

My mistake - what I should have said was “that it wasn’t software or software related”.

Really, what would you have the developers do? I guess you and others want them to write a utility that would somehow, magically, export any user tags/ metadata/customization to an external file and then guarantee that another Roon written utility would be able to massage that file so that it would be guaranteed to import into any other present or future media server.