To be honest, I’m content that Roon doesn’t touch the metadata of my Flac files. I’ve spent YEARS tagging and adding data to my 5000+ album library using external file taggers that are read correctly on all music apps. If an application decides to change the metadata on those albums, it will be dark days indeed.
2 Likes
[quote=“Blaine_Arnold, post:61, topic:24934, full:true”]
To be honest, I’m content that Roon doesn’t touch the metadata of my Flac files. [/quote]
Me too - I’ve been burned in the past by music players that fiddle about with my metadata without my consent.
One thing that seems to be often overlooked in these discussions is the feeling I have that Roon’s metadata model is much richer than the track-based metadata model that is achievable using ID3 tags. Even if Roon metadata is fully exportable as XML, using that to populate ID3 tags is likely to be a joyless exercise.
Well, I tried to change “a shot across the bow” to “a bouquet of flowers” but I can no longer edit the initial post or title.
Definitely don’t want it to happen without consent. That’s why I am suggesting it be part of the export function. HOWEVER, as discussed ad nauseum above, a preferred way of doing it is not to export the in-Roon media grooming, but rather to make Roon capable of Focusing on existing custom metatags embedded in media files. This way we can keep organizing and tagging as we always do, but then Roon actually leverages that so we can have the experience we want with all the benefits of Roon too. I just don’t want to have to do it all twice.
As stressed above in a number of posts, not asking for Roon’s metadata to be exportable. Only the USER INPUT data.
1 Like
Brian, I very, very much appreciate your thoughtful and detailed response, It’s a great testament to your company culture that you are engaged with your customers to such a degree. I mean, that happens in B2B but rarely in B2C to this degree.
Let me also clear the air by saying by no means was it my intent to imply Roon will fail or that you intend to change directions in a way that is unfair to the current user base. I base this on “anything can happen” and on the fact that Roon is as much a service as it is a piece of software and as such Roon would have to survive indefinitely with its current offering for the software to work just like it does now. And, given the valuable interactions with third party content like Tidal and your sources of metadata, I do not think permanence is a slam dunk in a way that makes me feel safe my efforts won’t some day be lost.
Your conversation about use cases won’t fizzle with me. I have years of work in custom tagging that I am committed to. That is not to say that I believe that ID3 tags are the end all and be all. If I thought that, Roon would have nothing to offer - on the contrary, I believe that Roon’s object oriented approach is wonderful and can greatly enhance my experience. But it doesn’t work to rely entirely on the software to tell me what I want to listen to, in the following sense. Here’s an ID3 tag from my collection:
Take a look at the last 5 tags. By using, for example, the filter functions in Foobar2000’s Columns UI plugin, I can select across these as well as the standard tags and eliminate what I don’t want to hear, and focus in on what I do want to hear, and then in effect to “instruct” Foobar to DJ for me from a wide selection of tracks that fit the profile of what I’ve filtered:
(1) BESTVERSION allows me to (a) listen only to the highest audio quality release of a title as well as (b) helping to avoid repeat songs from albums where I have 10-15 different release copies. Helps to balance out over-weighting of certain artists too. This is similar to your preferred version - I just have already done it myself across 5000+ albums.
(2) GROUP is an alternative to genre shuffling - much more targeted - and is similar to the relationships that Roon identifies for us - for example, if I want to listen to the Pixies, Frank Black, and the Breeders (these are all related to the Pixies) together, in one mix, I then filter down to that GROUP. I have GROUPS that are geographic (“Chicago Bands”), GROUPS that have some association (“Bands from the Repo Man Soundtrack”), GROUPS by source (“HDTRACKS”), GROUPS by type (“Cover Songs” and “Live Bootlegs”) and others. One way to quickly hit a vein of songs based on an interest.
(3) MOODS & THEMES is the closest I get to a playlisting function. Back in the day, I used to not just make a single mixtape but rather a series of mixtapes based on a theme or mood. Mellow morning music would be “Morning Coffee” and music to jump around and air guitar would be “Adrenaline Infusion.” I took these themes from mixtapes and turned them into this custom field which approximates the old feel of those tapes only with thousands rather than a dozen songs. These are all assigned at the artist level, which is not perfect, but a lot faster than assigning at a lower level. This is the primary method I use of determine the feel, pace, and mood of a playlist. When I filter to the “Earthy Rock” MOOD I get stuff from REM to Johnny Cash and thus there is both consistency and variety.
(4) SHUFFLE may be be my greatest innovation in that it determines how deep into a given artist I want to get into when I choose to shuffle a GENRE, GROUP, MOOD, OR ARTIST. Albums are categorized based on my personal favorites versus lesser known albums or albums I want to listen to less frequently. “Hits” is a self-explanatory value but “Narrow” means “Hits” plus “Deep Cuts” (so I can play both without having to select for both) and “Wide” is “Hits,” “Deep Cuts,” “Deeper Cuts,” “Live” and “Compilations” (which tend to have a few rare tracks but also repeat a lot of other album tracks). In this way, I can control how deep into my collection the shuffle goes - I usually use “Hits” when friends are over (to stay with the more familiar) and “Wide” when I want Foobar2000 to scrape down into my collection. I can also thus just listen to live tracks, best-of compilations, or very deep cuts to explore things I haven’t heard in a while (or ever). This also goes a long way to avoid over-including the artists where I have the most content - I just make sure that I have not designated too many of their albums as “hits” so that I get a more even shuffle - only when I go to “Wide” do the artists with 20+ albums start to take over the shuffle.
To be clear, I filter across multiple custom tags at once, hence the beauty of playing only the intersection of these subsets. It really allows for great slicing and dicing of the collection.
I haven 't found the Roon Radio function to suffice in replacement to the above, There are things I LOVE about Roon but there are times when I want to tell Roon to stop playing the same hits over and over, which it tends to do at times. The above custom tags allow me to control this through other applications.
So, initially I campaigned in the community to have Roon recognize my custom embedded tags so that I could use them with Roon. That campaign got little traction (perhaps because I didn’t use such a shocking title) and so I figured there wasn’t much appetite for it outside myself. Then I became resigned to have to redo these inside Roon without any automated help, but realized what a massive task that was, and decided, well, if I am going to to it over, I might even improve it, but if I do that, I do not want the effort to be lost if for any reason I stopped using Roon. Hence, the request for the function to be able to export my grooming work back out.
Given your’s and others’ responses above, it seems that perhaps I was closer to right the first time. Better for Roon to recognize my custom embedded tags and I can then quickly apply a corresponding Roon Tag. That would save me the redo and keep Roon from being viewed as such a closed system. It’s not perfect, because I don’t think Roon Radio will play non-identified albums, and I would like those albums included (meaning there is still manual work to do within Roon), but it really just is the point that beyond the standard ID3 tag fields, Roon functions like an impenetrable silo of data, nothing custom in or out, and the other great media software titles don’t function this way and are instead inter-operable.
One more point: I may have been mistaken about your target audience. I assumed it was the Foobar2000, MediaMonkey, and JRiver users of the world, many of whom are far more intense metadata tweakers than I am. If I was incorrect in that, and thus appearing to speak for folks who aren’t your target and are not in this community, I’m sorry.
Also happy to take this conversation off this thread and through some other medium. Feel free to reach out any way that works for you.
2 Likes
Haha. In your opinion.
Jamesdid put a caveat in that it was tongue in cheek and look how much attention he’s derived from it 
It’s fantastic that we can engage in such lively debate over our OCD passion. Keep going @James_I - the more we push the more we can improve this wonderful piece of software together
Fixed it for you 
still being sarcastic. [quote=“Sallah_48, post:65, topic:24934”]
Jamesdid put a caveat in that it was tongue in cheek and look how much attention he’s derived from it
It’s fantastic that we can engage in such lively debate over our OCD passion. Keep going @James_I - the more we push the more we can improve this wonderful piece of software together
[/quote]
Yep, just like an earlier post title of his “Roon is Ugly”. Some just like to come across ugly I guess, enjoy.
1 Like
Roon are listening attentively to everything that is going on in the Feature Requests forum. Please note though that they are also aware of (very) vocal minorities and idiosyncratic demands. By all means – keep this discussion going, but ‘pushing’ won’t help. Solid use cases (like the ones also presented here), preferably relevant to and supported by the broader community, do.
3 Likes
Thanks you made my day!
haha that’s scuppered it now… you’ll not get the same reaction 
And equally disgusting: getting a new computer with two drives and the tags with file paths don’t work anymore because they begin with D: instead if C:
EDIT: not referring to a Roon problem, Roon recognizes music if it gets physically moved. This was in reference to the suggestion of turning physical file paths into tags.
I agree. Roon is fairly tolerant of small mismatches in track timing, but if the metadata completely lacks track timing Roon gives up. This is not good. @mike
I know. I’m going to have to come up with another inflammatory title! 
1 Like
Essential contribution.
Thanks for the writeup on custom tags. It’s helped us to understand your use case a little bit better.
Part of the point here is: Roon’s Radio algorithm needs improvement (we know this, it’s being worked on).
BESTVERSION (maybe with PRIMARYVERSION as a synonym to match our terminology) is clearly something we should just do. Unfortunately your tagging scheme doesn’t group duplicates into sets–so the impact of that tag would be to influence who “wins” the set by default when Roon performs the grouping. There would still be some grooming to collapse things into groups properly, but once done, you could essentially toggle between “best version” and “all versions” by turning on/off Roon’s show-hidden-albums switch.
I don’t think we’d be averse to defining tags that allowed the grouping to be driven by that end, but I’d have to think through the implications further–how that mixes with the current duplicates determination–in order to be 100% sure.
The biggest issue I’m feeling is an uncertainty about how your tags are interpreted at the album vs track level (and if they are also interpreted in your world at artist level). BESTVERSION and SOURCEMEDIA seem to communicate album-level ideas, but what about the others?
I think I see how something like this could work for us. We have a big overhaul of focus coming, probably later this year. Might be the right point to fit it in. We’ll see.
We are displacing those products to an extent, but we are thinking bigger than that, too. We would not have much of a business if all we had were users of those three products you mentioned.
We are also not delusional–thinking that we will somehow displace Apple or Spotify or something like that–this is definitely still a product for a relatively small number of people who care more than the average person about music or audio.
People care about different things. Dedicated library organizers are a pretty small group–more people are doing their tweaking on the sound quality side–and even that group isn’t so large compared to sets of people like “anyone who has ever spent $300+ on a pair of headphones”, “anyone who has bought a HiFi component or AV receiver”, “anyone who acquires more than 10 albums per month”, “anyone who wants to DIY a whole-home-audio solution”–and we have something to offer to all of those people too.
The big struggle is keeping the product usable when adding power. We can’t promise whole home audio if the non-hobbyist spouse/kids can’t use it, or if a hifi dealer can’t sell it to their customers because it’s too complex to set up and use.
So in context–this complicated way of doing automatic DJ’ing that you’ve come up with is great for you–but even if we built this feature perfectly, and then you groomed the media perfectly to suit it, and set up all of the required stuff in Roon to support it perfectly, I could not take an iPad with your library and put it in front of another person and expect them to figure it out and use it.
4 Likes
Freud believed that an obsessively neat desk indicated a messy mind.
Sure, but that’s not the whole quote. The whole quote is “an obsessively neat desk indicates a messy mind…Darn, where is that album I just intended to listen to?” 
2 Likes
Thanks again Brian for such a thorough response. I do agree with this - I would not feel the need to take the reins on DJ’ing for myself to such a degree if Roon was better at surprising me in positive ways. What I’d really like to see here is the ability to choose whether to stick with “hits,” or “go deep” into an artist, genre, or other grouping, or to “go wide” to find related stuff, or deep and wide. A sort of adventurism slider type of thing, in multiple dimensions. Or at the very least, less predictability - Roon Radio sometimes feels like a top 40 station.
Just for completeness of response: MOODS and GROUPS are each recognized at the artist level, and SHUFFLE is at the album level. Of course, they are really all embedded in files at the track level, but uniform across those track files up to the foregoing levels, which then allows Foobar2000 filters to appropriate group them. .
That would be very helpful. Basically, if Focus could simply read and sort by any custom metatag field embedded in the file. This would be about an 80% solution to the needs discussed in this thread, which I view as pretty good, especially if the tweakers and librarians aren’t your core focus.
I’m sure that’s true - even when I have friends over and give a personal explanation, they almost always default to making playlists manually when I let them DJ. But it’s still handy for me to use these functions with guests because then I can focus on being social without worry that the music shuffle will go too far off the rails.
That said, it was definitely not my intent to propose that you make changes so that others could adopt my style of auto-DJing. My assumption is at a more general level, that there must be some significant subgroup of Roon users that in their prior media lives relied on custom embedded metadata for more advanced functions of their media software and that group would benefit from Roon having the ability to Focus on that custom data so as to be able to, in effect, “import” those functions into Roon by applying Roon tags as a substitute.
This is the other side of the coin from what I originally proposed above - that Roon export user-input media information so that users would not lose that effort, but really either is fine, because we can put that effort into the embedded tags and use the above process to import into Roon, thus preserving that scheme for use with other software as necessary (and that’s where we went down the rabbit hole debating the longevity of Roon, something I never intended). As long as it doesn’t exist only in Roon, I don’t care which direction it goes.
Hope I have been clear so as not to be seen pushing in a nonsensical direction (that’s a lob for those that want to quote me in their response…).
Thanks again, Brian. Roon, and the Roon team, are both great. It’s interesting the varying interests represented by this community - fun to see!
3 Likes
Thanks again Brian for your comments. I wanted to come back to you earlier, but I was on a business trip.
Just to be clear - I am not saying the “old” way is the better way. I will just be sticking to the old way in parallel as good as I can
There will be things that can’t be mapped to tags if you really like to have a proper database for (classical) music, that’s without doubt.
Having the vision to offer such an experience with zero effort is certainly the right one. I am just a little bit nagging about the path to get there. If you offer content in a piece of software like Roon, the first question people like me will ask is: can I modify it or add to it? At the moment I can’t properly do this. I understand that it was your design decision to start like this.
However, it is sometimes really painful to see data inconsistencies and being not able to correct them yourself without unidentifying albums. There are redundant album and track credits all over the place and the tool to correct them seems to me not very practical for mass adjustments.
Just as an example I am currently fighting with my Arthur Rubinstein albums which have Arthur Rubinstein and Artur Rubinstein both as credits with links but only Arthur is available in the Artist browser so I can’t merge Artur and Arthur into one… It seems to me that I’d need to manually delete all Artur Rubinstein entries from my album credits in order to fix this. Which would be especially funny, since according to Wikipedia and my soloist tag it is Artur and not Arthur, so at the end I would need to manually edit the Arthur I have in my artist list…
I do think that you got the basic data model right and I just hope that in the future you will open the Roon database fields to editing.
For my personal experience of Roon I it sometimes would be better to have a global “off” switch for Roon to identify albums and start with a library of unidentified albums where the database would only be populated based on my tags. I would loose a lot of information Roon could provide me, but I could have consistent data and wait for Roon to make progress on the classical metadata front.
I’m trusting that you will make progress there but at the moment I’m still not ready to give up my JRiver library completely, because with all limitations and ugliness of JRiver I still find my stuff with one or two clicks and can maintain all the (admittedly limited) data.
Still I’d really want Roon to succeed and therefore I’ll support it with my license fee even if I’m not using it every time.
All I can say is after using Pure Music and Amarra, Roon blows both away in how I listen, view and read (like the ol’ days when you’d get a new album and read liner notes while playing it) my collection.
Plus all the info they give you on your source connection, resolution and audio path your files are being played from.
Never tried JRiver but really appreciate all the tremendous work the people at Roon have put in for this great software!!
Another plus is the instant lyrics that are provided on almost every song that has vocals…The other guys never did that as well.
5 Likes