I have been discouraged by the quality of tagged downloads lately. Here’s one email I sent to BIS and eClassical. I suggest that others follow suit if it seems appropriate to you:
"I just downloaded the subject album [Russian Masquerade] under the BIS label from eClassical. While the files arrived in playable order, the tagging was woefully incomplete. There was no Album or Track artist data, no Year, no Label or Catalog Number, no Track Composers, incomplete and non-canonical names for the compositions, etc.
Put another way, I don’t think AllMusic, Musicbrainz, or Discogs would have accepted these tags for their respective databases.
I do not know if the fault lies with eClassical or BIS, but neither of you should let materials out in this substandard state. I expect more, particularly from a label of such quality.
Thanks for listening,"
Just an FYI and NOT a rant or dig in any way at Roon.
I’ve kind of given up on eClassical for that reason. I did write to them, too but the mess continues. Too much hassle fixing the bad or missing metadata
I don’t know. I have 16 BIS downloads, all identified by now. But I seem to recall that it took a long time for their metadata to show in AllMusic and in Roon.
I can verify what @John_V says. I recently bought two downloads from eClassical, both BIS. Both had 0101 in the year tag and much of credits where missing or misplaced. The albums weren’t new either so Roon should have found correct info in one of the data bases they use. I used quite some time fixing metadata before Roon registered all correctly.
I received a very nice response email from BIS’ CEO about 24 hours after I sent the mail. [BTW, BIS owns eClassical.]
Generally, the CEO is a self-professed non-computer guy, but he seemed interested and concerned about this experience. A few other managers got involved at his request.
So, good lip service thus far. We’ll see how it all translates.
That is wonderful you got a response from the top so swiftly. I just purchased my first download from eClassical, and the metadata was there but had to be cleaned up a bit for my purposes. It was a 2020 BIS release (Aho: Sieidi & Symphony 5). Thankfully the track names were all there. I have a feeling they will get a lot of my business. Both stereo and surround files for $15.50? YES PLEASE! I like their pricing scheme and will add it to my list of places to frequent. Yum!
