A provocative question

So, it’s some days i’m experiencing with roon.
i have many questions, many obscure points, many doubts. no surprise, and no problem: when i first installed squeezebox / LMS… i went crazy with so many problems about tagging and logic… (cuesheets, band, artist and so on).
but i’ve learned, and i have now tons of albums, tagged the best that i can: not perfect, i just put some care in the ones i care the most. and i have developed some rules that i like.

for example, i like original languages: for a french, russian, deutch (classical) composer, i like the original name, original composition titles and so on, instead of flat english ones… (klavierkonzert… instead of keyboard concert… ). the same with orchestras (wiener philharmoniker) and so on…
it’s a choice, and i undestand not the best one. the point is that i can customize my library.

here, looking at roon, i am learning one thing: i have to forget my tags, and trust roon metadata database (which in any case is buggy).

so my question… a provocation: what’s the difference between roon and some other online music stream service? i mean, why should i spend money and time to store and tag my files, when what i get at the end is something similiar to tidal? something on which i have limited control?

note: i’ve never used a music stream service, so maybe i don’t know what i’m talking about. i’m sure that on those services i cannot find all the music i like, that they don’t offer hi-res stuff, or bootlegs, i don’t know.
but it turns out that roon has not recognized A LOT of my albums, that metadata at the moment are a mess, and that all the effort to make things match would be lost if i should leave roon.
i don’t know, just asking your opinion.

Good question Niccolo.

For me it’s the way Roon links together artists, albums, musicians, session players, etc, through the credits, obscure offerings in the Discover section, reviews with tags, etc.

It’s more organic than any other streaming service or music player. Many times I’ve used a streaming service I’ve been left stranded with nothing to listen to, despite having access to millions of albums.

With Roon, I’ll often go on a “music journey” moving from track to track, artist to artist, genre to genre, etc in a fluid way and it’s a rewarding and rich experience and different every time.

Oh, and there’s a great community feel here and also with the developers directly within these pages.

You get to feel part of something special.

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For the albums that aren’t recognized, have you tried identifying any of them in Roon?

Separately, if you clean up the embedded metadata, using a good third-party metadata editor, that effort will not be lost if you leave Roon.

https://kb.roonlabs.com/File_Tag_Best_Practice

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Agree with @Sallah_48.

Most apps and services (and certainly file systems) have difficulty with the fact that a recording has multiple identities. I may look under Beethoven, or Symphony 9, or Choral Symphony, or Michael Tilson Thomas, or San Francisco Symphony, or Nathan Berg.

And once I found it under Tilson Thomas and listened to it, I may be impressed with Nathan Berg and want to see what else he has done.

I’m a big user of Tidal, love it, but they don’t understand these relationships. Farmers By Nature is a group with Craig Taborn, Gerald Cleaver and William Parker; Tidal has three albums, but none of them appear when I look up Craig Taborn. This means (a) I have to know this, and (b) keep it in my head when I want to look somebody up.

I have written many stories here about the joys of exploring and discovering.

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I don’t have time to write a more detailed response here @Niccolo_Terzi but I want to thank you for the feedback and just add a couple points about the transition from file tags to Roon.

Depending on how you’ve tagged your files (and the genres and countries represented) I can definitely imagine some migration pains here – Roon does a good job with all sorts of collections, but in some cases you may need to do a little bit more work to get your files “matched” to all the metadata we have.

Once your files are matched, you’ll start to see some of the advantages of a rich, object-based system like Roon, which goes beyond what’s possible with file tags, and what most streaming services are doing.

This article from our Knowledge Base is a good place to start understanding what makes metadata in Roon different.

If you have more questions, I’d definitely ask for specific examples of where you feel Roon is coming up short – there’s a lot to learn, so there may be places people here on Community can help explain functionality in more detail. And there are definitely places we can improve too, so the more detailed the feedback you can provide the better.

We really do appreciate the feedback Niccolo. Hope that helps!

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Pretty much the same discussion going on in two places:

Mike, I’d appreciate if the Roon team could take a serious look at a way to dynamically apply Roon tags based on custom file embedded metadata. See the above post - read towards the bottom and I got this idea from the post here:

EDIT: I just want to repeat that Roon is a great product. I’ve been building a queue for 15 minutes now and it’s just way more fun to use Roon than anything else.

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