Ability to identify compositions

Most of the music I own is thoroughly tagged, including WORK and PART tags. I’ve noticed this can usually get in the way of Roon matching a composition to its metadata sources, even when the name used in the WORK tag matches the name used by most metadata sources I know of. For example, I have all performances of Beethoven’s first symphony tagged as “Symphony No. 1 in C major, Op. 21”. All performances are grouped correctly, but no metadata is available. If I remove the WORK tag, then the composition is identified correctly and metadata is added.

Furthermore, there are compositions where the only performance I own is in an album that cannot be identified. In those cases I’ve resorted to finding an album with the same composition in Tidal, adding it to my library, and then merging the compositions. While this sort of works, it’s very awkward and ends up polluting my library with albums I don’t really want there.

For cases like this, it would be very helpful to just have an identify function similar to the one for records on the composition itself. This could allow searching for a specific composition. Even the ability to just manually set an AllMusic ID would be very helpful.

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yes, i agree
see similar request here:

I’ve hit that a couple of times, but selecting the tracks, then edit, then re-scan usually fixes it. If not, then I usually go into the metadata details, swap back to using Roon info for the grouping, then back to file info.

I feel you on the support group :slight_smile: I somehow got into a state where the identity of two compositions was swapped. I had Ravel’s piano concerto tagged as “Piano Concerto in G, M. 83” and it would show up as “Sonata for violin & piano No. 2, M. 77”. Then I had the violin sonata tagged as “Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2, M 77” and it would show up as “Piano Concerto in G, M. 83”. I had to invert the WORK tags (tag the concerto as the sonata and the sonata as the concerto) to get the right thing to show up in Roon. Still no clue what happened there.

Yeah, I first tag the files using a third party editor (usually use Foobar or dbpoweramp) to set WORK and PART tags. Most of the time, Roon picks everything up correctly. Every once in a while, it will not pick up a change I’ve made. At that point, inside the Roon UI, I select the tracks, then hit the Edit button and scroll down to Re-scan Tracks in the Track Options tab. That usually causes Roon to pick up the changes I made.

A wizard to tell Roon “these tracks are these canonical work” would be a good idea.

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+1
I call this feature “work chooser”

I agree this feature is desperately needed to help Roon work effectively with classical music.
Tied in with this, it would be wonderful if Roon could add descriptions for the works themselves rather than just a review of each performance.

This is already the case for works which have been considered important enough. Or do you mean something else?

I hadn’t realised these were here! Yes, this is great, although the original feature request still stands. I’ve had to pretend an unidentified album is a completely different performance so Roon at least know which work it is. There should be a better way.
Regarding the works information, is there a way to get to this when playing an album without having to select it again via compositions?

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In the now playing screen, select the composition info (If it exists)

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