Using Windows 10 - how can I add bio information to an artist or composer (not just dates but descriptive text)
Thanks
AFAIK, such information is provided by allmusic.com at the moment and there’s no way to change or replace it. This also means that if there’s no bio, then there’s none.
See also:
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Hell, even if all they did was add support for a REVIEW tag and/or review.txt in an album folder and leverage that if present it would be a huge step forward. Same thing re BIOS - have a BIOGRAPHY tag and/or BIOGRAPHY.txt in a folder and the bio is used for the album artist in that folder. That way team Roon needn’t concern itself with text rendering, sentence/word wrapping of rendered text based on keyboard input - which I believe has been the biggest impediment to getting something done in this space.
Even better would be support to be able to embed links to artists and albums in such files, but given what’s transpired thus far it’s possibly all wishful thinking.
I would love this feature, it would be very handy to add reviews to bootleg concerts we record and also fill in the gaps on lesser known artists, Bio’s etc…
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Some sort of manual end user submission process, to fill in or correct the blanks, would be great. It would also be nice if any submissions or edits were added to allmusic or a Roon server for the benefit of all, especially for some more obscure stuff.
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As Ken showed, I suggested this feature around 4 years ago. I’m still as keen on it now as I was then - in my mind it’s an essential feature for the user to complete and personalise their database somewhat. There have been many requests for this feature from others also. I hope it makes it into the software soon.
I get that they’re reluctant to invest in sentence wrapping of rendered text, but not adding tag or file support I don’t get - I can’t imagine it’s a huge effort pulling these into the user’s database and if they weren’t shared across the Roon user base that wouldn’t really bother me either, albeit it would be a nice to have.
As the request is for artist/composer bio, I’m not sure how this could be solved via a file tag/file based route in a sensible way as we import tracks actually and not artists or composers.
Agreed, but we organise our albums in folders. Nothing stopping Roon parsing a tag or file called “biography” though and writing it’s contents to the albumartist whose album resides in that folder. As a user you could arbitarily choose whih of ant artist’s album folders you want to drop the file in and Roon will can pick it up regardless.
Same logic for a review tag or file, only Roon would infer the review pertains to the album in the folder in question.
Which is only a partial solution that only works reliably for a subset of a local – doesn’t work for streaming content at all – library. Unsupported or else unexpected results may occur for e.g.:
- Classical albums with many artists (Orchestra, Director, Soloist, Composer, …)
- Compilations (Various Artists)
- … maybe more
What should Roon display if more than one bio exists for a specific artist because a user has forgotten that he already placed a bio or was unable to remember where he placed it for a specific artist and placed a new one or just adds a bio into every album of an artists for completeness?
At least for me, this seems to be not that easy at all to do it right.
Nothing can be done about the streaming side, composers etc until Roon decides to do something about it. For the locally library album artist side the solution is pretty easily implemented. Re which to show in case users are forgetful (or suffer some other affliction… import the last one encountered). In the case of compilation albums ignore the rage and/or file, it wouldn’t be there in the first place.
The only other way I can think of if Roon don’t solve this centrally is for them to come up with a file naming convention eg BIOGRAPHY-ARTIST-NAME and designate a folder for users to dump that stuff in. Roon can then compare that against local user library content and infer the correct composer, artist etc association.
That’s maybe the best solution possible, to collect all the user’s metadata overwrites in a single folder placed in the watched folder. 
Done this way, it may even be possible to work for streaming content. 
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@BlackJack , @evand - you’ve just invented the Kodi artist folder 
https://kodi.wiki/view/Artist_information_folder
(I’m not sure how they handle equivalencing issues.)
I don’t feel as like we invented something so far, because our considerations contain hardly any specifications. It’s surely not a no-brainer to implement.
From the POV of a (hobbyist) programmer:
-
Object mapping
As we all know, metadata exists in varying quality. So how to map a file to an actual artist/composer object? Just by filename? Could/should additional information provided in the file’s content?
J. S. Bach vs. Johann S. Bach vs. Johann Sebastian Bach vs. … -
File format
Plain text is usually a PIA because it lacks encoding information (cp1252, utf-8, cjk, …). You can use the first line (like for e.g. the shebang line) to provide such vital information but you then usually have to write your own parser. So maybe it’s better to use some other format like e.g. JSON, XML, … -
Content format
Should a (subset) of HTML or Markdown be allowed to provide the possibility of basic text formatting for the bio? If yes, what’s needed then? -
Content (the bio) processing
Should the content be processed by Roon (to insert links to other artists/composers found in the text for example)?
These are just some thoughts that came into my mind by thinking about it. I’m pretty sure there are many more.
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It was just coming to my mind following your exchange of ideas that kodi is doing its nfo tricks in a similar way and thought it might be interesting to have a look at it. Not that I expect something along this line’s being really considered for Roon. Even so it’s a pity because there’s already a small but working tool ecosystem for nfo and artwork creation and management available.
Roon already has a mechanism implemented for composer matching I think. There’s a json file in the app package pointing to this.
kodi uses xml, utf8, which may work well enough for Roon, too.
Would have to follow the rules Roon already uses for parsing tivo text, I suppose.
Not sure if it’s allowed to mix user content with tivo licensed material. But parsing user text the same way as tivo text may be a simple thing. Except that for all the user provided stuff Roon may need to do a lot more to check for sanity. Who knows what may come with user content and how that may affect the parser / renderer / whatever. Never trust user provided data …
As I said, I doubt Roon will implement something for artists that works outside the Roon app environment. But I do like to be wrong, at times. 
Thank you everyone for your comments
Could someone who is actually employed by Roon respond and explain what you intend to do about this issue please
Roon don’t normally come in and comment on these threads and ideas. There are so many threads on cherished ideas that you can sort of see why. One comment leads to many 
I’m using Roon for a few months and this feature would be much appreciated… any news about this request?
Hi Laurent
I am just a Roon user like yourself
I have copied in support to my response and hope that one of the support team will answer your question
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Hi @LaurentZ,
This is not currently possible in Roon, but I’d recommend adding your voice to an existing feature request about this! BlackJack’s post above includes some examples of those requests:
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