I am a classical music listener and a new Roon user. I have read in Roon documentation about the use of WORK and PART tags in order to manage movements in compoditions.
I use Bliss software and have tried other metadata editors on my Mac, but none seems to recognize those tags in any file on my collection.
Do, I have just a basic question: how can I add custom tags to a file, i.e. WORK and PART?
You should be able to do this with third-party tag editors such as Mp3tag or dbPoweramp. I’ve certainly been able to use the latter to add custom WORK and PART tags to files…
I use and strongly recommend Yate (YAH tay) for the Mac. It is a full-featured tagger with batch processing capability. It works very differently from Bliss, though, so expect a learning curve.
WORK and PART are custom tags that the user creates. This is probably different from your normal tag workflow. But just instruct your tagger to add WORK and PART custom tags to your files, and then populate the tags with data.
Hi @Giorgio_Gionni,
if you use mp4 as a file container (".m4a" files, AAC and ALAC) then I’d recommend to use a tagger which supports the respective iTunes mappings for WORK and PART.
Yate, as proposed by @John_V, will do this out of the box. It calls the respective fields “Work Name”, “Movement Name”, “Movement Number” and “Movement Count”. Roon is able to read those and will map it back to the WORK and PART values.
The (maybe confusing) mapping table of YATE:
https://2manyrobots.com/YateResources/InAppHelp/English.lproj/pgs/FrameMappingTable.html
Thank you very much! Did not find how to use dbPoweramp (Perfect Tunes) to add WORK and PART tags, but found a solution that suits my needs in Yate
Cheers.
I use mp3tag which allows you to easily add custom tags to its tag panel. Roon will recognise WORK & PART with no further mapping (for example to Vorbis Comments or iTunes). Windows only though.
Not entirely true. I have been using mp3tag on mac for years in a Wine container. doesn’t feel 100% mac of course but it works just fine. More info here: https://www.mp3tag.de/en/mac-osx.html
Interesting. I’ve never used a mac or an iphone for that matter. Don’t know what the capabilities of Yate are but the big plus of mp3tag is the scripting. I would have given up on roon migration a long time a go without it.
Yep, Yate has batch processing using scripts. I particularly like its (seemingly infinite) customizing options, and excellent user support.
I’d probably rate it a tie between mp3tag and Yate on the Mac side for features and customization. Metadatics is easy to use early in, but a bit lacking in flexibility and power features. dbPowerAmp is a great suite of apps, but their tagger is pretty rudimentary.
Ditto the need for a good tagger, @tripleCrotchet . It became clear that Roon couldn’t decipher ALL of my album and composition ID mysteries.
The iTunes mapping is a nice feature for those who use iTunes too, because then you get the same work grouping experience in iTunes. As far as I can see mp3tag supports it out of the box too: https://help.mp3tag.de/main_tags.html