Eventually I will try ripping.
But right now I’m just thrilled with what I’m getting.
Cheers!
The beauty of Roon radio to me is you can discover a lot of music that you really like but would never have known about otherwise. Of course, you can discover a lot of music that you really don’t like also.
For the most part I enjoy Roon Radio but I do have some issues with Roon Radio’s understanding and knowledge of jazz. Works great on popular music but often drops the ball when it comes to jazz. But that’s the topic for a different discussion.
Roon has an Album Editor that I’ve found quite useful when I don’t like the tags Roon provides when an album is identified. It allows me to use my tags - track or album level - instead. It will even let you add your own tags here, but of course, that’s only stored within Roon. Here’s a pic if you’re not sure where it is…
I’m aware of and use the Edit function. What I’m looking for is way to set the track artist to my tags, similar to how one can edit the album artist tag (see below - album level metadata preference).
I have not found found a way to edit the track level artist tag (see below - track level metadata preference).
I hope that I am making myself clear.
You can edit each track’s metadata preference or info regarding each track via the Track Editor. It is a PITA, but you can change credits or each track and identify the credit roles on each track such as Primary Artist, Composer, etc…
All doable, but I must admit I’m hesitant to go down this path myself because whatever you do is only stored in Roon which limits what you can do with it down the road if/when something else comes along that makes you want to switch away from Roon. Having tags in the flac files themselves seems like a better strategy to me. So what I occasionally do is tell Roon to ignore the metadata from the identified album and use my tags instead. It works and easy to do, but there’s also a price since once you do that, Roon stops looking for updated metadata for that album.
Personally, I don’t see this as a Roon deficiency as much as I do a total lack of an industry standard to manage such metadata. Even if Roon came up with a comprehensive solution, it would still be Roon’s solution that would unlikely port to any other product or service down the line.
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As has been mentioned a couple of times before, you can get Roon to put tags of the basic metadata into a copy of your library files using the Export function.
Exporting from Roon gives you the following:
- albumartist
- album
- discnumber
- track
- title
- artist
- composer
Thank you @Geoff_Coupe and @evand! I had seen that but just never got around to checking it out. Those are fields that I strive to correctly populate correctly within the flac files before Roon gets it. But knowing that Roon’s export can do the same does make the Album and Track Editor features far more useful in the long term.
@evand @Geoff_Coupe @mdconnelly
As far as I can tell so far no one has shown me how to get Roon to the file tags for track artist instead of the imported metadata track artist, as I tried to show in my previous post.
I’ll have a look tonight when home.
Well, it seems to work in a quick test I did a while back. I ripped a CD using Roon’s CD ripper. That created folders with timestamps and tracks with simple track numbers - and no metadata in the track files.
Then I exported it, and Artist/Album folders were created, together with track titles as track filenames. The basic metadata was added to each track, and for tracks with specific performers, this metadata was added as a performer tag…
For example - a CD ripped using Roon:
Note track 4. And here’s track four in the exported album (with Lisa):
And for comparison, track 3 (without Lisa):
That’s interesting. It seems there may then be differences when exporting files and exporting to Excel. Not sure why there should be differences but I’ll have a gander tonight.
I think I understand what @Jazzfan_NJ is saying now. But I don’t think there is (currently) a way round it. Take this example:
There are 4 works, but there are also 3 different configurations of the artists.
Works 1 and 4 = The Brodsky Quartet
Work 2 = The Brodsky Quartet + Sioned Williams (Harp)
Work 3 = Daniel Rowland (Violin), Jacqueline Thomas (Cello), Jean-Efflam Bavouzet (Piano)
The problem is that I know from experience this is just the type of album roon will often get wrong. Because the Brodsky Quartet is the Album Artist, for example, they get a performing credit for all works (wrong) and because there is a mix of performers I know that the balance of probability is that these won’t be quite right either.
This is a small enough disk for me to be motivated to edit the file before importing but now roon will overwrite my meta-data with roon meta-data. Actually, to be precise, roon will merge roon and file-metadata as that is what I have set up the import to do. In practice this means that I then have to do a secondary edit in roon to remove unwanted credits and generally align everything with the file meta-data I had in the first place.
Now I suppose I could set up roon to import file data only but I don’t want to do that as in many other genres besides Classical that I am interested in roon gets it right. Even when roon gets it wrong, often it is a useful baseline I can work off without starting from scratch and saving a lot of time and effort.
I cannot see a way round this catch-22. What is needed is a way of preferring file artists at a track level.
.
That’s all well and good and I’m thrilled that it works for you but…
that still doesn’t answer my simple question which is how to get Roon to use the track artists in the file tags instead of the INCORRECT or INCOMPLETE track artists from the metadata.
So let’s try this once again:
Here is a screen shot of mp3tag with the correct track artist circled in red.
Here is screen shot of Roon showing the INCORRECT track artist circled in red:
I wonder if this is because Roon uses a PERFORMER tag as well as ARTIST. In dBpoweramp, I see both tags being used. In Mp3tag, there’s only the Artist being shown?
Exactly!
By Jove I think he’s got it!
Now to be fair there are few different ways that go wrong in Roon with each with slightly different results.
-
Roon identifies the recordings and overwrites the tag metadata with incomplete or incorrect metadata. So for an XXX Quartet recording with each of the four musicians identified in the track artist tag field the imported metadata and therefore Roon only shows the XXX Quartet as the artist and also on the credits screen.
-
Roon identifies the recordings and overwrites the tag metadata with incomplete or incorrect metadata. So for an XXX Quartet recording with each of the four musicians identified in the track artist tag field the imported metadata and therefore Roon only shows the XXX Quartet as the artist but on the credits screen shows all four musicians. - Not so terrible and I could easily live with this outcome.
-
Roon fails to identify the recording in which case the track level artists used in the file tags are shown in Roon. This is okay but once the recording becomes identified (if ever) then there’s a good chance that either 1 or 2 above will result.
Oh boy more manual editing!! Can I get I subscription credit for doing manually all the things that I am paying for Roon to do automatically?
Please understand that I feel that I am on the bleeding edge here because as we move forward and the metadata providers that Roon relies upon continue to provide less and less useful metadata, I will not be the only complaining. Fans of all music besides popular music are not getting useful metadata and the situation is not improving.
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Well, frankly, it’s good enough for me. I really have no wish to slide down the razorblade of life; I’ll just listen to the music.
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Who are those people?
Oh…Taylor Swift…I think I’ve heard of her 
Hello TheraP,
Nice to see you manage to install Roon and are enjoying your music.
I agree with you that I don’t like Roon radio much. I think Spotify is awesome for that, and Tidal is good but not so much. Roon has not been good at all selecting tracks that I like.
In order for anybody to help you With the album info I think you have to let us know what device you are using as remote. The remote is the device you are using to select the playback devices and the songs you are listening to. iPad, iPhone , android phone, Fire 8 or 10??
I hope you can enjoy your system with great music for a long time to come! I am currently on my trial and will be subscribing because Inrrally like all the metadata and info about songs and albums. It has helped me find artists and songs from the people whose work I like.
Enjoy!