Another thread about grouping classical artists

Roon Software Discussion
1

@support

Describe Your Setup
Roon Core on Mac OS 10.12.4 > Switch > Airport Extreme > Switch > QNAP NAS (library)

Output to Meridian Explorer from Mac
Output to Linn Klimax DSM via Netaux via second switch listed above

what version of Roon you are running : 1.3 223
Macbook Pro 2013 *gb

Describe where your music is stored: see above

Let us know your collection size (approximate number of tracks): 28000+, 3TB

Describe The Issue:
I want to see my classical albums grouped under artist in the artist view. For instance, if I have 35 Beethoven albums, I want to see them all of them grouped under a single Beethoven tile in the ‘Artist’ view. In this example, all 35 of the albums have artist and album artist file tags set to Beethoven.

I will retag if that gets me there. If there is easy settings change then yippee.

I have searched and searched and not found anything that gets me where I need to be.

Thanks,
Michael

2

If you do it by “Composer” rather than “Artist,” does that achieve the desired result?

3

If I understand correctly, you want Album Artist to be the Composer of all the works on the album. This is not advisable, for a gazillion reasons.

Rather have Composer as Composer, and then focus on albums featuring that Composer.

Screen Shot 2017-05-27 at 18.08.24.jpg2880×1800 876 KB

4

I want to be able to look at the artist view and when I scroll through the list of Artists I see something like this:

Beck
Beethoven
Bela Fleck

When I tap on Beethoven, I should navigate to a page where I see all of the Beethoven albums.

I don’t want to have to press on another UI and I don’t want my artist view polluted by a bunch of obscure quartets and orchestras that I care little about.

I have a 3TB library, it’s is extremely noisy and impedes browsing to have all the quartets, etc have individual tiles in the Artists views.

Michael

Ps. I have read the gazillion reasons re: tagging. That’s fine. I just want a browsable view that presents all of my music in the same way so I can scroll through the list and tap on what catches my fancy at the time. I am willing to give up richness of data to get this - at least for classical.

5

Is there really no way to do this? No way to say: “hey Roon, for these items, ignore your database magic and just go with the file tags?”

Or some other solution?

Thanks,
Michael

6

You could try “unidentifying” an album or two and seeing if that gets you where you want to be. To do this, touch the three dots near the top of the album screen and then select Edit. In the resultant dialog, select “Identify Album” under Album Options. Then just keep selecting “None of these look right” until you get to a dialog where you can select “Use Basic File Information.”

That said, I respectfully suggest that you’re barking up the wrong tree. Sometimes with software, you need to let go (if only temporarily) of how you want it to work and spend some time figuring out how it does work. Roon is very well designed and still evolving, so IMO it’s worth spending some time getting a handle on it. If that fails, there’s always the Feature Requests section.

1 Like
7

Did @Ludwig’s suggestion above not help here – the way he suggested is also how I would recommend finding these albums:

You can also create bookmarks for these views, so it’s always easy to find your Beethoven albums in a click or two,

Anyway, you’re free to use Roon however you want, but I can see why this would be frustrating – Roon is designed to clean up messy or incorrect metadata automatically, replacing it with connections that are richer than what’s possible with file tags.

Because Beethoven himself didn’t actually release any albums, trying to organize these albums that way means fighting against the system as it attempts to accurately represent the musicians and performers involved in these recordings. Using the Focus feature, on the other hand, will let you find all the albums on which Beethoven’s compositions were performed, even if they also feature compositions by other composers.

I understand this is different from what you’re used to, and you’re not the first person to face this learning curve. So many applications have long ignored the needs of Classical fans that I can understand why so many people have resorted to just using the Artist field for prominent composers, even if that often requires ignoring the contributions of the actual artists and performers involved in the recording.

I can assure you that making sure Roon addresses the needs of classical fans is something we are always thinking about, and taking feedback on, and improving. That said, those improvements are always going to be focused on representing Classical composers, artists, and albums in a richer, more accurate way.

Hope that perspective helps @Michael_Faoro – please do read the article I linked to above and let me know if you have any questions.

8

That (unidentifying) was perfect and gets me where I want to be. It will be a lot of work for me but Ill do it. Thanks Orgel.

There is a lot to love about Roon. But, I think its designers are a tad too enamored of what technology can do and sometimes ignore what the user wants to do or at least bias the design towards the technology rather than the user.

In my case, and in the case of many others I have come across while searching on this problem, I just want a browsable browse. I don’t know who I want to listen to. I just want to browse my library until I run into something. Therefore your find/focus/search features are useless to me. With all of the random trios, quartets etc in my browse view the task of browsing music becomes that much harder - whether I am looking for classical or not.

Michael