Hi there, I am new to Roon - just trying it out at the moment. I have more than a thousand unidentified albums, came from Squeezebox and have put a lot of work in my tags, all classical and opera.
In the artist tag I would have something like: Pavarotti, Sutherland, Milnes, Ghiaurov
Now in Roon they appear in one block, also they are not searchable as separate. Meaning if I would do a search for Pavarotti, the album would not appear, it did in iPeng.
I really like Roon, but not being able to find all albums until I have identified 1400 albums is really frustrating.
Why does Roon not see the comma separation in Artist as separate names? Or have I missed a function?
A comma is not a delimiter character, used to separate lists of names - Roon (like many other music software) uses a semicolon ( ; ) to separate items in a list. See the section on File tag delimiters here.
This article also gives best practice for using metadata tags with Roon.
Great, thanks a lot. I changed the import settin to comma instead of semi-colon and now all is good. (I never used the semi-colon and tagged everything myself.
But I do wonder why there are 1400 unidentified albums? I can find most of them when I do Identify album.
Mostly multi CD albums of Operas. Any idea how this could be helped?
Can you share an example of this with us? Please share screenshots of both the album in Roon, the folder structure via Finder or File Explorer. We have some great documentation in our Knowledge Base about how best practices for multi-disc sets — I definitely recommend checking that out.
Thanks, hope this info helps. As you can see, Roon has not identified 1900 of 3600 albums - acually I have atleats identified about 200 myself.
All tracks are ripped the same way, tagged the same way, stored in the same sort of folder - since I do all myself and was really working hard to have everything “perfect” for LMS, I did all myself.
But why does Roon ignore so many? I cannot understand why Roon identifies Album A but not Album B - when I run Identify and search I usually find the Info.
Are the files for all of the discs here in the same folder? If you restructure the folders for this album as mentioned in the article linked above do you notice any change here?
They are all in the same folder. I always put all files per album in one folder.
As I wrote before, Roon recognizes some and some not - but all are done with the same system, as in all files in 1 folder.
I guess the problem is, that I do not have the Tags with Disk 1, disk 2 and the tracks are from 1 to 60 and not starting at 1 for each disk. But it is like a merged disk in Roon and that works when I manually identify the album.
As you are finding, some genres, like opera, can require a great deal of manual intervention to get an identification in roon. Other genres have less of a problem.
Another tip is to label your operas “Aida, opera”, rather than just “Aida” as you have done. That simple trick can improve identification rates a lot if you have already edited all the obvious things like disc numbers, artists, record labels and catalog numbers.
I don’t think there is an easy fix for opera, it seems to cause a perfect storm for roon. There are exceptions and sometimes I have been lucky but mostly I find that there is a great deal of manual intervention required with opera to get satisfactory results.
Sadly, I have for the time being decided to leave my Operas as “unidentified” in Roon. That way at least the music is displayed in the format I prefer.
Sadly, I also have a lot of unidentifed operas. Mostly for the same reason. There is too much editing effort involved and too little added value in a roon identification.
At this time the best option is to reformat the folder structure using the link provided as a guide in order to get better identifications. We hope to improve Roon’s ability to identify non-standard folder structures in the future, but we don’t have any specific timelines for when a change like that may happen.
I’ve always used this approach, which has worked very well for all my 69 albums in the Opera genre:
Music/
An Opera Box Set/
CD1/
01 Track.flac
02 Track.flac
…
CD2/
01 Track.flac
02 Track.flac
…
As a result of this, only 6 remained unidentified, and thus Roon is using file tags for these. And 3 of these are my own manual compilations, so I would expect that Roon would not be able to identify them.
Thanks, yet the thing I do not understand is why there have been so many albums with the same structure have been identified by Roon and others not.
It is all the same.
They are identified as albums with all tracks, but the tags are not applied. Does Roon not search by artist title and or catalogue number? Does it really care for Cd1 and Cd2 ?
As you asked me before, I have changed my tags and the files for the AIDA above, in the way written in the knowledge base, but after a rescan all stayed the same. The album was not identified , manually I could identify it.
It is a shame that you kept your own tags and unidentified operas. Obviously that works, but it is slightly beside the point. But then again I cannot see myself identifying 1900 albums… Retagging and sorting my files is not an option, took me years (literally) to get this far with my collection and I am not finished ripping yet.
I really do not understand why it worked 1500 albums but not for the remaining 1900. They are mostly structured the exact same way.
I really like Roon, but this looks like a lot of work. Leaving my tags, would not make such a great improvement over the LMS iPeng setup I have been using.
How many albums have you left unidentified?
Well then it really worked with you, guess your tags were more standard. But then I always thought mine were pretty standard too. The main difference is, that I took it opera by opera and did not have cd1 etc , because in the streaming world it seemed unimportant to have extra CDs in the folder, plus that could cUse trouble in LMS.
I travel a lot so I cannot tell you exactly how many unidentified albums I have at home. But I have a smaller subset on my work laptop and 11% remain unidentified. I would imagine it would be similar at home. In many cases the reason for that 11% is my choice as i prefer the results unidentified than identified. In other cases, roon simply has no data. Mostly vinyl rips or specialist CD labels with small runs or more obscure repertoire.
It is a different question how many albums did roon auto-identify during the migration process with little manual re-tagging effort on my part? I would say that was about 40%. My experience is that roon has actually required a great deal of retagging. I am actually almost 2 years into a migration from JRiver and I still have 4,000 albums to go. I gave up batch migration a long time a go and migrate albums one by one applying the editing tricks I have picked up by trial and error along the way.
As I say Opera has been a particular problem. You say you got 1,500 identifications out of 3,400. That’s about 44%. Pretty much my experience.
Thanks. Hmm slightly depressing. When I started ripping I thought it would take me till I die . Now I have ripped quite a lot and seem to still be alive, even though it will still take me quite a while.
Seems like the next thing will be identifying 1900 albums in Roon and hopefully be finished before I kick the bucket
I really had hoped it would be slightly better than that, a neverending story.
Unfortunately getting an album identification is just the start of the journey. In many cases an album identification is no guarantee at all that compositions have been correctly identified or with multi-part compositions that the hierarchical layout makes any sense. Even composers, artists, credits, recording dates, recording locations, labels etc. etc. can be very wrong despite an album identification by Roon.
These issues effect some genres much more than others. Unfortunately that includes Classical in general and Opera in particular. The problem with Opera is that it brings under the roof of a single genre everything that roon struggles with. The operas are usually box sets, foreign language (non-English), large casts with complex credits, a complex multi-part hierarchical structure (acts, scenes etc.), multiple versions and revisions. I still believe the migration effort is worth it but I am much less ambitious and accept that I will probably never get round to migrating large parts of my library. I have to maintain several players anyway as in my household I am the only one that wants to use roon.
Classical metadata is a mess of note, it’s not Roon it’s the metadata sources they use , is there a difference we ask?
External Tag editors help, forge find and replace your comma with a semi colon will help some of your woes, MP3 Tag is a freebie for example
I have around 3000 Classical albums with maybe 100 not IDed it took some effort but can be done. Roon matches only when all agrees even a couple of seconds on a track time is enough to fail it
There are quite a few devotees with good advice , keep asking
Hi, instead I changed the semi-colon to comma on the import setting and now all my artists are nice ly separated, which improves the search function greatly. But, identification is not any better.
Often the timings in the metadata from Roon are wrong, so if Roon is looking for anexact match, that could also cause a problem.
