Personally I don’t think Roon has any intention of ever doing better on the fronts raised in this thread, I truly don’t think they care. It’s a business and the only game in town is growing the subscriber base by continuing to extend valence and streaming services.
1 Like
I think Roon’s creators have bitten off way more than they can chew and refuse to acknowledge this or are afraid to acknowledge this.
On the one hand we get grandiose language about how much better every new release is, how much more advanced than the competition they are and on the other hand they completely ignore the problems we keep pointing out (well, maybe not completely - I got a question about my beef with the search function but I’ve gotten no further reponse since).
As for first world problems… Let’s be honest: Roon is a first world product. If Roon is relevant, then so are the problems users experience.
If the problems are irrelevant because they are “first world” then Roon itself is irrelevant.
4 Likes
Not true. There are several features in Roon that with careful use make ingesting boxsets a lot more effective. But overall boxsets are a disaster because labels just put them together with no attention to metadata as a way of grabbing a few more $$ from a declining classical audience.
Roon has to apply its limited resources to where they do the most good to the most users, and fighting a losing battle against exploitative record labels is not a good use of resources.
BTW, Roon does fine with most new classical issues, probably because the labels have to create metadata for those anyway for streaming. I listen to a wide range of non-popular musical genres, including classical, and the biggest problem is by far missing metadata for new releases by very small labels or independent artists.
3 Likes
I can live with that, Geoff! 
It’s just that it can feel like quite a big storm when it’s in your own teacup 
I guess what I was trying to say is this:
Interesting. I don’t listen to or buy classical. But my understanding of the ‘box set’ issue is that you can buy massive sets containg dozens of cds for a cheap price. But, roon doesn’t handle them well because of missing metadata or it can’t identify the discs. So, is this a matter of users purchasing inferior product to save money and expecting roon to “fix” it or make it usable?
3 Likes
It’s not as simple as you suggest. Especially with classical music, many box sets contain many recordings, or remasters of recordings, that have been unavailable for years. So it’s certainly not always (exclusively) a money issue.
You are right, however, in your observation that it’s poor metadata from the record companies Roon has te deal with. I know it’s unrealistic to expect Roon to “fix” all of this, that would be an impossible task.
That said, there are many ways in which Roon could improve box set handling and many of these have repeatedly been discussed on this forum. The poor attention this has received over the past years is the reason this topic was created, I guess.
I do believe that the users who frequently experience issues with this because of their large classical collections are just a tiny percentage of the total Roon user base. But, as has been stated above:
IMO that includes all users, even the “exceptions”.
3 Likes
A bit more complicated than that. I have some boxsets that include discs that one cannot get as single discs any more. But in general I prefer to buy individual original recordings or specifically remastered recordings than mess around with badly curated boxsets.
1 Like
Got it. Thanks!
1 Like
Yes, sadly this seems to be true. When Roon started out, it was into local libraries and the streaming was an add on (to put it simple), now it is the other way around, seems like it is going more and more down the streaming service lane.
I guess people buying and ripping CDs are a thing of the past. We were mainly the step between physical media and digital media. Now the next step ist actually not owning stuff, but streaming. Doing that - I believe - you hardly have any issues with Roon, since Metadata is there through the streaming service etc.
From a business point of view this makes sense, also if you start out with music now - you probably will not even understand what local libraries are about.
But - and this is a big But,streaming services have a lot of stuff, but a collector has much more specialized recordings, which are out of print etc. The mixture of both worlds is great.
In a perfect world, some of the Roon team would be crazy classical music collectors who would want to make this software the best for local libraries with online discovery.They would have all the problems we face during testing and naturally fix them, or atleast tell us what was going on.
But this does not seem to be the case, so why fix something, that is not broken? If you do not use Roon that way, you will not run into the issue - therefore it is not an issue for you.
Unfortunately (at least with Qobuz), the streaming service(s) are taken any cheap records, distributed by companies that take music older than 30 years.
Those companies do not pay any royalties ( and probably there is a good deal in it for Qobuz as well)
Just take a look how many records/year are released from 2015 and later fo artists such as:
Elvis Presley
Frank Sinatra
Aretha Franklin
B.B. King
John Lee Hooker
and many if not all ‘original’ blues artists
I am sure a lot of artists can be added to this shortlist.
This is another aspect that I do not like at all in streaming services.
They are pushing away consumers from the original artist’s works, just for the money.
And unfortunately, Roon is not giving a real helping hand here.
To ease the pain on Qobuz a little bit, they at least offer a sorting choice, based on relevance and on most sold. That helps filtering out these last year’s rubbish records.
In Roon, the only thing you can do is sorting on oldest records first, in order not have to push aside hundreds of albums.
Dirk
It’s hard to know who to chastise for the poor metadata, since different folk seem to fall down on different albums. The Mosaic box set releases are known for their highly detailed information documentation (i.e. metadata). Unfortunately, this often doesn’t make into roon, for various reasons. The Jackie McLean Blue Note set has pretty good metadata in roon (date recorded, personnel), except it is missing the composer for many tracks. This information is listed in allmusic so shouldn’t roon have it? In another Mosaic instance allmusic is just strange. For the Mingus 1964 Jazz Workshop box set, Ken Dryden has written very detailed notes in allmusic covering every one of the 33 tracks (save the announcements tracks) providing data on personnel, venue and performance notes (these are in allmusic but not in roon - why not?). At the same time allmusic has zero metadata about this set, not even a track listing and nothing about personnel. So even when the creator of the box set has as complete metadata as one could want, allmusic and roon fall down. I take it that roon has completely outsourced the provision of metadata; if so, then roon should examine closely whether its partners are allowing it to live up to its claims about what its product can do.
1 Like
I know Frank, I used your remark to emphasize this. It was not meant as criticism in any way, quite the contrary.
A lot of these concerns are very minority “collector” concerns. I do have some old stuff including boxsets, but most of the music I listen to is recently recorded jazz, classical, world. A good portion of that shows up on Qobuz, most of the rest on Bandcamp, the reset on a variety of digital download services (7digital, Presto Digital, …).
For whatever reason , and I don’t doubt the grabbing record labels , Big Box Sets like Brendel 114 are a disaster
Roon fails for my use case , I run big boxes in JRiver so at least I can manually tag and navigate by individual disc of the set.
Roon still presents 114 pretty little hyperlinks even if the metadata is c**p , I have a good view of the layout of the box but where do I star looking for the 2 live recording of the Diabelli Variations
Mozart 255 is 200 disc and no doubt Beethoven 2020 will be the same
There is no excuse for this omission other than a marginal genre with few Customers , the accent on CUSTOMER …
1 Like
Nor have I!
thank the unknown-god, I don’t like jazz , I guess 
1 Like
My biggest gripe is not Metadata, i can live without that . It is navigation
Yes big boxes are cheap per CD but often replace parts of my collection eg Worn Out vinyl etc with pristine often remastered copies. I do not use them as cheap bulk music , quite the opposite . If you not a classical listener or a collector this wont interest you but it does ME and plenty of others
All this is not much use if you cant find the music within the box
8 Likes
I think you are right, but the “magic handling” of metadata is also a big problem IMHO.
I have a fairly well-tagged collection and I had a lot of inconsistent attribution of works, expecially in the op.XX/ Nr.YY category. The metadata provider is not consistent in how to group these kind of works. So I thought, I’d be smart and set my library settings to “prefer file” for the composition and work tags…
What I have experienced are two things that made me reverse this…
- I lost my composition descriptions - Roon does not match compositions even if I use the same canonical names for the works as Rovi.
- At the same time I still have a couple of Bach works that Roon matches to existing (but wrong) works.
So in one case I lose information when setting my libary to “prefer file” and at the same time Roon tries to outsmart me by deciding that the work I have tagged and want to have preferred is not the right work…
I’ve given up trying to understand this. So apart from the boxset disaster it would be a big step for me if “prefer” tag data would work as advertised…
Honestly, I do not expect this ever to be adressed.
1 Like
Unfortunately i think you are correct , its a minority use case