Part of the reason I love Roon is that I don’t use a streaming service. That’s right, I’m still back in the stone age of navigating a large and messy - yet unique and beloved - music file library. The biggest reason for this is that I’m picky. No streaming service offers more than 50-60% of the music I want to hear on a regular basis. These days, when I buy new music, I prefer to get it through Bandcamp because it offers a direct-to-consumer platform for artists and labels. And because they have a massive collection including tons of independent releases.
Roon is terrible with identifying music purchased through Bandcamp. Tons of releases have to be entered manually. It’s a little less spotty when I update tags prior to saving the file on my Nucleus (incidentally, this is the only aspect of Roon that hasn’t improved since I started using the Nucleus). Yet even then, I often still have to re-enter data in Roon’s album editor. The ‘identify album’ screen is useless in those instances.
Given how many independent releases are available through that one big centralized vendor - Bandcamp - I would highly encourage the Roon team to look into the possibility of integrating data from their website somehow. Even if the data can’t be extracted in bulk, I imagine many of us Roon users could be helpful in building some sort of querying database for Bandcamp releases - perhaps through a platform akin to Roon Valence? Idk.
Perhaps you’ve already looked into this. Perhaps there are legal issues getting in the way. Regardless, I appreciate you reading this feedback.
Alexander there are a lot of Bandcamp fans on this forum. Many of us end up adding the metadata to the database that Roon uses and that helps our fellow user’s who have a similar taste in music.
I think there is a thread where you can vote to add Bandcamp integration. I am pretty sure one of my votes is sat in there
Thanks so much Michael! Was able to put in a vote for it over in the other thread. I figured there would be a contingent of Bandcamp Roon users here somewhere…
Yes more than you think. Tbh Bandcamps metadata at times can be dreadful and it relies on the small
Labels of artists to add metadata to the services Roon uses to identify stuff. MusicBrainz Picard is what we tend to use for any albums not in MusicBrainz, as can start to add the band and album from its interface with your files and then finish it via its webpage. Then it syncs to Roon in a few days. Not sure Bandcamp have an API to allow you to use its Metadata so to get any extra stuff on the release or band. Roon can’t take metadata from Qobuz or Tidal to identify your own albums even though if you add same album from their service it won’t show as identified. You can only see it on their streaming version. Not that these have any extra data it just doesn’t display as unidentified.
But Bandcamp as a service would be awesome to discover new music via Roon.
Pretty much what Simon says, he has been the chief Picard enthusiast on this site and has got a number of us adding the Metadata from BandCamp to the MusicBrainz database. It has made a big improvement to my library of unidentified albums.
I am due another session for my recent purchases which still remain unidentified in Roon.
