Beethoven & Liszt Confusion

How does Roon handle transcriptions?

I am looking for Beethoven Symphony No.9 Transcribed By Liszt, I know I have 5 recordings (OK !!)

in composer view

I see one as Symphonies de Beethoven (9), transcription for piano, S.464 etc, Composer Beethoven , Arranger Liszt

I see 2 under Beethoven Symphony No.9 Composer Beethoven arranger Liszt

I see 2 under Liszt Composer Liszt Original Material Beethoven

Nowhere can I merge these compositions to show all 5 at a view

I have set Work = Composition = (Beethoven) Symphony No.9 etc , Part = Movement etc and then Selected Use File rather than Roon , still no joy

Any ideas how I can merge the compositions of what appears to be 2 composers . I have even tried to remove credit to Beethoven as a Composer and set Composer = Liszt

What a mess

Who did Compose it I believe it to be Liszt , based on material by Beethoven

As wonderful as Roon can be, its support of classical music is uninformed and spotty. Just yesterday, I tried to simply find a complete recording of Puccini’s “Il Tabarro.” Good luck. You get dozens of references to excerpts but no clear-cut way to find a complete recording. Plus, it utterly failed to find the complete recordings on my media server at all. (Never even catalogued them, I suppose.)

In your case, Mike, my impulse would be to tag it as Composer: Beethoven/Arranger: Liszt because Liszt transcribed the composition for piano, but he didn’t compose a new symphony based on Beethoven’s work. It’s ALL Beethoven’s composition. (As opposed, for instance, to Liszt’s operatic fantasies which ARE new compositions based on themes by other composers.)

As far as getting all the results on one page, good luck. Roon seems to be in denial mode but it needs A LOT of work to properly manage classical music. (I still love it, though, and have spent MANY wonderful afternoons wandering through links and connections throughout my music collection.)

I think the short answer is that roon doesn’t. I cannot really see that there is even a concept.

If you go to the credit roles list in the knowledge base you will see no less than 14 different roles containing the word transcription. However, they are all “Production” roles so engineering functions like “Vinyl Transcription” and “Effects Transcription” and translation functions like “Score Transcription” get lumped together with content functions like “Orchestra Transcription” and “Piano Transcription”. This is of course why we are tending to use the role of Arranger instead as although there are 17 of them and they also mix up engineering and content functions they are at least categorized as “Composer” functions. But of course Transcriber and Arranger are not really the same thing.

There is a similar problem with Saint-Saens, Berlioz, Chopin and all the Opera as has already been mentioned. But to be honest I have pretty much given up on roon as a Classical library manager (are you still trying Mike?) but I do like it for casual listening with radio, shuffle and I like the integration with Qobuz playlists .So, with transcriptions I usually just assign the original composer and e.g. Liszt as the arranger and merge the transcriptions with the original piece. This means I can make more varied playlists and get some surprises with radio and shuffle which is the way I tend to use roon anyway.

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I am still persevering :grimacing:

As ever it’s metadata quality and consistency

I still maintain JRiver and manage my classical collection through it

I use Roon to meander JRiver to accurately, quickly and reliably get to my classical content

It involves effort but what the hell i’m retired , it keeps me busy …and I can listen while I’m doing it

It’s heap less frustrating than Roon. Roon has enough good bits to persevere but for serious classical navigation it’s quite useless …

Yes. A great shame. But there is clearly no will to change that.

I let my JRiver subscription go and lost track of when I made file or roon tagging edits, so I am actually in a worse situation now. For local navigation I often just use windows explorer these days as I am tired of roon’s philosophical debates on this. With the reality of incomplete and inaccurate metadata, I find it is not only easier and quicker to navigate a folder, it is pretty much the only way without being a slave to tagging. I’m quite impressed by Qobuz and Idagio for discovery so that’s what I tend to use. I still use roon for casual listening on a laptop as there is just enough to hang on but it does seem to be less and less. I had a server disaster a while back which I haven’t fixed, and ended up dropping a roon subscription I was no longer using whilst I figure out what I really want to do next. Leaning towards resurrecting physical media for local and the direct streaming apps are getting a lot better than they were. In the end, I found I didn’t miss my local library as I had enough on my laptop.

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Roon plus JRiver. Seems like we’re in the same strategy camp, Mike, right down to the retirement. :smiley:

Sounds like my dilemma,you can ressurect JRiver you can upgrade to 26 from about any version , i guess you were 23 or 24 may be. Its 30 usd i think

The whole view bit makes life so much easier

It seems Roon have little interest in classical stuff, admittedly the state of metadata it would be a major ask to do anything beyond what they have. It is a minority genre we keep getting told