Has like 90 tracks. That is a lot, but as all are well-tagged regarding composers, performers and compositions, I kind of have the feeling it is browsable as one album. Sometimes you have to focus.
I agree, but think this is very much an early Jazz thing with lots of sessions being recorded, and maybe bootleg-worthy rock (GD and alike). This does in my understand defy any idea of structured browsing, you have to live with the vast track number within one album, and apply roon´s multi-dimensional browsing methods, like focus.
At one point Media Monkey 4 had an add-on function that allowed a particular file to be associated with more than one album. So the single file for Miles Davis’ Morpheus, for example, could be associated with Track 1 Disc 1 of the box set Chronicle and with Track1 of the Miles Davis album Miles Davis and Horns, whch is where it originally appeared on cd (it was track 2 on side B of the lp). I never did. get that to function consistently, but I appreciated the idea.
I tried @Brian_Resch suggestion above to use WORK and PART tags, and it does solve some of the issues, but creates a new one, which is that it breaks Roon’s automatic linking of different versions of a composition.
Does anyone know how/if Roon uses the GROUPING tag, which seems like it could be helpful in these contexts?
in my experience, Roon does not recognise the GROUPING tag. SECTION can be used to tag an opera Act, though I have used it in other situations, such as the live Miles Davis “bootleg” releases, where recordings were made in multiple locations and across multiple sets on the same date. Eg WORK = location, SECTION = performance date and set number, PART = the actual track. Or sometimes have WORK = location and date, PART = actual track. I know date and location have their own tags but doing it this way as well gives a pleasing result, for example:
Where a box set comprises individual releases (eg Hyperion recent box set of Romantic Piano Concertos), then I tag them as individual releases with the associated performer and album artwork and use ROONALBUMTAG as “Romantic Piano Concertos”. This combined with the ORIGINALRELEASEDATE enables a smart playlist to be generated with the albums together in the correct order.
OK, because I’m a visual thinker, I have hacked together, with the help of Claude, an HTML prototype of how Box Set navigation could work in Roon.
The data model used is described in the info box on the landing page – basically, GROUPING is used as a level above the current Album top level for a particular release. That should let the WORK and PART tags still operate the way they do, to link compositions and to help organize classical recordings, especially.
As others have noted, this would take some manual work from the user to implement, but in this demo, all of the information was actually derived from MusicBrainz. But it’s by no means comprehensive on this front.
I’d be interested if anyone who’s interested in this topic were to click around and offer any thoughts/suggestion/feedback.
Would you expect the individual albums that are “grouped” together in a box set to also show up as individual albums on the artist overview or album page?
Thanks for putting this together, it looks really cool. I see the problem, though, that it is breaking with a fair bunch of browsing rules and defined hierarchy of roon displaying albums and releases. It would basically mean adding another layer of entities and type of release. I am not a coder, but this looks like it would require enormous alterations.
Not to speak of metadata. I don´t really think there is reliable data in MB telling the software, which disc of a boxset is equivalent to which original album release.
And, i would personally see the main benefit in having an overview on large classical anthologies and live boxsets like by GD. I am afraid metadata situation is even worse in such cases, because I don´t see a consistent way of MB/Xperi delivering the information that for example discs 9-11 are belonging together and need to be shown separated by the title ´May 9, 1977 — Buffalo Memorial Auditorium, Buffalo, NY´. Same with different covers, I they exist. If all this information is existing, I would be fine with just having a ´disc´ selector including the disc title, instead of treating the whole box as an album and then having albums under the boxset as an additional browsing layer.
In my understanding, examples like MD sessions or Beatles in Mono, are not really benefitting from such browsing structure. In the former case, I would be fine a single-album view to keep the overview on the tracks, and in the latter case I would simply prefer the albums separated. I see not much benefit in having them together, as part of the Beatles Mono box, so I can navigate from the boxset page to the album page.
Good suggestion. I do use additionally the IMPORTDATE tag for the correct order of albums within a set or within Roon in general. Unfortunately I tag only the later sets and albums with that info.
As a starter given a box set in MusicBrainz, the overall artwork , ie the Box Image is normally all you get
where does the disc subtitle come from ? ( a very limited few boxes have subtitles)
where does the individual artwork come from ?
The Beatles example is easy , as it a plain collection for known albums
@Mark_McClusky1 effort is the right way but I agree its not an easy one
In Roon’s current infrastructure a Tag is the nearest object to box set . Fixed set , a container for a collection of albums, already a visual “Box”. Sorting default is wrong but that s a minor code change . It would be needed to have a single image “Box Image” rather than the composite 4 album covers.
BUT at best its a template for manual editing , NOT very Roon, this is a typical example BUT it is a collection of solo albums
@Mike_O_Neill we certainly agree on the difficulties.
Absolutely true, which in my understanding makes such ´multi-album boxsets´ the easiest ones to find a workaround for or deal with using roon´s standard methods.
I frankly don´t think Roonlabs would fundamentally alter the browsing hierarchy and introduce new classes of releases, if there isn´t remotely a chance it could work with automatic identification using its given metadata sources. We should take into account that presumingly the majority of users is not enjoying manual credit editing and metadata grooming.
Whatever solution we suggest, it should also be compliant with boxsets sourced from streaming service like Tidal and Qobuz.
This example looks to me more like a playlist of albums, grouped by tags, than an existing boxset release. If albums exist as separated releases and have their own title, cover and release date, as sourced from Xperi/MB, I personally don´t see much value in the fact that they were released as a set as well.
Have some of these in my collection, and tremendously enjoy them, but I don´t see the problem in browsing the albums, and seeing the overview in artist´s discography, focus-filtered, or alike:
As you ask, I was thinking about examples, but I would say yes in every case I think about so far. I personally like the roon approach that album releases are the main foundation of browsing logic.
I tend to agree. But we should also take into account that metadata do not grow on trees. There are real people (including me) that fill the database of MusicBrainz and I think that they are mostly music lovers too.
If one resists to do some work for his/her own collection than he/she have to live with the consequence of poorer metadata.
And again, this has nothing to do with box set handling primarily. It could be very easy to give a sub disc name in Roon, e.g.
@Enno14 i absolutely agree, metadata is a question of public interest, which everyone can support (I am a Discogs guy).
Certainly true, but the majority of people nowadays relies on streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, and they basically pay a subscription fee in order to have music delivered with usable metadata. Tidal and Qobuz are not cheap, and roon charges another fee on top. So we should acknowledge that people pay, and expect proper metadata in return without investing too much time.
It is a sad truth, but the age of downloads, rips and local collections, perfectly curated and tagged, is in decline. The Roon way of blending local and streamed content in a musicologically useful form, in my understanding is the best way to go. That does not mean they would invest a lot into features which serve mainly people with local libraries. And boxsets/samplers in the streaming world, seem to be organized in a vastly different way.
I personally will stick to my local collection, keeping metadata in good shape for roon to do its magic. But I am increasingly unwilling to do this for albums which I just have as some kind of ´back catalogue´, so I invested this time solely for the core collection, like 4,000 albums which I consider to be my favorites, and which are all unavailable on streaming services (which is probably an exception). The rest I have removed from roon´s main folder, keeping them disabled 99% of the time, including the majority of boxsets, and surprisingly I never missed anything. I always find what I intend to find.
All box sets in my collection already have disc subtitles it is (for me) a matter of matching my name for it [Disc] to whatever Roon decides is the appropriate tag [DISCSUBTITLE] seems favourite
I agree to “fix up” a hundred CD box, adding [composition], [movement] etc even with the tools available is still many hours work and in my case many screen hours I shouldn’t be doing.
I am fast approaching a library where I have ONE album for an artist just to force an appearance in the Artist list , after that Tidal coves my needs
I appreciate everyone taking a look, and that it sparked some discussion.
I’d love to talk more about this – as I was playing with the scheme, I tried pretty hard not to add too much complexity to the current data model. It’s one new entity, but one that fits, I think, broadly into the model.
And I think we can stipulate that metadata will be a challenge, but, for instance, all of the metadata for that massive classical box set was on MusicBrainz and came in clean. To echo a sentiment above, I don’t think that the fact that it might be incomplete should be a blocker to trying to improve this..
