Bye Roon, why I am not renewing my subscription

“This allows for non-commercial use of the data as long as MusicBrainz is given credit and that derivative works (works based on the CC licensed data) are also made available under the same license.”
Non-commercial is a blocker.
Derivative works also CC is a blocker.

I don’t know anything about the specific sources, it’s just a general observation based on a lifetime in software: stuff is either restricted, or restricted from commercial use, or use requires that the using product is also free. Rare to find anything else.

Any user that contributes to MusicBrainz should be aware that their contributions will be made available to the public under the licenses described below. Furthermore, MusicBrainz users give the MetaBrainz Foundation the right to license this data for commercial use. The income from these licenses keeps MusicBrainz running and covers the paychecks of paid MusicBrainz developers.

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Given Roon leverages MusicBrainz I think it’s safe to assume they’re doing so on a commercial basis.

@joel, care to comment here?

Roon should fundamentally and primarily improve the ability to edit and curate what’s there. The editing of tracks and the sliding puzzle hell of reorganising them is so bad, one can’t help but wonder if it’s been done on purpose to stop people from tinkering.

Really it would be good to have Roon pool collective experiences in the community to try and find a good solution to specific “1st build” compromises.

Roon should be perhaps focusing of gaining feedback about how to fix so many little things that are fundamentally “broken” or unusable about Roon, namely box-set handling, classical tagging, generally tagging of music.

IMO It’s odd that Roon asks for extensive feedback about implementations after the event and never officially asks for assistance with ideas about current projects to get it fundamentally right first time.

(although I do remember something about playlists years ago? Did anything ever happen with that dev?)

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@joel already commented on a thread I created a while ago, where I showed heaps of examples. I could probably use all the albums on the Roon home page to show how behind Roon is behind the ‘free’ Tidal app… but the Roon Team is well aware. They say there is a plan to close this gap.

See here:

Roon data versus Tidal desktop app - track data

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They actually do that (see here).

But will there ever be a ‘fundamentally right’?

IMHO it is like it is. Everyone has to decide for himself, if he’s willing to further use a product or abandon it for an other (in other ways flawed) product. Everyone has it’s own priorities and use cases. That’s why so many operating systems (and distributions there of), back-up, music player, … software exists.

I agree. Roon opposed being a tag editor. I believe that a good solution could be a partnership with one of the existing software. In this way, the user can use the program to retrieve data from various sources (musicbrainz, discogs …), correct and fix them. Both, Roon and the editing software will have the same metadata structure so Roon will be able to read correctly and the problems of development and management will be in charge of this external software. Obviously, if the user didn’t want to buy the license for this program, everything would work as now.

It could be a valid solution for everyone: Roon would solve most of the problems on metadata, who will manage the tag editor software will have a very large group of potential customers and the end user will be satisfied

Great suggestion!

The core db dumps are CC0:

https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/

So no problem for commercial use, I think. Roonlabs acknowledges the use musicbrainz data in its about box, btw.

:slight_smile: yeah that one too.

True enough words BlackJack, but it doesn’t stop us from lobbying the powers that be, does it?

" But will there ever be a ‘fundamentally right’?" - no, but there can be a generally accepted better solution. And by openly discussing options and coming to consensus before implementing new ideas/features, it should be more constructive than re-engineering stuff afterwards?

Also, if it’s a case of disagreeing with an alternative because one likes the status quo (eg paw masher, and instant play arguments, or side vs vertical scrolling) then it’s a different situation to revamping something which is generally conceived as being bloody awful, or implementing new features which are really craved by many people and don’t detract from the general usage of the system by those that don’t care for them.

I have no problem with Roon per se, am in my 3rd year of usage, and it finds constant use for me for its really solid multi-room implementation and chromecast support, and also for the flexibility of the Roon-Tags and bookmarks, which I love to use.

But there’s so much more it could do and evolve into.

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Useless without a means of applying them in bulk externally using a tagger or some means of doing so within Roon.

Have you looked at SongKong, it accesses both MusicBrainz and Discogs

It has a demo version that is “Read Only” but you get the idea it’s so inexpensive as well

Mike

Is the metadata a lot better than that visible on allmusic.com and if so, does it combine them in a meaningful manner?

I have both and i find them very useful, but they aren’t optimized for Roon’s structure. For this reason, if roon doesn’t want to manage metadata editing, an external editor that perfectly contemplates the structure of roon metadata would be the optimal solution

I’ve used Yate with some success. I don’t find it intuitive, but it does have features to map between Discogs, Musicbrainz and Roon.

https://2manyrobots.com/yate-features/

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Roon has said they don’t want to be an embedded TAG manager. There is no way around Roon being a metadata manager in many senses of the term. Disclaiming that would be contrary to a mission that is largely driven by metadata.

The matter with Roon disclaiming being a TAG manager is that it inherently is, but it simply keeps it within the database rather than embedded within files. And this has a domino effect problem of keeping a TON of work done by the user trapped within Roon when almost every other media player software is inter-operational by virtue of embedded file tags and folder organization.

For those that love to say “but I listen to music not metadata” or “just enjoy the music” or similar: we that curate our collections do just that, thank you. But the way we do it involves creating various VERY SMART style playlists and other groupings using this metadata. I’ve posted at least a dozen examples of how I do this and it’s all about creating shuffles that play what I want to hear. Roon Radio is OK for this, but at times you just want direct control, which this provides.

So connect the dots - many of us use Roon in ways that make Roon a Venus Flytrap. Nice going in, can’t get out. While that may sound like a smart marketing play, I do resent that Roon doesn’t do anything at all with custom metatags, in or out. “In” would be best since Roon doesn’t want to be a tag editor and that would imply “out.”

Then Roon needs to be able to use those tags like other pieces of software such as Foobar and JRiver. Includes more logic than “OR” in Focus, for example.

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+1. What’s the point of any tags if you can’t use them for retrieval? Definitely need AND and OR operators in Focus, as well as access to all tags and operators like contains, greater than etc. Even adding more than one filter would be a start so you could progressively refine a search. And definitely need to distinguish between a composition as in the opera “Cosi Fan Tutte” and a part of a composition such as an aria.

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I feel tha Roon’s Insistence on using only automated metadata providers is lazy and will never address the issue of more flexibility with metadata. I can’ envision any of the current big box providers coming up with an adequate solution for dealing with box sets — in fact, currently many box sets are either not listed or given the most cursory information. This issue is not going away. I wish Roon would have some response to this.

This would be cool. Why not make a Feature Request?