Bye Roon, why I am not renewing my subscription

Well, maybe not anything - but surely not the entire tivo music db (or knowledge graph, as they put it) or whatever allmusic has behind its site. :smiley:

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Metadata is a big can of worms. My inclination would be to have greater ability to manage my own metadata within Roon (artist info, composer info, album info), the ability to choose mine over Roonā€™s if/when desired and the ability to fully extract it if/when desired. While I think music sources can and will improve, I donā€™t there thereā€™s anyway for Roon to please everyone fully. So giving users an ability to better self-manage would be a step in the right direction. I love having the ability to drop PDFs, artist and album art in as well as edit much of the metadata, but Iā€™m curious why thereā€™s no ability to manage the descriptive info. Legal issues I suspect but it seems a bit arbitrary.

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Indeed. And with the unexpected victory of Oracle over Google in the API copyrights case, who knows fair use even means?

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If I remember rightly Roon have quite firmly opposed being a glorified or otherwise Tag editor

They provide only limited editing the rest being from external sources

I believe the view is there are plenty ofTag editors about why reinvent the wheel

Am I correct ?

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Hear, hear.

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@anon49565150, tell us more about your personal-use web interface to LMS?

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Oh yes, please elucidate!!
It reminds me of Moose, which I liked very much back in the dayā€¦

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The effort of one individual could not be seen as ā€œcompetingā€ against Roon :slight_smile: so Iā€™ll say a few words. It is ongoing, and I have developed so far an album grid page, and artist grid page, with navigation and various sorts and filters. It just aims at having a more ā€œmodernā€ look and feel than the LMS web interface, and be simpler to use. But it is a lot of workā€¦ When i get something presentable I will post it on the LMS forum, with the hope that some experienced developers can contribute to enhance it.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of things I would have liked to do but have been limited by LMS. But the idea is to have something simple, and it will remain simpleā€¦

I have notes (copies of reviews, linksā€¦) in text files in my folders, and they can be displayed in a tab when viewing an album (a local web server needs to be set up - I use caddyserver which is very simple to install and automatically converts files in markdown format to html). I plan on being able to edit the files from the web page, but have not done so yet.

For artists, the ā€œartist and album informationā€ plugin can retrieve artist artwork, which I display, but I intend on setting up some sort of artist database as well to add more information (essentially Wikipedia links). At some pointā€¦ That is a challenge itself.

I have also strived to present each albumā€™s tracks more simply than in LMS. I put the option of displaying the ā€œcommentsā€ tag as a sort of header to group tracks, which is convenient, for example to name discs, but also to identify for example: original album, bonus tracksā€¦ Sort of what Discogs allows you to do with headers.

I also have the option of splitting tracks into works using a seperator character (I use a colon) which is not ideal, but better than nothing.

My biggest issue is musician credits: I have entered them in text files in my album folders (copies from various sources: discogs, Wikipedia, album jackets, jazz discography websites, etcā€¦), often grouping them (with headers) into the different sessions that are covered by an album. I want to find a simple way to update tags from these text filesā€¦

This file based system is far from optimal, but it works for me.

My initial idea was to collect information on jazz discography sessions into a web database, that could be searched and used to populate album credits.

If you know at least one musician, or the band, and the recording date of an album or track, and have a fairly comprehensive sessions database, then it is easy to identify the musicians (since a given person can only play on one set at a given time!). This approach is interesting as you no longer rely on identifying albums, just sessions. Albums are constantly reissued in a variety of formats, but sessions do not changeā€¦

I believe this could be applicable to classical music as well.

For jazz, there are a variety of sources available. For example, this one: https://www.jazzdisco.org
Columbia has a similar project: https://jdisc.columbia.edu

There are a lot of private ā€œcollectorsā€ that build discographies.

Mosaic box sets alos have a wealth of information.

Etcā€¦

But to get back to LMS, it is limited, and for the time I am using it to leverage its existing functionalities.

If Roon were interested in developing some ā€œadd onsā€ to enhance their current solution it would be great, but I do not see that happening.k

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Unfortunately, thatā€™s all directed at collectors of classics, not as listeners of new jazz :frowning: My main issue is that new jazz releases from independent labels have no of very limited metadata. Even for highly visible current jazz artists like Jason Moran.

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You are right. But it is a startā€¦
My assumption is that for new music the information is more readily available. I could be wrong.

I wish :confused: Many small independent labels donā€™t upload metadata to Allmusic or Musicbrainz.

I realize that. Discogs may be a better source.
Anyway, as is said, I am just populating text files so far :frowning:

ā€¦ but then real fans could jump in and add the data in musicbrainz. :sunglasses:

Yes, absolutely. And it should ultimately show up in Roon. Populating Musicbrainz does take some time though. I started populating some albums on Discogs and gave upā€¦

Doing that :smile: hereā€™s a recent example https://musicbrainz.org/release/711905d5-aa77-43ab-a806-95a4be4f8365

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Right - and for a classical album with no existing reference in musicbrainz it can take ages. At least thatā€™s how it sometimes feels to me.

Labels should be incited to upload their data to musicbrainz.

Not sure if that would help much; the big players with their own distribution chains (and at times streaming services) may just not care; for distributers like the Orchard it may be an additional bar when onboarding labels; for independent players - self releasing artists included - it may just be too much work. Iā€™m hoping for platform players to step in - bandcamp, for instance. Or some like those listed at musicbrainz as (major) supporters: https://metabrainz.org/supporters

For years when I was using iTunes I obsessively contributed closely noted metadata of jazz albums to CDDB, every track listed with performers and their instruments. And what happened to it all? Gracenote. Kind of soured me on community-sourced metadata effort.

Understandable concerns. With metabrainz I hope even if they had to cease operation data will not be lost.

https://metabrainz.org/social-contract