Bye Roon, why I am not renewing my subscription

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?

Almost everything is. And the Oracle/Google spat over the Java APIs shows us that even things most people thought weren’t copyrightable might in fact be. IP is slippery. There are a number of issues here.

One, does the record company or band own the copyright on the track listing? After all, someone came up with the names of the tracks, and someone arranged those names into a play order for the album. Arguably both are creative works. I know some lawyers who could argue persuasively that the track listing itself is a copyrighted work. Which would mean that the contributors don’t have the right to copy the metadata into the database without permission.

Secondly, do the database operators have the rights to the data, even if the contributors assented to a click-through license when they signed up? I know that the Python Software Foundation requires all contributors to provide a signed hardcopy document providing a transfer of rights before any code, even a couple of lines, can be incorporated into the codebase. They want to make sure they own the code.

The format is not quite the same , inevitably, but close it does a auto lookup and provides Work/Part and Composer in a Roon friendly format and writes the tags to file

eg.

Composer Ludwig van Beethoven
Composer Sort - Beethoven, Ludwig van

Sonata for cello & piano No. 1 in F major, Op. 5/1 - AllMusic

Sonata for cello & piano No. 1 in F major, Op. 5 No.1 – SongKong

a quick find and replace away

Sadly Apple only !!

I have heard Yate compares favourably with SongKong

Sadly there are no standards so everyone does their own thing

The Text Processing in MusiCHI Tagger is well worth a look , it can fix up very quickly any discrepancies

I agree a Roon Processor with look up would be first prize

Even though Roon does it and stores it in the internal db , should Roon fade I would prefer in it in my File Tags …

Software developers dream , but life’s too short :sunglasses:

AFAIK one cannot claim copyright for a (CD) track listing - at least not in the US where the Metabrainz Foundation resides. (see https://www.copyright.gov/comp3/chap300/ch300-copyrightable-authorship.pdf). The same would go for names and also facts. It’s hard to imagine that this would change - but then one never knows. :wink: At least for the time being there doesn’t seem to be a barrier entering this kind of information at musicbrainz.

If this stands then your second point wouldn’t be a problem either.

AFAIK, the copyrighted product is the database – the information about relations between the data-points – and not the arbitrary track/artist/composer/album/… names on their own.

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This varies by country to some extent, and the approaches of Civil Law countries is a little different from Common Law countries. Treaties have helped even that out a bit.

The protection for something like a track listing, track credits, or a database thereof would be a compilation copyright. Analogous to the old phone books, where each piece was publicly available information but the compilation still took effort that was afforded protection by copyright.

So the process by which the information is compiled is key. If you are pulling it out of some database, then maybe it is protected. But if you are compiling it yourself, then it should not be protected. My gut feeling is that if you are getting it from the back of the record or the liner notes, it should be OK and the labels likely should not claim copyright ownership on that, but if you’re just looking at some website that’s compiled the information, it probably violates both copyright and the website’s terms of use.