Hello there
I think a way to come back on track with this initial post is to get an answer from Roon as OP made some valid points and demonstrated why. Would be nice to have the opinion of Roon on these points to at least understand if these have been acknowledged and if they will be addressed in the future.
The rest, is just noise.
They are rather different. Yate provides a comprehensive toolkit for metadata modifying but you can only match to MusicBrainz one album at a time, and it takes the metadata from MusicBrainz as is. SongKong is designed so you can apply to your whole music collection, and applies more intelligence to MusicBrainz metadata such as resolving some of the issues with Classical metadata in MusicBrainz, such as correctly identifying the track artists in a consistent way.
If you have any questions about SongKong feel free to contact me on the Roon or the SongKong forums
I really think Roon would solve alot of its metadata issue by switching its primary metadata supplier from Rovi to MusicBrainz, and just using Rovi as a supplementary source where necessary.
There are two major problems with MusicBrainz
But both could be solved.
How did they ever come to make such a stupid decision, there a rationale expressed somewhere?
Instead of switching their resource, could Roon give you the option of choice in the file editing feature. They decide which are the top 2 or 3 then give you a tick box to make your selection with the option of change at any time.
Just my own thought for what itâs worth - while not perfect (nothing is) Roon is far and away the best music management and streaming client Iâve used, especially for online streaming services (Tidal in my case).
Can we get a moderator to clean this up? This is a good discussion that doesnât need to be tainted.
I have fully enjoyed Roon and I worked hard to get my system to be able to handle it. I came from JRiver and before that was that Apple disaster. My collection is massive and it took Roon a while to come up to speed with it, but I am pleased with the epic amount of discussions regarding artists, albums, graphic content, and comparisons (rabbit trails) that are contained within. I have discovered so many things about my collection through this service. I donât do any streaming.
I hope for continued improvement in metadata and continued development of the discussions. I would welcome the ability to edit metadata or even contribute to a Roon knowledge base of metadata, and a place for me to make comments about what I think is good about a track or an artist.
I think it is something like this.
When MusicBrainz was first created it was focussed on Pop/Rock. Peoples minor interest in Classical was very much focussed on the composer of the music, so being being able to list all tracks attributed to a composer was deemed more useful than all tracks attributed to a performer or conductor. They couldnât do both because Advanced Relationships did not exist. Artist Credits allowing multiple artists to be credited and Recordings as a separate entity didnât exist either, also meaning that Recording Artist didnât exist.
Its very difficult to change the way things work after the event, but it doesnât matter that much since TrackArtist is sort of a meta- meta field, the composer can usually be found by looking for compose relationships on the recording, the conductor for looking for conductor relationship and so on.
That could be useful for user, but then leaves you with decision of which one to use and you may want to vary that for different album, and doesnât help other customers with the same album. Much better if Roon provides you with the best data in the first place.
An analogy, I haved use Ancestry.com to create my family tree, it has good resources and easy to use, but as my research grew I kept encountering others on Ancestry whose sizeable family tree overlapped mine. Now I could copy part of their research to mine, as they could but this meant we were just continually duplicating each others work. Much better to import tree into wikitree and create a single family tree that everyone can work on, this is a much more productive approach.
Sorry Paul no intention to malign SongKong
I left Apple with my Apple ][ in the late 80âs soo can only go off what people comment
SongKong is a great product and I recommend it all the time
To each his own. Enjoy the music.
Not everybody has the same preferences; I am sure there are people out there who appreciate both music and the Metadata that comes with the files. You need to understand and accept that
I do understand that. I just donât think you cancel a great service like Roon because you donât like the metadata. I personally use Roon to listen to music. I donât ever read any of the metadata. I really donât care if itâs even there. You obviously feel different and if itâs an issue for you I hope you find something that makes you happy. I have.
No I do not feel differently and it is not an issue for me. I like roon and Iâm staying with it, I am just telling you there are people with different tastes and priorities. If somebody chooses not to stay with roon for whatever reason, thatâs just their choice.
Fully agree. Never said otherwise.
Me too. I love the music I hear from Roon, throughout my house, all sorts of setups. (And for some I even get to play with RPis and the like.) Yet I still use iTunes to FIND that music (my own personal manually curated hierarchically organized playlists), because in my experience Roon is a weak to terrible platform for helping me find my own music. You can find many users making the same complaint. Moving on, Roonâs queue, radio, and connection to streaming services are also great. Itâs that hole in the middle that is by far its weakest point.
I think metadata is such a big issue for many because its primarily what sets Roon apart from the competition.
There are 10âs of music players that âplay musicâ as well as, if not better than Roon but non of them have the rich meta data infused browsing system.
This is what people pay a lot of money for.
Without it they may as well look elsewhere for a lot less outlay.
Itâs hard to generalize. Some of us chose Roon so that they can have good-quality digital music distribution to multiple systems throughout their home, controlled by any mobile device that happens to be at hand (I tried several other options before, none good enough). Metadata integration is useful too, but not the key value for us. The recent upgrade of the Radio algorithm and integration with Qobuz are (delightful) icing on the cake. As for âa lot of money,â a Roon lifetime subscription cost a small fraction of the total hardware cost of my home audio systems.