Cannot use local file tags

New to Roon. Please tell me if I’m missing something. A minor issue with multi-part compositions on one album (J.S. Bach: The French Suites), but what bothers me is there does not seem to be a method to fix it by using the file tags (which should be correct, I use Yate to edit them). Suite No. 3 has 7 parts, not 5, and the album has 6 performances, not 8. Even when I un-identify the album it wants to pull the incorrect metadata from Roon.

Hi, @Paul_Sherriffs, thanks for the report, could you please share a screenshot with filetags of those two parts which were not groupped into a composition?

Thanks!


Ivan

Sure. Here they are:


I also populated the work & movement fields to see if that would make a difference:


Um, shouldn’t Keith Jarrett be the Album Artist? J.S. Bach is the Composer… Roon is probably metaphorically scratching its head.

Maybe. I like to keep albums sorted by composer if it’s classical, but by artist otherwise. In the past (using Audirvana) I simply copied composer into album artist for classical albums and artist into album artist otherwise.

My real question is, if for some reason I want to override the Roon-provided metadata can I do so? I have added about 200 albums so far to Roon and this is the first one when I had any reason to do so.

Yes, you can tell Roon to prefer file tags over what it knows about your music. See here. You can do this on an individual album basis, or for multiples, or for your entire library.

So if I want, for this album the file tags to be preferred I can do this:

Then click the save button. It’s intuitive, but in this case it doesn’t do anything. For example my title fields here do not currently include the BVW numbers, so it’s still getting this info from Roon.

The problem with setting metadata on an indivual album or individual track(s) basis is that the settings do not “stick” in the GUI. If you go leave the Album editor metadata preferences tab and then go back to it, you will notice that all settings you previously entered in this tab are unset. So you basically have no way to confirm that the settings you previously defined on an album have been acknowledged or not by Roon. I find this behavior very annoying, particularly when you try understand why changes you made do not appear to work correctly.

Would it be possible to improve on this Roon behavior?

Apparently the behaviour is because if you’re selecting multiple items to edit, they may contain a mix of Roon metadata and tag data for each field, depending on the past edits you’ve already done. This screen allows you to change those fields all at once and so every time you open the screen. the default state is going to be “don’t change anything” until you choose what you want to edit.

In other words, it’s not showing the existing values. It’s showing you what’s you’re going to change if you hit save.

I agree it’s somewhat confusing. I suspect that changing the design may have ramifications elsewhere, so if the Roonies are thinking about a change, it’s probably in the context of the major UI re-design that has been hinted at (with no timeline, as is Roon policy).

Thanks for your info, @Paul_Sherriffs! May I ask you te send this album over to us for the further investigation? I will contact you via PM with more details.

Thanks!


Ivan

Paul, sorry to be late to the party. It looks like the last two tracks use a slash to delimit the work from the movement (PART in Roon parlance). Is that same scheme being used for the first five tracks.

I created an action in Yate that took the track title and populated the WORK and PART tags that often get Roon out of the fog. Or, you can do it manually.

I concur with your general observation that once Roon IDs a composition, you have to work hard to convince it otherwise. WORK and PART, while manually intensive, almost always work.

Hi John. Yes I did try populating the WORK & PART tags, but it made no difference. I left the titles as they are with WORK forward-slash-space PART. Should that be the case? Ivan wanted me to upload a copy of the album, but there was an issue with the password. I could not log in.

@Paul_Sherriffs, I sent you a PM with a correct link, let’s try again, sorry :slight_smile:

Thanks!


Ivan

The album is uploaded. Did you get it?

yes, @Paul_Sherriffs, I downloaded it, looking into the issue.

Thanks for your patience !


Ivan