Classical composer and ensemble naming conventions have changed

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Hi, until some point in the last 10 or 15 days, Roon has as a general rule followed the AMG (English based) naming convention for classical composers and ensembles/artists when using the latin alphabet. Overnight this has been changed to native language or what is considered (sometimes subjectively) to be a preferred latinised form of anon latin name (for Russian composers or artists for example). In some cases (eg Sergei Rachmaninoff vs previously Sergey Rachmaninov) the cases are not major but they will conflict with data one has embedded in one’s original files; in other cases, unless you can learn all latin alphabet languages (and I do speak a few and am writing as a bilingual French/English speaker with knowledge of a few others) it is a significant step backwards in using Roon’s powerful metadata tools (eg unless one speaks Swedish how can one even fathom that Kungliga Filharmonikerna is the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra).

Now I don’t want to offend anyone’s language preferences or imply that any is superior to another, ie if anyone wants to have the choice to apply native names, that’s fine by me, but it would really help if we had an option somewhere in settings (and if there is one then please indicate where it is) to revert to international naming conventions or AMG conventions. It is curious to see the original name for the composer/artist and, when there is a description below, that they are referred to in their international convention name. I appreciate that in some cases original names are the international convention and that there are many other issues one has to deal with with ensembles and orchestras that have gone through name changes in the past (eg most of the former Soviet orchestras) but this seems like an unnecessary complication that turned up unannounced.

I am aware that one can prioritise metadata from one’s tags and I curate my tags quite extensively usually, but not in as rich a manner as Roon provides (one of the reason why I joined on launch) and for the first few years, one could not tag performer information in a manner compatible with Roon and I have not gone through full reedits for all the many albums I have. In addition this will not work for albums in the library from a streaming platforms, platforms, which in the case of Qobuz I believe, still use the international/AMG convention. Considering the size of my classical library, having to reedit names manually will many days of work or basically killing off performer searches for lesser known ensembles (which kind of where they are most useful).

Apologies if this has already been brought up elsewhere but general threads on updates become very long and I couldn’t find this issue flagged up plus although I suspect it is linked with the recent version update, it did start appearing beforehand.

As always many thanks for the Roon team for continuing to make a great product consistently better and for listening to users’ feedback.

Have you made any edits to this content in Roon?

Is this content from local files, TIDAL, or Qobuz?

Screenshot of import settings

Description of the issue

Hi. I’ve been using roon for a little over a year and am having some terrible problems with it that are not being addressed by roon support and I’m just not knowledgeable enough to understand some of the info I have seen online. May I ask you for some help on my problem? steven [moderated: private email address removed]

Hi Steven, I have had a quick look at your original thread and will look at it over the week end. I am not from technical support nor part of the Roon team but will try and answer in that thread rather than here as the issue is quite different. Some the albums you have in your images (eg the Szell and Klemperer Mahler albums I also have n my library in the same formats (SACD rips as well as CD issues) so I could envisage what may be the source of your problems if it is not a corrupt drive issue. My interactions have always been well handled by the team and others from the community so let’s hope the issue can be identified quite quickly. As indicated above I will get back to you on that post as it is best to do things in public so that if the issue is solved, then there is a record others can see if they encounter the same problem in future.

Steven, it’s not a good idea to post your private email address in a public forum - the address is likely to be harvested by spambots.

Folks can always use the Private Message function of the forum to contact you privately for one-on-one discussions.

I hope that in the near future the feature will extend to:

  • show {1} the original name OR {2} a name translated to my preferred UI language
    AND for option {1}

  • optionally show a transliteration to my preferred UI language (if available)
    unsure if this should be the scientific transliteration as often seen in wikipedia or also localized
    AND or OR

  • optionally show a version translated into my preferred (UI) language (maybe with an on / off switch)

Personally, I think the step taken goes into the right direction. So instead of reverting it I’d like to see “more of it”.

This:

probably shouldn’t happen so maybe reporting the cases where things don’t match could help Roon to adjust things?

Also:

I haven’t tested it for ages but would assume that Roon applies its metadata to integrated streaming services so this shouldn’t be an issue. Roon would adjust the data on the fly. If it doesn’t, the integration would be severely affected indeed.

I have no issue that there is the option for users to keep the original language name or to choose a language of their choosing. I assume that the Roon databases still have a record of the international naming convention as the system as it recognises and adjusts those names whether from one’s private library tags or from the metadata from Qobuz it seems.

I would think that language options beyond English and the original language name would have to be a project delegated to users with final approval from the Roon team as it would be a very time-consuming task to validate and find the translation for thousands of artists in dozens of languages.

In the classical field, names are a particular minefield and whilst, again, giving users options is a good thing as long as it doesn’t divert too many team resources from the key operations and upgrades, imposing this as a default with no alternative is a real step back for classical users.

Thanks. Part of my frustration/anger is that I have never gotten any useful response about how to search for the missing albums. I highly doubt that the problem is a corrupt drive and as far as the database issue I saw in the past day or so, my problem goes back a year. It just took me 10 months to get angry enough to start trying to start making noise. steven

Noted. I’m not used to message boards like this.

Hi. I can’t figure out how to see if I responded to you earlier today but if not, thanks. I hope you can figure this out. If you need any more screen shots just let me know. gladbag

I also just experienced the name changes during an audit of my album and track data.
‘Valentin Silvestrov’ was no longer recognised - I had to change it to ‘Valentyn Sylvestrov’ (the accompanying screenshot is interesting especially as the article uses the previous spelling)
Adopting a singular spelling could be problematic, especially if the composer (or artist) is from a time when there was no set spelling of their name or they changed their name in their lifetime.
Surely the record (entry) for an artist would contain a list containing alternate names, variants and aliases which would be the indexed and match field rather than relying on the (singular) name. An example of such a field would be JS Bach, J S Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach. If this exists, is there a way to contribute to the maintenance of it?

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