Classical composers tagging not working / dead links

Hi,

I am trying to understand the tagging system in Roon 1.8.

What I need to accomplish, is to tag composers (mostly with period labels like “Romantic” or “Préromantic”, but also with other qualities) so that I can later focus on albums, for example, that contain any “Romantic or “Préromantic” compositions based on the presence of a specific composer.

To do so, I first go to the Composer’s view from My library, then right click or long press on a composer so that the “…” symbol appears next to the play now button. From there, and there only, I add the desired tag.

The problem is when I click on the composer afterwards, I don’t see that tag. It only shows under “My tags” menu, but there is no way to know what tags are associated to a single composer.

Besides if I try to tag a composer, not from the composer’s tab (showing all composers in my library) but instead on it’s individual page, the tag will then be displayed, BUT it will appear as an ARTIST tag and not a COMPOSER tag in the Tags screen.

The workaround I have found for now, is to tag Composers 2 times with the same labels, one time as an Artists and one time as a composer, so that I can SEE what tag I input for every composer.

As I understand it, there seems to be a confusion between ARTIST and COMPOSER pages for classical music, at least in the way in which their individual pages are displayed.

I am missing something?

Thank you for your help, as tagging large collection of classical music is time consuming.

EDIT: I just found that the problem runs DEEPER!

I tried to remove a tag from composers (problem reproduced with any composer) in My tags view, but that tag won’t go away. The only solution is to delete the entire TAG, LOOSING all that tagging work. This is very frustrating, and I hope someone at Roon will address this SERIOUS issue. What good is there to have a fancy looking music software if the tagging system is broken? @noris (In case this tagging issue is related to crashing in Composer/composition view).

2 Likes

Hi KML,

What remote are you using? I’m able to select a composer and remove them from a tag okay — Are you seeing the option to remove and it isn’t working, or are you not seeing the option at all?

Hi @dylan (and possibly @noris)

I used both Ipad and windows 10 x64 (full roon) apps. The problem is easily reproduced with both apps and ANY composer.

The only place I see that I can remove I tag, is on the TAGs view in “My stuff”. I have to manually search the whole tag category (or use filter) to find the single entry (Composer in that case) that needs deletion. (If that is the only way to remove a tag, what a downgrade from Roon 1.7!)

As I wrote before, there are 2 ways to a add a tag to Bach or Mozart (for example):

  1. You can select Bach’ page by clicking on Bach in Composer view and add a tag from there. The problem is that it will add an ARTIST tag, NOT a composer tag!

  2. Or, you can long press Bach in Composer view (the place that shows all your composers portraits) on ipad, or right click in windows so that the “…” appears next to play now. If you add the tag from there, it will be a COMPOSER tag, BUT then a) you won’t be able to delete it (artist tags can be deleted), and b) it won’t be displayed on Bach’s individual composer page.

Do you guys understand the problem @dylan?

Thanks.

Ragards,

I get the impression that Roon is trying to give us tools to do the things that people do via Tags and Bookmarks etc, they are not perfect, but how about Focus:

Hi @geoB, thank you for your answer.

Of course, I enjoy, like you do, the new composer view and its focus abilities.

One can indeed use Focus/Periods with Composers or Compositions, but:

  1. One cannot use them for albums, which would be really useful;

  2. Some compositions/composers are not, in the first place, associated with a Period field (which will have the effect of leaving some materials aside of search results), or are not properly tagged, or are not tagged the way one needs them to be. Composer tags are very important for any classical music lover using Roon because they will be available with virtually any material that has composer metadata, and because they can be used in any view screen (albums, tracks, compositions, and composers).

  3. I personally use tags to overcome the lack of a fully integrated Period focusing system, but being at the core of the Roon system, the tags are useful (and needed!) for anything else.

  4. [BUG] Right now, the tagging system is it not functioning correctly for composers because a) tags for composers cannot be seen on the composer’s page or deleted (at least without deleting the whole tag – that certainly is a bug!), and because b) if you tag a composer on its individual page instead of the (multiple) composer view you posted previously, it will show as an ARTIST tag, not a COMPOSER tag which makes it unusable (i.e. Bach as an artist is not associated with any material). (@vova were you aware of that?)

  5. [BUG] Also, did you try, GeoB, to use an individual composer’s page? Click on the (…) right under the composer’s name : the links associated with this composer (“view tracks in library/view albums in library”) are dead links, they lead to the message “try removing some focus criteria”. (@dylan and @noris, did I tell you about these issues?)

  6. [CRASH] Last but not least, the composition view is very important for any classical lover (but also Jazz, and pretty much any other genre). Now, that screen is broken too, Roon crashes every time I hit the play button on the right side of the screen, no matter what focus it is on (I tried it under Windows, Ipad and Iphone). Would you please (geoB or anyone reading this post) try it and confirm this bug?

I really enjoy the direction that Roon 1.8 has taken and particularly appreciate the new focusing system. Congratulations to the Roon staff.

That being said, the above issues are significant because both the tagging and the composer/composition systems are at the very root of Roon experience and functionality.

As a lifetime member, I am not whining about some feature requests here, I only respectfully ask that the Roon team acknowledges theses issues and recognize them as know bugs that are being worked on.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to the Roon team for their enormous work, despite the inevitable difficulties associated with a any major update.

4 Likes

Thanks for the further details here, @KML

I’ve passed this along to the QA team for further investigation.

Thanks, @dylan.

In case other people care, like I do, about composer tags, I thought I’d share the temporary workarounds I found.

First problem: Roon 1.8 adding Artist tag instead of Composer tag.

Temporary solution: instead of adding a tag from the composer’s page, simply add it from the composer panel (the one showing multiple composer portraits).

Second problem: Roon 1.8 can’t delete a composer tag.

Temporary solution: the only way to achieve that is to delete the whole tag. So, go to the tag, select all composers (Ctl+A in windows) then, deselect the one you need to remove and create a new tag before deletion.

Third problem: Composer tag not showing.

Temporary solution: use the export to Excel sheet feature, it works great to see all your composer tags at once.

Thanks to the Roon staff (@dylan) for Build 763 which addressed many bugs. Unfortunately, none of the above-mentioned crashes/bugs/tagging dysfunctions/dead links were fixed in this release. Hopefully in the next one?
Regards,

2 Likes

To clarify, here are THREE of the above-mentioned BUGS that are still present in build 764 (I just want to make sure that they have been passed for investigation @dylan):

  1. The links associated with ANY classical composer (“view tracks in library/view albums in library”) are still dead, they lead to the message : “try removing some focus criteria”.

  2. Although one can now remove tags from classical composers by unchecking boxes under the tag menu (restored in build 764), classical composers are STILL tagged as Artists rather than composers when adding a tag from a composer’s individual page.

  3. When adding a tag to a classical composer from the “My composers” view (the only place that actually functions correctly), the tag will NOT be displayed on the composer’s page. Points 2 and 3 make the tagging system unusable for classical composers.

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I do wonder whether the constant chocking-up of the Focus feature may be related to all of this?

Example: You focus on Period. There are many composers where that field is blank >> Roon keeps circlying trying to find info thats just not there >> hangs up eventually.

I need to spend more time trying to figure out when exactly this happens

Hi @KML
you saved me!
i could not understand why some artists did appear under a certain tag even though, openeing that artist’s page, i could not see the tag!
the reason is that (for some reason) the artist is also a composer, and … there was that tag on the composer page.
the point, as you explained, is:
you don’t see the tag on the artist’s page… in 1.8 you don’t have 2 separate pages for performer and composer, so the composer’s tag are hidden (or viceversa, for an artist whose main page is a “composer type”, i guess you do not see previous tags created on the performer side)

you showed me how to see these tags accessing on the “My composers” page.
but it seems to me that the procedure of long press - three dots - tags allows to remove the tag from the composer…

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Hi,

The last few updates fixed some of the above-mentioned issues (dead links, inability to remove composer tags…), but you are right, @Niccolo_Terzi, the Composer/Performer display issue still remains in 1.8/build 783.

Hypothesis: I can think of 2 reasons why the composer tags (let’s say Bach) are not displayed on a Bach’s page.

Either

There are 2 different types of Bach pages (Bach as “performer” – whatever that means! Or perhaps as an “artist”) and Bach as a “composer”. The latter page would then need to be fixed to show composer tags.

Or

In Roon environment, there are no such things as composers’ pages, there are only performers’ pages : when you click on Bach’s portrait in Composers Panel, it redirects to a page that is actually a “performer” (or an “Artist’s” page?), but for an unknown reason, it does not redirect the tags in the same process. If that hypothesis is correct, I suppose Roon could simply add a “show composer tags” option, and eventually in another colour to distinguish tags on Leonard Berstein as composer from tags on Leonard Berstein as a conductor (a “performer” or an “Artist”).

I think Roon is trying to create a more coherent system to address the multiple confusions between composers and performers. For exemple, we need Berstein as a performer and a composer, but we only need Bach as a composer.

Let me finish with an observation that may or may not be related to that issue.

When I click on Bach’s portrait (from composers panel) for the first time I get:

Then I come back to Composers Panel, click again on Bach, and I get:

That leads one into thinking that there are actually 2 different Bach pages. Or maybe this is another display discrepancy.

Anyways, sorry for my mistakes in English, and thanks for reading.

1 Like
  1. ok, good for the fixes…
  2. in previous versions of roon (<=1.7) every artist page had 2 versions… one as perfomer and one as composer (if he/she appeared in both roles). the 2 pages showed the same bio, but different infos (e.g. external web links appeared only in the performer side). and you could put separately the tags on the 2 sides. i could really never understand this structure. the actual (1.8) structure is IMO much more logical. you just have one page for the artist. if he/she is a performer, the focus goes on the performer view. example, search bowie:
    image
    under the name, he is reported as ARTIST, and his page is:


    if he/she is also a composer, you have a “compositions” link near “overview”.

on the other hand, what if he/she is only a composer? look for Bach, near the name there is COMPOSER
image
and his page is:


so… the artist page is fucuses directly on the “composer side”, and reports “composed by”
i note here a difference with your result, that says “dan ma biblioteque” (that is a very misleading translation for library… it should be dans ma discoteque… anyways). in may case it says “composed by”.
i think that all this works.and i don’t really see the point in having the “composer’s tags” anymore. but somewhere in roon code, there is still a distinction between performer page and composer page, reflected in these doubled tags.

i think that this is actually a BUG of roon 1.8: there should be no more any distinction between “composer tags” and “performer tags”…

another comment is here necessary:
it seems that we (users) cannot control if an artist is a composer or a performer.
see for example:


so… Horowitz is considered COMPOSER.
this is a metadata error i cannot solve.
this, in first version of 1.8 was a problem (as the main composer page did not show the albums with a performer role). this now i notice seems to be solved.

thanks

I think, on the contrary, that we need both performers AND composer tags, just as the tag system allows now (we just need to be able to SEE or select both seperatly).

Your reference to Horowitz shows why. (Although Horowitz is mainly an interpreter, he is also a composer). Needless to say, that logic also apply to jazz (take Bill Evans, for example).

Also, as a classical lover, composer tags are probably the most important type of tags for me, because most tracks or compositions have composer metadata that can consequently be associated with tags at the composer level. Once you’ve set a tag to a composer, you are good to go, you don’t need to add the same tag to single albums, tracks or compositions. For example, I might want to add “Impressionism” to Claude Debussy as a composer. Then, any album or track or composition that has at least one “Composer: Debussy” metadata entry will be displayed when the associated tag (say “my preferred piano composers” or whatever) is selected on the tag focus icon. That’s just a quick example to show how important composer tags actually are.

BR

I perfectly understant that.
My point is that it makes no difference if the tag is at the artist level (so, no distinction between composer or performer).
In your example, you tag Debussy ad IMPRESSIONISM, independently as he is a composer or performer (not his case.). and filtering albums with this tag, you’ll get all albums with composer debussy.

when filtering albums with a tag XXX, i don’t see the point in distinguish if an album is selected because
-the album itself it is tagged XXX
-it is performed by an artist tagged XXX (at least one track)
-it is composed by an artist tagged XXX (at least one track)

the distintion of tags at composer/performer level would be useful only in the situation like this: an artist that as a perfomer is (for example) e metal guitar player, but his compositions are only classical minimalist. i wouldn’t like to filter my albums for MINIMALISM, and find metal rock albums.
but this situation could happen also within “COMPOSER TAGS” (a composer with 2 completely different line of tags) or “performer tags”. in a situation like that, it would be more sensical to tag the albums, or the compositions…

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