Could Roon please add user customised filter under Composer? Most classical composers have hundreds of compositions. It is almost impossible to find one particular composition. It makes Roon unusable as a classical music server.
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+1
Itās a start. You can do this by filtering on composers and compositions from the composition screen. But itās not especially intuitive and you need to know what you are looking for in the first place.
But I think it is time for a UI overhaul? So much of roon still has an unfinished, unjoined up beta feel. I donāt really understand the logic of having to swap between composer screens, album screens and composition screens. I would expect it to be all in the same place, especially if I donāt know what I am looking for. Roon for me is primarily a tool to discover hidden corners of my library but I find the interface works against that. It would be really nice to see that composer screen with a complete overhaul with compositions grouped by form and/or instrumentation, some kind of search filter, and also the albums displayed as well.
2 Likes
I think itās time to consider how you find a piece to listen
My vote would be by Album first.
For example, select a Composer then see all the albums of that Composer, then a means to filter that , say Genre
So I can go quickly to Beethoven>concerto > piano concerto to give me a subset of Albums
What use is Composition say for Chopin, I select a specific Waltz and get 3 mins of music, more likely I would select an Album of waltzes. The same goes for a lot of works. Composition is nice if you want compare all your Moonlight Sonatas but is too granular for normal listening navigation IMHO
Mike
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classical music is 2% (?) of the fysical market? I rest my case.
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Audiophiles make up 2% (?) of the people listening to musicā¦ still there is discussion about DSD and Hi-Resā¦
What do you want to tell us? To stop discussing things like this?
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if thatās an option: do 
itās not about you or Roon, itās about the music.
I can tell you metadata of classical will always suck. I tried Roon as a owner of 2000(?) ripped cdāsā¦Roon didnāt failā¦I was too optimistic.
For me it is not about the Metadata itself but about the DB structure and display within Roon. I have around 10.000 classical Albums in Roon and I also know that classical Metadata always will suck.
Thatās why I keep maintaining my metadata in my file tagsā¦
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Tag everything manually. I use MP3Tag. Then you can search by composer name. The āAlbumā column in this screenshot gives me a path to every album I have by typing in the first few letters of the composerās name with the Roon view in āSorted by Album Titleā.
Geez. Thatās a really good idea.
It maybe your prefer way to listen to whole album. But I always select a particular composition to listen to and yes it can be as short as 1 min. Some classical albums are issued like Complete recordings of XXX on label YYY. There is no logic of organising the compositions in these kind of albums.
Its always going be horses for courses ā¦
I have all my classical stuff tagged and manually tagged down to individual Composition in my Pre Roon system believe me that was many hours of labour .
So clearly I agree that composition is an important aspect of classical music, but it shouldnāt be the only way to select and navigate music. My point is that Roon as a software concept seem to be centred around the Album as a āpackageā but for classical music it seems not to be.
There are methods of getting there eg Focus in the Album view but I find that to be too many Taps or Mouse clicks to get anywhere logically
Composer>Genre>Album PLAY does. I have my library still current in my pre - Roon system and that is how I do it there and it feels right and above all quick to find a specific album.
If you now wish to play a single composition its a āOne Trackā selection from the chosen album. Equally this approach would take me to all my āBeethoven Piano Sonatasā so my selection of a single composition could come from any one of my 20 or so box sets etc. Am I so wrong ?
Each to his own I suppose, all I am asking for is an option to do it otherwise. Indeed in Roon there are nearly always several ways to skin the proverbial cat , except in the field of classical music.
I donāt want to have to maintain 2 systems to get the navigation i want it is quite painful where a change to one impacts the other , let alone the additional computer time at the expense of LISTENING time
Mike
Hi Adamus
I too have a large collection, split 40:40:20 Classical:Rock:Jazz roughly approx 5000 Albums 120k Tracks
On initial load Roon sorted the metadata for Rock and Jazz about 99% leaving only a few odd balls āUnidentifiedā. Roonās metadata sources seem better suited to these genres
Classical was another story. The metadata sources Roon uses I am sure are the root cause , Classical Metadata in general is poor and often inaccurate, for example placing Ludwig Van Beethoven as the ARTIST rather than Alfred Brendel (this is unfortunately too common)
Classical music may be a small proportion of the market but as far as listeners go and I suspect the audiophile end of the market they still represent a good proportion. I learned to love classical music when I was exposed to it at university , I have loved it all for the ensuing 50 yrs of my life in the same way I could still be referred to as an aging rocker. I have very wide tastes in music āBach to Led Zeppelin and Bach againā !!
Equally I have been an active audiophile since I could afford it in my 20ās
Just because we donāt fit in with the more mainstream styles of music doesnāt mean that Roon should not cater for it . I donāt wish to be rude but writing classical lovers off as just an odd 2% seems a little harsh, each to their own.
I have actively been canvassing this forum for changes in Classical music navigation since I started using Roon, I even gave up my membership at one stage because of the frustration, but I came back mainly because āyou cant change something you are not a part ofā so I suspect I will continue to chirp on this subject until I get some traction.
I know from other posts that I am not alone (Klaus above for example I suspect is a kindred spirit)
No Offence meant or taken
What did the guy above say ā Its all about the music ā Keep Listening !!
Mike
I do the same but in JRiver. I still maintain 2 libraries which adds a bit to the confusion
When I get really frustrated with Roon I revert to JRiver which is set up āThe Way I Want itā
Customization of views is still missing in Roon where its easy peasy in JRiver
Mike
Hi @Alan_McMillan,
Iāve managed to miss this. Where are you doing this in roon? Is that from āTracksā? I cannot see how to add a genre column and roon displays all my composers as āfirst name, lastnameā, Not ālastname, first nameā.
That image is Mp3Tag not Roon?
Yes it is. Sorry for the confusion, I should have made that clear.
In response to @Tony_Casey: to begin with, I set up Roon to display composers on a Last Name, First Name basis but it was only partially successful for some reason. That MP3Tag screenshot shows the Last Name, First Name convention because I needed it that way for my previous system, which used Asset, to work properly and because I found albumsā built in metadata was inconsistently formatted and sometimes just plain wrong or even missing. It also meant that every albumās information would be displayed in a completely uniform and consistent way, which is a sort of OCD thing for me. When I first got Roon I had major difficulty getting it to show things the way I was used to and it took me a while to realise that it was never going to using the Roon metadata. I then edited my entire Roon database to āPrefer File Dataā and āDisable Multi-Part Compositions on this Albumā. I did the first part in chunks by selecting and editing large blocks of albums. The second bit canāt be done that way so I do it on a per album basis as I listen. Laborious I know but it gets me what I want in terms of how albums and track data show up. If I hadnāt tagged everything manually as I ripped and downloaded my way to a library in my early days of streaming, I suspect Iād be as frustrated as you about how Roon displays classical music.
Hi @Alan_McMillan,
Understood. I have found myself migrating on an album by album basis as well. I certainly have not found that roon has reduced my manual tagging effort. There is a long way to go but to a certain extent I can rely on sunk effort that in my case goes back more than 15 years to the early ipod days.
But I think I am coming from a different perspective. I actually prefer roonās āhyper-linkedā approach to more traditional tabular views and I was initially quite excited when I saw roon for the first time. But my experience has been that getting that more āvisualā view on a library to work properly requires a considerable manual tagging effort above and beyond what I used to do with more traditional tabular library managers. Otherwise there are a lot of roon specific problems like dead links, duplicate links, equivalents miss-matches etc. Most of the artist and composer artwork is also either missing or not formatted properly because there is no consistency in aspect ratios from view to view. It all adds up to a considerable effort and I gave up on a ābatchā migration to roon a long time a go.
But investing in getting the roon UI to work also requires buying into basic roon dependencies like āfirst name, last nameā, āmulti-part compositionsā etc. I still think that there is a place for multiple views on a library, including tabular views. But that often requires a different logic (last name, first name being an obvious example). What would be nice is if roon could revisit some of the tabular views that it has implemented with that sort of reasoning in mind and find a way of more closely integrating composition, album, composer, style, period views in one place. Iām not hopeful though. The UI used to have a priority but no longer it seems, especially with Classical which now seems to be viewed as some kind of edge case. Iām not so sure. I think that improvements in the more complex navigation required by genres like Classical in terms of grouping, association, discovery etc. could be reused to enhance the performance of the āradioā and ādiscoveryā features with benefits to the roon user base more generally.
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Hi @Tony_Casey
Itās horses for courses I suppose. Iām not particularly concerned with Roonās hyperlinks and Iāve discovered a lot of them donāt go anywhere in any case. Iāve even found that a lot circle back to the album from which the hyperlink was clicked in the first place! I prefer the uniform and predictable layout that my approach has given me. The point being that my neural wiring seems to be a bit odd, insofar as I find the Roon default multi-part and hyperlinked way of doing things somewhat chaotic and random which gives me a feeling of having an itch I canāt scratch! Tabular uniformity sits much better with me.
Hi @Alan_McMillan,
Iām curious. Donāt take this the wrong way, but why do you use roon? Whatās in it for you? It sounds like a lot of manual effort to get a view you probably already had in whatever you were using before?
My excuse is that I actually try and get those links and the roon UI in general to work. Mainly whatās in it for me are improvementās in radio and discovery performance. But itās a task without end and there remain a lot of well documented problems with both radio and discovery.