Classical Music Type

[Jon_Saperia]

My library is largely classical and while not large, I still can not find a simple way to get me to get all my piano concertos or all my violin concertos, or all of Mozart’s symphonies. I have poked around this forum a bit, but don’t see anything that helps with my problem. If there is a solution/best practice, that helps, I would appreciate a pointer.

A couple of questions:

• When I look at the details of a tracks information, which is a bit awkward, I don’t see any data that would identify this. For example:

  

• There are more id3 tags in the list than in the image that Roon has, none are what I want. Checking the entire id3v2.3.0 spec, I can not find anything that would help either. So… have I missed anything?

• It seems my only option is to use tags. In the current state, trying to filter on a word or two of the album title or artist, does not seem to work. I don’t think I have missed anything here either.

• If I create tags such as: symphony, piano concerto, violin concerto, motet, etc., etc., I will have a lot of tags and each track must be tagged individually. I don’t even see how I would select a set of tracks on an album or an entire album to apply the tags to - have I missed anything. I suppose I could use Media Center an do the tagging then reimport, but that feels a bit daunting.

Any ideas.

Thanks.

[anon47919701]

If Roon had identified your albums then the Composition browser should help a little:

Concertos usually get assigned a genre “Concerto” when identified by Roon, that could support focusing, too.

Results will vary depending on the quality of the metadata Roon has.

[Jon_Saperia]

I find that genre is used for the type such as classical. I not have seen any instances were that is different in my collection, except where I used that field to contain the period, for example late classical. I should have used a different field for that. That said, I don’t see Roon doing the type of tagging you suggest. This is even on recently downloaded files.

[Nathan_Wilkes]

I use a subset of “genres” (under Classical), such as “13th C” or “18th C - Haydn”, to create smaller buckets of recordings. This has two benefits: Roon Radio works quite well, as it tends to stay relatively close to the seed track, and makes it easier for me to browse (using focus and bookmarks). You can use any genres names that help you, regardless of musicological “correctness”.

NB: genres can be set in an external application, making it quick to change many at a time. Use semicolons to add multiple genres. If you edit the Roon genre hierarchy to place your genres under classical, you actually don’t need “classical”.

There are those on this forum who abhor this use of “genre”, but the results are extremely effective for me.

[Jon_Saperia]

I understand your use of genres - as I may have mentioned I had done some of this before moving to Roon. I just checked some of my files again and see that even genre is not always supported. I see TCON (Content Type) as a place some files contain the genre information.

Further, in checking the idv3 spec., there is no field for period (e.g. early romantic). Even if there were one, it does not appear anywhere in the files I have when I view file information for a track.

Here is where I think I am:

• There does not seem to be any way to mark several or all tracks with a tag at one time as far as I can see.

• I don’t trust that if I use an external editor like Media Center that everything I want will transfer.

• I have to create one tag for each genre and type such as concerto, or piano concerto, or violin concerto, etc. etc. Then do this one track at a time.

One last check before I start this process - a better way?

[Nathan_Wilkes]

I must be misunderstanding you. If you use the Genre field, you can use any tagging editor to mass change any number of albums you want – and if you want multiple “genres”, you separate with a semi-colon. Likewise, if you use the Roon tag feature, you may select multiple albums at a time.

[Jon_Saperia]

Perhaps I am making too much of this. I took a step back and edited the period on one track in MediaCenter. Then I copied that file back to my disk inside my Nucleus + It still does not show period for the track. I do see that genre for this particular track shows as classical-romantic which is how I edited that file many months ago to try to get around this. I could continue with that approach but it is not what I want.

[Mike_O_Neill]

There are loads of ways , I just need a decent keyboard, I’ll send pictures later

[Mike_O_Neill]

Firstly check out the Knowledge base for Tags & Bookmarks they are invaluable.

Tags are static , use for fixed Box Sets like The Beethoven Edition that will never change

Bookmarks are Dynamic, the requery the Roon Db each time you open one

Method 1
Goto Albums > Focus >Composer select say Beethoven

Click on the Genre Pie Chart , Select Classical , drop the arrow on the right , pick Concerto

Now use the Filter Funnel Top RHS , Type Piano

You will now see only Beethoven Piano Concerto Albums

Use the Bookmark Icon to create a Book Mark Beethoven Piano Concertos - Albums again Top Right

Play Tunes on the selections

Method 2

Go to Compositions
use the Filter funnels on Composer = Beethoven, Composition = Piano Concerto

Click on any one composition to expand all the recordings in your collection

Again create a Bookmark Beethoven Piano Concertos - Compositions

Method 3
Goto Composer
Use the top RHS Filter Funnel = Piano Concerto , same effect as the Composition view in Method 2

I sort my Composers by No Of Compositions

Clear as MUD !! You get the idea

There are lots of ways to slice and dice what you have , if in doubt use the Magnifying Glass search

Hope this helps

Mike

[Jon_Saperia]

use the Filter funnels on Composer

Thank you so much. I really appreciate this. I think this will mostly work. One last question, can I change the Period, Form, and Genre inside Roon, or must that be done externally?

[Jon_Saperia]

I felt the need to add two things.

First I really do appreciate the time to do what you did it is a big help to me. I just never looked at it this way. I was focused (forgive the pun) on an album view. I think improvement is needed with regard to editing. For example, what field should be used for opera? How would I put it in that field.

That said, thank you for what you have done.

[Douglasmaurer]

Ok, I like those tips too, Mike…I feel Jon’s pain as my collection of classical easily exceeds 4000 albums and finding the same album twice can even be challenging let alone sort out specific concertos vs. symphonies w/o just looking through alot of hits. To find a specific recording that I know I want I usually just type in the conductor and composer or soloist and composer name and that shortens the list considerably though sometimes brings in really random stuff that isn’t remotely classical. I don’t know exactly how the search in Idagio is accomplished, but that classical streaming service search and sort functions were incredible…I just can’t really justify having that on top of Qobuz esp since Idagio can’t play w/Roon! Would be great if the Roon devs could look at Idagio and see what they would need to bake into the search to create results like Idagio.
Doug

[Mike_O_Neill]

Try the Composition view , filter on Form = Opera then filter Composer = Wagner ?

I see all my works

Opera is a funny because there tends to discs of Full Operas as well as extracts, Overtures, Arias etc

It’s been a request for a while to be able to split the two

[Jon_Saperia]

Thanks very much for this. It is very frustrating that the filters available differ from composition, album, etc.

Did a quick test, this all fails even with a basic try. I did Album view, then selected on composer, then was going to filter on concerto or something, then I saw that Roon thinks there are only 8 Classical recordings with the composer as Beethoven. You will see in the image below that there are 20 (I thought there were more). See the Genres portion of the image which thinks only 8 of them are classical.

Just in case you are wondering, the other filters at the top restrict the view to only high res files and excludes all the CDs I have ripped, thus the low number to start with.

[Mike_O_Neill]

Did you see Ludwig van Beethoven, Roons metadata uses that format ,there may be 2 entries in the Composer drop down?

The metadata that Roon uses is notoriously poor for classical

[Jon_Saperia]

No, only one, Ludwig van Beethoven.

[Jon_Saperia]

One quick follow up. Is the pull down list dynamically created from the contents of the library or is it static?

Sorry for the additional update. I just check doing this by “Method 2” that was proposed. this does not work either for me since it ignores bookmarks in effect when you select compositions, and when in compositions, you can not add a bookmark to filer. I have a bookmark that looks on the internal disk on my Nucleus plus for high res files, this method does not all me to do this.

I have come to believe that the only way of doing this would be creating tags for each period such as early romantic, late romantic, and each type of music, such as symphony and piano concerto, violin concerto, etc. Each track would then have to be identified. I just tried and it puts up the whole album which is good.

I am going to work up a list and see how it goes. It was suggested that I could edit this information with the selection at the album level and select as many albums as I want. This does not work since there is no access to the attributes I want

[rvb (robert van bekkum)]

For me is most important

1. Composer
2. WORK, Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 15
3. PART, Moderato Con Moto

WORK and PART I add manually in id3, the info is at www.allmusic.com.

[Mike_O_Neill]

Are you seeing this

The littler Blue tag thingy is the Bookmark icon

You can then use the Manage Bookmarks to drad and drop to reorder the bookmarks alphabetically.

WRT Composers , Roon will recognize Beethoven, Ludwig van Beethoven but NOT Beethoven, Ludwig van or Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827)

Have a look at MP3Tag , its a free tag editor (or did you say you used JRiver) and correct all your composers Tags to simply ‘Beethoven’. I use only the Surname except where there are many , so Bach is simply Bach , all the sons have their initials

That May Help

PS has Roon Identified all your recordings , check with Album>Focus>Inpector>Identified

When you have clicked them a GREEN Identified should show , click again and it will turn RED showing non identified albums , you can then set about manually identifying .

I have 40 or so out of 5000 not identified

[Jon_Saperia]

Hi, GREAT suggestion about using bookmarks on multiple albums. I use JRiver Media Center to edit my meta data. The problem I described above was not because of different Beethoven names. The problem what that it thought only a small portion of the albums I have by Beethoven were Genre=Classical.

I also did a test in MediaCenter and using the search Wizard. I saw an interesting result since some albums have works by two Composers. It did the right thing (I think). I have one album with both the Mendelssohn and Beethoven violin concertos. When I searched for composer with Beethoven in it, I saw the album with only the first three tracks showing. The second search on Mendelssohn showed the same album with the last three tracks for the Mendelssohn concerto.

I though I had corrected all albums where composer contains Beethoven, to be Beethoven, Ludwig van. I see several variations in Roon. Is the Roon Standard for Beethoven “Beethoven, Ludwig van”? I think I saw this in a thread somewhere.

Of course I am going to have re-copy my entire hi res library from my computer to Roon after I make all these changes. The entire library rather than picking and choosing files I have changed will be slower but more accurate. I do it this way since I can not do these edits as easily in Roon (at least with my level of ability with Roon).