Hello all. Given the paucity of response, I’m now convinced the features I was seeking–which seem like obvious small extensions of current functionality–do not exist. Consequently, I’m moving the post to “Feature requests”. The goal is better navigation, especially for classical music. I’ll start with a (new) summary, then leave the original post intact for support.
- Add a filterable “Performer” field in the “Compositions” view so that, once I’ve found the composition I’m looking for, I can filter or sort on performer. Otherwise (especially with Tidal integration) I’m left with MANY versions of a particular composition to wade through before I find the one I want.
Note that this functionality essentially already exists–but for reasons I don’t comprehend, “Performer” is excluded from the listed, filterable fields (currently Date, which is populated maybe 40% of the time–Period, Form–also underutilized–and Instrumentation). Just add “Performer” to that list and we’re golden.
- Similarly, increase “Focus” options (Buttons) available in Composition view. Currently there are only four: Periods, Forms, Composer, Inspector–and Inspector options when chosen are limited to the point of uselessness:
The fact that “Performers” vanishes from the Focus criteria in Composition view makes it seem that the designers were not considering classical when they were thinking this through.
The rest is my original post, provided for reference.
I was just trying to locate a particular recording in Roon. It’s something I don’t own, but hoped to retrieve from Tidal in case that matters. Quickly ran into some limitations so I thought I’d query you folks.
I started by choosing “Compositions”–then immediately noticed that there was no “Performer” or “Artist” field available to filter/focus on–just Composer, Date, Period, Form, and Instrumentation.
Let’s say my goal is to find a particular Beethoven Piano Sonata by a particular performer. The aforementioned fact means that, while I can filter the Compositions list on Composer and Instrumentation, yielding a list of recordings by various pianists, (and I can then, use “Forms” to narrow it to “Sonatas”), I cannot then filter that on “Performer”–so I’m left with a rather long list I have to scroll through. Similarly, I may prefer to start by filtering on Performer, to see what Compositions by them are available. Seems reasonable to me.
So, can other fields be added to the list of fields I can filter on?
Similarly: If I click on the Focus button, I see only four choices to focus on: Periods, Forms, Composers, Inspector. When I first did this–looking for a piano trio–I assumed I’d find that under “forms”. But it’s not there–it’s under “Instrumentation”. That’s fine, except that there’s no “Focus” choice for “Instrumentation.” Can it be added (by me) somehow in settings? I know I could filter using the search boxes in the Composition listing, but why can’t I do it this way–and of course, there’s also no choice for “Performer” either–and no way (at the moment) of filtering on “Performer” in the Composition listing. So what’s the solution? Screen shot below.
(sorry, screenshot shows Brahms, but that doesn’t affect my point.) A completely sensible way of handling things–very intuitive–is what ArkivMusic.com does. It lets you drill down. Choose Composer/Beethoven and you get a list of composition types:
This is quite similar to “Instrumentation”. I choose “Wind Music” and get a choice of specific works:
Click on an entry an you see all the recordings that include that work.
You can do this in any order: Start with “Performer” or “Ensemble” or “Conductor” if you want to; you always end up with an appropriate list of recordings.
That’s a good way of doing it, but I’m sure there are others. I’m mainly writing to figure out how to use Roon to accomplish this in the most straightforward way, since I’ve often found that features I want are already there in Roon; I just had not found them yet.
Thanks.