Classical recordings display Roon's white background color changes to off-white

Roon Software Discussion
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It was never an ‘official’ option. There were a few users that located the files that defined the colours for light/dark/classical/etc and were prepared to make changes. There were some good themes, and a few that would quickly induce a headache…

Part of the problem was that the files were likely to be overwritten with each update, and there was no guarantee that the schema was the same for a new release, so just copying in your modified files might break things.

I think there might have been a few font changes too. Worth a forum search if you’re feeling brave…

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I did find it…and while that type of coding is something I’m too familiar with, it’s not a task I have time for at the moment. Another rabbit hole, in other words. :grin:

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Tony,

Of course. And why not! I have appreciated that from the beginning.

I’ve also found that Roon does an extremely good job of doing so - of enhancing the listening experience of every type of user.

And of making life easy for those of us who listen - usually without playlists and shuffling etc - to entire works as their composers intended; and/or - as in your example with the Bambergers - perhaps to a particular performance style; or works within a collection.

My analogy remains that of a (probably somewhat old-fashioned and now all but disappeared) record shop which specializes in the thousand years of music from Pérotin and plainchant to Penderecki and Pousseur.

If all the shelves were labelled ‘Classical’ - chiefly because that is how the ‘rest of the world’ (:confused:) categorises this music, it would be of little use to the buying public.

The only ‘imposition’ I have made (and which so far works well for me; but I am happy to learn from you and others and revisit in due course) is to assume that all the music on my <500 Albums is going to be of one or (rarely) more of the ‘Genres’ I have chosen. So far that has worked perfectly. I do keep an open mind and have ‘bookmarked’ your kind suggestions, Tony, thanks.

You’re right, of course, that when I consult Roon’s inbuilt music Genres I see a vast array of specifics. They betoken a superb knowledge of the richness of ‘classical’ (in the demotic sense of that usage) music. Fantastic. And, Yes, I could apply each one to each and every track in my Library. In fact, I have also Settings > Library > Genre mappings mapped them and set the appropriate value in Import settings.

I appreciate that there is a richness here which I am bypassing.

In my case, though, until a more knowledgeable (and sympathetic) user is able to explain why I should not have the half dozen types of ‘classical’ (again, in the demotic sense of the usage) Genres, ‘Top level’ Genres, I think I’ll stick with it.

This way I can find, say, Baroque opera at that boiling point when early C17th composers were extending the intermedii; or Romantic - as opposed to Classical era or C20th/C21st song cycles.

But know that I may indeed be missing some of Roon’s functionality. Thanking you, I shall revisit, I expect :slight_smile:

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I’m sure the shelves would be labelled as the owner saw fit - which might even align with your schema.

The ‘rest of the world’ however might appreciate a large ‘classical records’ sign outside the shop so that they would know what to expect should they venture inside…

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Andy,

I think your gloss on this makes it make sense, viz:

If we could be sure, then Yes: ideal. If more like Roon’s database of Genres, then I’d have thought that most ‘classical’ (in the demotic sense of the usage) music lovers would still be able to find their way around.

But - assuming I understand Tony’s descriptions of one way in which Roon works/can be made to work - that would not (necessarily) be the case unless each shelf had two labels: one for each track on each and every CD (etc), and one for each area of the shop or group of shelves according to era of composition.

Certainly. Why not!

It’s what Presto does; and did more simply before they branched out into selling jazz and books/scores…

But with my metaphor (too grand a name for this, to be sure) that is unnecessary because such a shop (one that sells only ‘Classical’ - in the demotic sense of the usage) would be the only type of shop people like me would ever enter.

BTW, I don’t doubt that aficionados of other genres would find it useful not to have their sub-genres all bunched together under one catch-all Genre.

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No you don’t seem to understand at all.

A physical shop and a digital web-site are clearly not symmetrical. Digitally you can organise your data the same way a physical shop does but physically you cannot organise your product in the same ways that is digitally possible. Its not that customers like yourself wouldn’t like it, it’s just not possible.

But why on earth would you want to organise a digital environment using the constraints that a physical environment forces? It just misses the point of what digitalization enables and what a new generation of customers coming through expects. At the end of the day it’s all just data, so on-line, in principle, you can organise things pretty much anyway you want. There are no physical constraints.

Let’s take a concrete example. The record labels find contemporary Classical music a hard sell. So a common strategy is to sweeten the pill by coupling with more familiar works. Let’s take this album coupling the famous post-romantic Elgar Cello Concerto with the much less well-known avant-garde Cello Concerto of Elliot Carter. What genre do you suggest such an album is?

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What’s more, it is conducted by Daniel Barenboim, the long time partner of probably the most famous Elgar cellist of all time. Jaqueline du Pre. So, on a digital platform like roon I can chop and dice performances linking Barenboim, Jaqueline du Pre, Barenboims current squeezes, Cello, Avant Garde, Boccherini, Handel . . . Anything I want, regardless of the labels CD programming choices or the shops CD display choices.

Here is another example. A marvelous album combining the classicism of Handel again with the avant-garde of Carter and other modernists like Rivet and composers from non-Western traditions like Hosokawa. What genre is this?

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I don’t know what music you listen to but I find time and time again that with the Classical music I listen to, simplistic categorization by genre at an album level really gets in the way. It also rather misses the point of what a digital platform like roon enables you to do in terms of chopping and dicing your physical content, programming your listening queue, shuffles and playlists. If all you want to do is listen all the way through homogenous single genre classical CDs then what on earth value add does roon provide? I don’t get it. Just listen to the CD.

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Tony in my estimation, @Mark_Sealey would simply use individual genre tags for each track to satisfactorily address these matters to his liking. That is what I do. In this case, album tags are useless. In Mark’s case, he might have an album that comes up, oh I don’t know, with the tags “Romantic” and “Baroque” and nothing more. That will be the kind of accuracy he seeks, and Roon supports it.

There are many people who use only very specific parts of Roon. I am one of them. The only advantages Roon has to me over my parallel ecosystem (Synology Audio Station/DS Audio) are the inclusion of TiVo album reviews, artist biographies, and composition overviews (and the links contained within these that allow me to discover relationships between elements in my collection). None of the rest of Roon’s features matter to me - not streaming, not better metadata (I have all of my metadata exactly as I want it in my ID3 tags, including meticulous album artwork, etc.), not multi-room, not even RAAT, really. Apart from streaming, which I don’t use, I get all that from Audio Station as well. As a matter of fact, I find the lack of certain features (like support for track release dates) infuriating and rely on some tricks with Audio Station to benefit from these features via a hack in Roon.

Many of us use only a very limited subset of what Roon has to offered and are still satisfied. I hope you can appreciate that @Mark_Sealey — who has to be one of the nicest and most thoughtful of the regular contributors on these forums these days — probably falls into that camp.

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Tony,

Thanks once again for taking the time and trouble to explain how you do things, and how you let Roon work with and for you.

If I had that Decca Album, I would assign the Genre ‘Orchestral’. I’m familiar enough with both Carter and Elgar to be able to put my finger straight on their concerti if I need to. And (I may come to regret it, if I’m wrong) expect to be so with 10, 20, 100 times as many (such) Albums of their works as I add more and more ripped CDs and downloads.

For the Pahud (what a superb musician he is, isn’t he!), probably ‘Instrumental’. But if necessary more than one Genre: say ‘Instrumental’ and ‘Chamber’.

In the physical store metaphor (I agree, of course, that it’s only partially analogous to the Roon environment), I was responding to @AndyR’s question.

I really don’t want this to be combative, Tony: when I first came to Roon you were extraordinarily helpful; and I truly appreciate that. Thank you!

Please tell me simply this: am I missing some crucial functionality offered by the way Roon has been designed which - were I to attach the (to me confusing) ‘Classical’ Genre to all my Albums - I’d be able to take advantage of?

You may remember (also) helping me with the way in which appropriate tagging gets Title-Work-Part to work in Roon so that movements or individual Lieder, say, are appropriately indented and numbered.

Currently I have only observed (could be my shortcoming, for sure) the parchment background when a ‘Classical’ Genre is ‘invoked’.

I’m committed to making the best of the way Roon works.

What else could I expect - at the Album level - if I tagged all my imported CDs (am shying away from doing this at the track level) the way you’re advising?

I’m listening :slight_smile: …

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Thank you very much, @DDPS!

I believe you’ve placed the stylus perfectly in the groove and focused the laser precisely on the CD track! (Apols for that silly attempt at a metaphor.)

I’m certainly ready to be persuaded that I’m missing some functionality by assigning Genres the way I do. If/when I know what that is, I’ll evaluate it and see if it’s of real use to me.

Like you, much of the functionality of Roon isn’t (so far) relevant to me. I was delighted, though, to have spent a week or two recently importing ‘liner notes’ as PDFs (named just 'Booklet.pdf: something - it almost goes without saying - that I learnt here) into my Library.

I don’t (yet?) really need biographies and the rest. Although it’ll always (?) be there if that should change. Surely that is a key selling point of Roon.

I didn’t expect to get much from ‘curation’ and recommendations, either. But just yesterday, while exploring Michel Richard deLalande, I got a hint of a recording from Roon (really, presumably, from MusicBrainz and/or AllMusic). I thought I had everything available. Thanks, Roon!

But - as you so clearly imply - there are possibly as many ways of using Roon as there are users. That’s an enormous strength, isn’t it.

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