Composer errors generated by Roon

I am running a Roon Nucleus +. I have only 3 zones in my house. In two zones there are Bluesound units, while my music room has a Mytek Manhattan II with Roon bridge. My music library is about 4TB. Roon accesses this data from a 8TB LaCie drive. The basic library is an iTunes file stored on a Drobo Raid device. This network is all connected by ethernet. Everything works well, and I am continually impressed by the robust features and performance of Roon.

In the last few days I have noticed changes in Roon meta data that concern me. I research both classical music and jazz. I also host a jazz radio show. And I find it important to have accurate meta data.

  1. My first problem occurred with the album “Denzal Sinclaire”:

Track 4. Where or When
composed by Richard Rogers, Lorenz Hart

Track 5. You and the Night And the Music
composed by Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz

Roon changed composers and showed all of the above 4 composers as composers for both songs. When I edited the information to delete the extraneous composers in each song the error was not corrected. Additionally, if I went to Track 4 and selected the command 'Go To Composition" it went to the song shown on track 5. Similarly, if I went to Track 5 and selected the command “Go To Composition” it went to the song shown on Track 4.
I tried switching the location of the songs within the album on my iTunes file, but the problem persisted. Eventually, I rebooted the Nucleus + and the problem was corrected.

However, I have found other composer errors which I could not correct through editing, or rebooting the Nucleus +. As an example lets look at a portion of the album “Scott Hamilton Plays Ballads”

Track 7. Emily was composed by Johnny Mandel, Johnny Mercer. Roon has added in the composers from track 8. In A Sentimental Mood. When you go to “Emily” and hit “Go To Composition” you are taken to a list of songs “In A Sentimental Mood”.

Track 9. A Beautiful Friendship was composed by Donald Khan, Stanley Stein. Roon has added in the composers from Track 5. Laura. Corrections aren’t made and if you go to Track 9 and select “Go To Composition” it takes you to the song Laura.

Neither of these errors was correctable through editing or rebooting the Nucleus +

Track 11. “Embraceable You” is much more serious problem. The song was composed by George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin. I have about 26 versions of that song throughout my iTunes library, all showing the two composers.

Now, Roon has added in the name Maurice Whitney to every file. Maurice Whitney is not in my data base, nor are any songs he wrote. He was an American classical composer (now deceased) who wrote a transcription of “Embraceable You”. Now each version of the song points in Roon to his transcription.

I regularly look through my meta data to standardize song titles, composers and names. In the last day I found these errors. I am worried the errors are generated by Roon and there could be much more.

Regards, Bill

Checking these albums against Allmusic and Discogs shows a mismatch on the track listings. I downloaded Scott Hamilton from Tidal and indeed the tracks are wrong - thus I surmise Allmusic is to blame and imagine this is the source of your problems. Roon’s @metadata gurus will sort it out.

Thanks for taking the time for that check of All Music. I would have thought that the composers are matched to “songs”, and the order is irrelevant. If I change the order of my songs in iTunes, the performers and composers and all other associated data remains with the appropriate song. I’ll count on Roon to sort it out.

How about the addition of Maurice Whitney to all versions of "Embraceable You. That is probably another Allmusic contribution. I wonder if any other Roon users noticed it.

Thanks again

Just as a follow up. I was able to edit Maurice Whitney out of existence and change the title so all is now appropriate for the song “Embraceable You.” However, I am still concerned that errors can be made affecting a number of songs and I have to rely upon my manual review of data to find and correct them.

From your pics, it seems you ripped/downloaded the albums yourself i.e. not via Tidal and provided your own metadata. Thus your metadata has been conflicting with Roon’s (they get theirs from allmusic) once Roon has identified the album. I would imagine that your problem is restricted to you and those others who have similarly ripped their own copies.

PS I’ve got Maurice Whitney as a composer on Embraceable You too! Some editing called for…

Thee is an advantage to studying music and providing researched meta data. Even when I download music I correct songs for spelling and make sure every song has only one correct or consistent spelling and the correct composer. For example, a lot of apostrophes get replaced by a french accent mark. Looks almost the same, but they don’t sort the same.

At the same time I can correct for songs that were misappropriated (stolen). For example, the songs “Four” and “Tune up” were written by Eddie Vinson, while the song Solar was written back in 1948 by Chuck Wayne for his deceased friend Sonny Berman. All three songs were copyrighted by Miles Davis. He never wrote them.

Problem Resolved

I think I found a solution to these errors involving composer information. First, I found more cases of these errors. In one album, “Nina Simone’s Finest Hour”, all the composer info is wrong for tracks 9 through 14.

To resolve the error I clicked on the album and selected “Edit”. I then picked “Metadata Preference” in the album preferences I went to the end of the list and selected a ROON preference for “Track Title”, “Track number” and Track’s Track Number".

When I went back to the album, all these errors were corrected.

Note, if I went back to “Metadata Preference”, and changed the selection to “Prefer File”, the errors reappeared.

Hope this helps the discussion.

Yes. You are now removing the conflicts between your and Roon’s metadata.

However…
I downloaded the Simone album from Tidal and found there were two versions of the album which appear if I try to identify it, and these differ in the track ordering. I don’t know what you used to set your tags when you ripped the album but evidently the matching ended up different from Roon’s.

In this case it appears that Allmusic/Roon got it right (and you didn’t), but in your other cases mentioned above, Allmusic/Roon was wrong and you were right. We need @metadata gurus to sort that out, rather than you having to resort to workarounds.

Brian

Hi @William_Krause,

Would you mind sharing this album with us so we can take a closer look?

Ideally, you can zip up the entire folder and send me a private message containing a shared dropbox link. If you don’t have Dropbox or need another way to send the media, just let me know.

Hi @William_Krause,

I wasn’t able to reproduce this behavior. The track numbers that I see also don’t quite match with what you’ve reported here. Can you try re-scanning this album and see if that helps resolve things here?

I have reached out to our metadata provider and requested they make a change here. I’ll keep you updated once we hear from them.