+1
Roon should definitely have an easy way to allow users to assign a certain composition to a certain track or - in case of multi-part compositions - a group of tracks.
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I thought MP3Tag was the gold standard in tagging. How is MusiCHI better?
+1 This would be useful.
I’ve used both, but MusiCHI is optimized for classical. But I don’t think you can purchase it anymore. It is only available with their music server now.
This cropped up for me again today. I don’t want Roon to edit the tags, I just want to be able to select a number of tracks and group them as a composition. Simple. It shouldn’t require tricks, dark arts and voodoo magic in third-party tagging programs to bend Roon into displaying compositions properly.
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Yes, just give me the option to group the Medley on side B of Abbey Road as a composition, and I will be a happy man. Maybe only briefly, but I will be happy.
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I find that on many classical music albums imported from Tidal tracks are not correctly grouped into compositions, or not grouped at all. So this feature—the ability to group tracks in the album editor into compositions—not only is necessary for local albums, but also for albums imported from streaming services.
We have an album editor where we can select tracks and group them into discs, and I have used this feature occasionally. We can also reorder tracks and save the album with the reordered track list. But we cannot regroup tracks into compositions if they are wrongly grouped or not grouped at all. This is one of the features I miss most.
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Found this thread in my search for a solution to the title gore that is the tracklist of the Qobuz version of Marillion’s An Hour Before It’s Dark.
I am surprised to learn that grouping these tracks into compositions isn’t possible (yet?). Or am I missing something?
In general editing of multi-part compositions is only possible with local content. If you have your own rip you can split the titles into WORK and PART tags. Roon will then group the composition hierarchy.
There is no such editing capability for streamed (i.e. Qobuz content). If roon has not auto-formatted the composition hierarchy then your options are limited. What you can try is editing the titles and putting a colon “:” delimiter in. For example:
Be Hard on Yourself: I. The Tear in the Big Picture
Be Hard on Yourself: II. Lust for Luxury
etc.
This is extremely hit and miss. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t.
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That’s great. Sometimes using another delimiter like dash “-” will work when the colon doesn’t work (you may even find that different long/short dashes work/don’t work). Also for example using decimal numbers like 1., 2., 3. . . . instead of roman I., II., III. . . . will work. Finally, as a last resort you can go to allmusic and see exactly how they have formatted it. Sometimes copying that will work.
Of course what would be much better is providing the same WORK/PART editing for streamed and local content, or at least making the editing workaround above for streamed content more predictable. There have been quite a few feature requests for this going back many years. This is not the only one.
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Well I now see the hit and miss part of your reply: the last track, Care, does not work like the others. Apparently because ‘Care’ is just one word. If I add another random word between ‘Care’ ’ and the semicolon it works, but not with just the one word ‘Care’.
This is correct. It’s a deliberate design choice to prevent some false positives.
Thanks for the reply. Can you give any info on the status of this feature request? Is this being considered for implementation?
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I’m afraid not.
I have come across this a few times. If it is important to you, you can usually choose a meaningful title although its obviously a bit of a hack. In this case the chorus is “You Have to Care”.
Thanks for all your kind replies and trying to help me out. I’m gonna let it rest and learn to live with it 
The absence of any possibility to group tracks on streamed albums to predefined or newly defined compositions rests a lot of value and appeal to the whole concept of ‘composition’ in Roon. Select any composition in the composition browser, and supposedly you can browse available recordings of that composition. But, with so many tracks undefined as compositions, or wrongly defined, this only makes little sense.
Another aspect which has recently been raised is that Roon doesn’t understand the difference between a ‘composition’ and the ‘interpretation’ of a given composition as part of a given album. If you ‘heart’ a composition in an album’s track list because you liked that interpretation as recorded on that album, you in fact ‘heart’ the more abstract concept of composition.
To me it seems as if all this had not really been well thought through and designed.
Just to illustrate why I think that the concept of ‘composition’ right now has little appeal, I’ll post a screenshot of the composition browser on my Roon database. I can scroll upwards and downwards and many pages look similar: many ‘compositions’ are in fact parts or movements of meaningful compositions… And this is so because it is simply not easily possible to correct the grouping of tracks into meaningful compositions, not for local albums, less so if these albums are unidentified by Roon, and for all practical purposes impossible for streamed albums. I feel that’s a shame.
Hi @Andreas_Philipp1. I share your frustration with the the lack of composition editing for streamed content. But I am not seeing quite so many issues as in your screenshot. Most of the albums are too blurry for me to see but I recognise the Boulez Stravinsky (2. Andante - Interlude (L’istesso tempo). I have that album in my library from Qobuz and roon did not have a problem with the composition hierarchies:
I assume yours is a local copy? Provided the WORK/PART tags have been set as in allmusic and both the album and the composition has been identified there should not be a problem with this particular composition.
I do have examples where no matter what I do roon will not group the composition but in my composition editor I do not have long lists of ungrouped compositions, just the occasional annoying example.
Maybe there is a difference in your setup? for example, do you have a screenshot of the Boulez Stravinsky? Maybe there is a difference that stands out.
Thank you Tony. Yes, I just checked and this particular album is a local copy. But no, I am not going to spend endless hours grooming my local files so that Roon possibly does a better job with identifying tracks that are parts of a well-defined composition. My import settings for composition/part grouping are set to ‘Prefer Roon’. Roon should definitely do a better job with that, and there should be some easy-to-use editor to correct the grouping of tracks in an album’s track list display. And this editor should work for both local and streamed content in my library. That’s the feature suggestion this thread is about. I would be very willing to correct wrong groupings on the fly as I am selecting an album for listening. Maybe Roon could even provide some mechanism for users to submit their corrected track groupings for a given album to some sort of repository in Roon’s cloud services, so that other users could benefit of them.
All this doesn’t really prevent me from enjoying my music. But it does rest value from Roon’s implementation of the ‘composition’ concept. It simply appears to me as user as a poorly thought-through and half-baked solution as it is now.
1 Like