Well, today I gave it another try to fix some albums that are not recognized by Roon (still have about 700 of them) with the Identify Album Tool.
But man oh man what a frustration it was again from the first album on. How Am I supposed to check if the track titles are correct when there is no way I can normally read them simply because they don’t fit into the box. No way of scrolling, just bad luck if it doesn’t fit. And this is on a 1900*1200 display. Lot’s of space but no space at all where it really counts, what a waste of screen real estate. Now I know the titles are not perfectly tagged to begin with but isn’t that what this tool is all about, trying to identify not properly tagged album?
Second, have some of you ever tried fixing the tracks in the right order, it is really a pain in the ass to use. What is it supposed to be, a stress test or a useful music organisation tool? I haven’t been using this tool for years, I just checked to see if something might have changed since but unfortunately, it is as bad as ever. Is this really what is considered to be state of the art software? Are the developers really not interested in what I consider to be a basic function of a music collection program?
Can you please once and for all look into this, it has been taking way too long now.
Roon does a lot of thing right but this tool is just a joke imho.
Chances are that the best answers you’ll get for this problem are somewhere between “Listen to the music, not to metadata” and “Roon is not a music organization toll”. (I apologize, I don’t want to hijack your post, but I can’t help myself).
This has indeed been (and still is) a frustration that should have been solved a long time ago. One of the inconsistent UI experiences that make Roon sometimes feel “cheap” rather than premium.
Imagine having to edit a bunch of classical records (with lots of tracks, sometimes over 50 tracks on one disc) and having to edit all of this manually. Too crazy for words.
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James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
4
Maybe there are better ideas, but at the very least it needs to provide for multiple select and drag and drop. I have given up on album identification if it involves matching tracks.
The ID process itself is a bit odd. Roon shouldn’t get so confused just because a track is 2 seconds off its expectation.
Agreed, but also the Windows 3.11-like way of having to move each track down one position at a time, instead of being able to e.g. drag and drop it (remotes are mostly tablets, hello we’ve moved on?).
Roon users like me having been saying this for years now, and I think Roon should get its basics in order, rather than spending all its resources on the ratrace keeping up with each and every new development (like MQA ).
There’s still no balance, as I keep on repeating. There have been several posts about a huge UI-update, that now appears to come to us in phases, but these kind of terrible experiences should be on top of the priority list IMO. Unfortunately, by now we can safely say it’s obvious they are not.
I’m naïve here as I don’t edit metadata in Roon. But does MusicBrainz/Picard ‘correct’ data in a credible way or does it just replace one bad set of data with another bad, but different, set of data?
I don’t know, but this is thread is not about whether or not the metadata is bad or not (which Roon can’t help), but about how bad Roon is if the metadata is bad — no matter if it’s my own fault, AllMusic’s fault or whatever. Roon could and should help fixing it in Roon much better — easier, quicker, better.
Not trying to shut you down in any way, by the way. On the contrary: if you think that’s a real issue, I would advise opening a separate support thread for it.
I agree with that (I think). I have no bad metadata. I’m sure it’s not perfect, or I could add more, but what I have accurately reflects the CDs I ripped.
I do have a small number of “unidentified” albums. It’s always because my album is not in the databases Roon looks at. Some should be there, some will never be there.
So I have to deal with this tool. I have to say, I’m not a complete idiot (I’ll accept partial ) but I find this interface completely lacking too. At first it wasn’t even clear what I was supposed to accomplish, or even what the two columns were. And what happens if you don’t get everything matched up?
There are a bunch of cases where there’s an album that’s close enough that it’ll at least get me the review, credits and all of that sort of stuff. I’ve switched to telling Roon to use my track titles, etc, so that seems to work out well.
Anyway, in short, this isn’t about Roon being a metadata editor. Roon will never be able to find matches for all albums. Never. So it needs to give us ways to fit our albums into the environment.
No it’s not about metadata, it’s about a horrible executed user interface of a simpele tool that should help making the identifying process easy. At least make it clear what the dsta in the colloms actually refers to, make it readable and let me Just simply number the track in the right order instead of this highly complicated puzzle, like I said it’s a joke, it’s Windows 3.11 indeed.
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James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
10
I’m very hopeful that, now that the Qobuz integration has been launched, that the next major effort for a release will be a substantial cleanup of the UI organizational and curating features.
Some users still seem to experience search slowdowns, and maybe there is also work being done there.
I have just noticed a significant drop in Roon team communications on the forum the past month. That often correlates with an upcoming release. Maybe this is that.
To the “just listen to the music” crowd: this IS for that. Sure, do I occasionally just like to browse a well organized collection, yes, I guess so, but what is much more important is that I am able to organize my collection in a way that allows for very fast but still complex and sophisticated means of assembling playlists for random shuffle. Others want ways to find a single disc in a box set. These curating functions are not for OCD. They’re for accessing music. Roon does sell itself as a library manager. So it’s not OCD to ask that these features be polished, corrected, finished, made usable, however you want to put it.
That content doesn’t fit the window or field it’s presented in or is hiding the reference point you’d need to make use of it seems to be a pattern in the app. A usability review of the entire app - if not done already - could probably deliver useful pointers.
I’m not sure if it’s a good idea to invest time into advanced inline curation features. Matching timing differences seems OK to me, but track order (like having a totally different release at hand) should better happen outside Roon. My take on it - and I’m heavily into good metadata can’t get enough of it …
Let’s speculate.
I’d doubt it - at least regarding anything for curation.
Some kind of mobile sync is probably more in line with what “the world” wants … (including better user / access rights management, which was asked for from time to time, too so it could be useful in more than one way).
I think it depends on what data actually is in the musicbrainz db. If the version of the album isn’t there or if the recordings aren’t added properly musicbrainz won’t help much. mb credibility comes from what volunteers enter.
No need for an advanced tool, Just a working tool. Somtimes it Just happens that, caused by a tagging fault, for instance track 1 and 11 got mixed up. Easy to fix, Well good luck trying to fix something as simple as this with this tool, it’s a straight nightmare. Now what if 3 track got mixed up with titels too long to fit the box? . that’s good for a nervous breakdown, or Just forget about it and consider it as a loss. That’s what I have done for the last two years but I really think it’s a shame for the software that users totally give up on it.
I don’t think the functionality in itself would be advanced. Drag and drop sorting of entries is already there - like in the grouping editor.
What I’d try to say is that in general I think the better approach is to use dedicated tools for correcting local (meta-)data. It might also prove to be the more sustainable approach because corrections would apply outside of Roon too.
1 Like
James_I
(The truth is out there but not necessarily here)
17
I could be wrong, but I think the goal is to correct the Roon-implied metadata. I agree that correcting file-embedded metadata would be outside Roon as it is now. Point being, all my files have good embedded metadata…every last one… and yet Roon still struggles to ID an album because my SACD version didn’t have all the live tracks of some other version, or two songs are 3 seconds off what Roon expected, or some other thing like that
Definitely. So many artists show up as “The” because the second word is too long to fit into the field allocated, no scrolling, no shortening, no second line. Just “The.” How did that get through QA?
Versions, especially when on different mediums, aren’t trivial to match. Roon is already compromising here - if you look at discogs you might get an idea what variation is possible. On the other hand I was quite successful to get matches for musibrainz added versions. Only two or three versions didn’t show up in Roon so far.
Yeah, the “same track as in Roon’s db” tolerance seems to be +/- 4 sec. That’s not much for instance when having digitized vinyl to match … Still it seems to be a reasonable value.
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