Credit Roles Consideration Requests

“Chorus Director” is something I see a lot on large vocal music. A kind of conductor.

Crwth - good scrabble word !

@brian i’m not sure that i agree with you.
if you consider what roon’s “mission” is supposed to be (have a look at the website), i think that having some kind of “piece of art” instead of a standard list is one of the puposes.

so, my point is: why a closed list?
could we not have a mechanism similar to the genres?
in genres, i can tag however i like my files.
than roon can take care of them, and if i like it can map them in fixed roon genres hierarchy. but if i don’t like, i can still prefer a specific genre not present in the list.

that said, it would be helpfull to be able to map credit roles: even in your list, there are many doubles, like “sax (soprano)” and “soprano saxophone”, and it would be great to merge/map them in one (chosen by the user).
i could decide to save “Yak and black lace underwear”, or map it in something else.

i don’t see your point in avoiding a credit role that would just appear in 1 album. and then? who cares? that album is unique for that reason, too.
besides, let’s consider one point: in roon there’s no way to search anything by roles (i cannot look for duduk and find all albums with a duduk player…).

(as an aside: let’s say than in roon you cannot even browse by performer…)

and let’s consider one final point:
even though a role is not in roon’s list… it is scanned in the files. that means that it is not showed, but it’s there in the file tags section of the track.
that means that (i guess) showing it is not going to make the library larger. it’s a piece of information already there.

I’m sure you don’t agree with me. I’ve read many of your posts before :slight_smile:

It’s a closed list for two reasons–

First–this forces a normalization to a clean, consistent set of names for credit roles, so there aren’t seven ways of saying the same thing. I’ve seen an early version of Roon (never released to the public) that accepted and displayed credits indiscriminately. The experience was unclean, cluttered, and repetitive, and the only way to fix that was tons of manual editing–something that the great majority of people aren’t willing to do.

Yes, there are some repeats in the list we are using–they didn’t originate here, but they do exist. We should clean those up, and when we do, those benefits will filter to everyone, not just a minority who are willing to edit.

Second–If we know the full set of roles at design time, there is more power to do interesting things them. This has been important recently…we have been working on machine learning stuff that needs to know if a credit role is an instrument, a producer role, an engineering role, a composer/conductor/etc role, if it is a keyboard instrument or a type of trumpet, etc. By working with a fixed list, we can manage these classifications centrally.

Genres being an open set is problematic, but the horse is already out of the barn. For example, Roon Radio doesn’t know about your personal genres, nor will any of our other “smart” stuff in the future. If you do turn on user-provided genres, there is almost always mess to clean up, and manual hierarchy-building to be done–which few people do, so it gently harms their experience with clutter.

The difference between genres and credits is that there are a lot more people who’ve invested time into personal genre classification systems. We first released Roon with a closed set of genres, and that quickly became a significant barrier to acquiring users, so we were forced to make a compromise. There is not a similar amount of concern for credit roles in the world.

I’m sorry :slight_smile:

anyway:
-i’m sure that much can be done on the machine learning side. and also on the graphical display that could benefit from a fixed roles list. for example
a) statistics (of genres listened, but also “which is your favorite instrument?”, “do you prefer female or male voices?”… i’d like some statistics… :slight_smile: )
b) additional filters of music (for example, filter classical AND violin… actually i’m doing this manually using roon tags to tag the main instrument of an artist/album… it would be great if roon could do this :slight_smile: )
c) many more… i could go on…
-so, i can really accept the compromise and would really love anything that, with the power of roon, could bring out something new … something no booklet could give (i don’t forget that the “Yak and leather underware” are there… on the digital booklet)
-i’m glad to know that there are reasons… which were not clear.

but, as it turned out, the list of roles is… not complete. i didn’t struggle to find out more. they simply came out, because i normally tag almost all new albums with credit roles at track level. and it happens quite often that there are some missing. almost always in the ancient music or regional music with tradicional instruments. but you missed also the violin octet!
so, it would be nice a top level forum thread for this, something like “metadata problems”, called “credit roles problems”

so, thanks for reading this one too :wink:

Hi there.

I’m interested specifically in the instrument list, and in making sure that my Musicbrainz tagged collection works well in Roon :-).

Since I noticed a few instruments missing, I did some digging into https://kb.roonlabs.com/Credit_Roles and https://musicbrainz.org/instruments

There is about 300 instruments listed in Musicbrainz not in Roon.

Looking just at the first few in the list, a good number are just alternative spellings.

A few are really missing though.

  • 17-string bass koto -> 17-string koto
  • accordina -> melodica
  • afoxé -> afoxe
  • afuche/cabasa -> afuche / cabasa
  • alto viol -> alto viola
  • analog synthesizer -> analogue synthesizer
  • arghul -> arghoul
  • arrabel -> rabel
  • ashiko -> ashiko drum

Really missing:

@brian I definitely agree that there should not be different entries for the same instrument.
That being said, for interop (with Musicbrainz in this case), having an aliasing mechanism would be awesome. Not to mention that for some instruments, it’s not really clear what the canonical name is/should be.

What do you guys think?

For my own needs, I’ll probably script something to ignore diacritics and do some substring comparisons, then retag, but…

Happy to share the full diff, but apparently I cannot upload a txt file, so I would have to dump it here as copy paste…

Hope that helps.

Yeah, we are working on credit aliases. Making sure that we have good translation for musicbrainz should also be a topic here. I am also not 100% sure that we are pulling all mbz credits at the moment.

@joel @vova please make sure the above is incorporated into our tracking ^^

@brian aliases: \o/ \o/

I am also not 100% sure that we are pulling all mbz credits at the moment.

If you mean: is the MB dataset in the Roon webservice? I do not think it is (this for example)
Also, track level relationships are rarely there as far as I can tell.

If you mean, “data out of files tagged by Picard”, there are some issues indeed. The most glaring one is probably that picard tags instruments performers as PERFORMER=Somebody (some instrument) which does not fly well into Roon, which expects PERSONNEL=Somebody - some instrument instead.

It is fairly easy to script this out and rewrite / convert all these tags, but if Roon could be smarter on the PERFORMERS tags, that would be awesome.
In my scenario, I maintain my metadata using MB + Picard (prefer file), and having an extra processing step before adding the files to Roon is a minor annoyance.

What I will probably do myself is write a tagger that relies on the Musicbrainz service and stuff tags in a way that works well with Roon.

I would love it of course if Roon was playing better with MB (read: use more of / only the MB dataset) - but then I understand why it’s complicated and that your core business is not “specialist” metadata.

Thanks for Roon by the way! This is a fantastic piece of software.

FWIW, here is the full list of the instruments in Musicbrainz that are NOT matching exactly in Roon:

17-string bass koto
accordina
afoxé
afuche/cabasa
alto viol
aman khuur
analog synthesizer
arghul
arpeggione
arrabel
ashiko
baandu
baltic psalteries
banjo-ukulele
barbat
baroque rackett
bass recorder
bass trumpet
bass violin
bazooka
berda
bhapang
bicycle bell
birbynė
birch lur
bisernica
blaster beam
boatswain's pipe
boobam
boomwhacker
bouzar / gouzouki
brač
bronze lur
buisine
cembalet
chakhe
chande
chime bar
chirimía
chirimía and drum
chitra veena
chuurqin
cizhonghu
clapper
clapstick
claviorganum
concussion idiophone
craviola
cristal baschet
crwth
cymbal
danso
denis d'or
disk drive
diyingehu
djoza
dombra
donso ngɔni
doshpuluur
doyra
dramyin
drums (drum set)
duggi
dulce melos
dulzaina
duxianqin
effects
electric bass guitar
elektronium
english concertina
english flageolet
fipple flute
flabiol
floppy disk drive
flumpet
fourth flute
friction idiophone
fundeh
garifuna drum
garklein recorder
gehu
gendèr
german concertina
german harp
ghaychak
gizmo
gralla
gramorimba
gravikord
guban
gudok
guitar family
guitar synthesizer
guitaret
guitarrón chileno
guitarrón mexicano
güira
handbell
handpan
hard disk drive
harpejji
hotchiku
hourglass drum
hue puruhau
hue puruwai
hydraulophone
härjedalspipa
jeli ngɔni
jouhikko
junjung
k'lông pút
kachva sitar
kagurabue
kamalen ngɔni
kanklės
kemençe of the black sea
kettle drum
khim
khong wong lek
khong wong yai
khulsan khuur
kinnor
klong khaek
klong song na
krap
krap khū
krap phuang
krap sēphā
kèn bầu
kös
kōauau
kōauau ponga ihu
lamellaphone
lasso d'amore
lautenwerck
lavta
laúd
lirone
lithophone
luthéal
maddale
mandoguitar
mandolute
mandora / gallichon
marimba lumina
membranophone
mendoza
minipiano
mukkuri
musette de cour
nadaswaram
natural trumpet
nguru
ngɔni
njarka
octavilla
octobass
oktawka
olifant
orphica
otamatone
oval spinet
pahū
pahū pounamu
paiban
pakhawaj
percussion idiophone
phách
pi
pianet
piano quartet
piano spinet
piano trio
piccolo oboe
pipe and tabor
pkhachich
plucked idiophone
pocket trumpet
poi
poi āwhiowhio
porotiti
portuguese guitar
primero
pūkaea
pākuru
pūmotomoto
pūpakapaka
pūrerehua
pōrutu
pātē
pūtōrino
pūtātara
qilaut
quadruple reed
ranat kaeo
ravanahatha
reactable
rehu
renaissance rackett
repinique
rototom
rōria
saduk
saluang
samica
sasando
saw duang
saw sam sai
saw u
saxophone quartet
scraped idiophone
serbo-croatian tamburica orchestra
shaken idiophone
shichepshin
shudraga
single reed
slenthem
slentho
spinettone
steel-string guitar
string quartet
string trio
struck idiophone
subcontrabass recorder
suka
sursingar
swarmandal
sênh tiền
t'rưng
table steel guitar
taishogoto
talharpa
taonga pūoro
tape
tar
tarota
te kū
telharmonium
temür khuur
tenor viol
tenora
the great stalacpipe organ
three-hole pipe
tible
tinya
tonette
tonkori
topshuur
traditional basque ensemble
treble violin
trikiti
tritantri veena
tromboon
trumpet family
trống bông
tubax
tube zither
tubon
tumutumu
tungso
turntable
txistu
tōkere
unspecified drum
vessel flute
vibrandoneon
video game console
vienna horn
viol family
violin family
violin octet
viololyra
violoncello piccolo
violotta
vuvuzela
wagner tuba
whip / slapstick
wooden fish
wot
xalam
xaphoon
yatga
yehu
yu
zhaleika
zhuihu
çevgen
ütőgardon
żafżafa
żaqq
šargija
čelo
żummara
đàn tam thập lục
đàn tứ dây
ģīga

my favorite…lol

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@seaharp1 actually this is the first one I did hit in my collection :smiley:

@Dubo_Dubon_Duponey

I’m using Yate (OSX) tagger which has a Roon setting available as well as MB and discogs plugins.
It’s not bad for $20.

@seaharp1 Thanks for the tip! I’ll give Yate another spin.

i add to the list:

ka drum

We need more cowbell!

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I have a few albums with “Modular Synthesizer” as a credit.

Two questions: There are many, many albums where Tivo has not added genre data or simply defaulted to Pop/Rock, Jazz or Classical. This is also often the case where there are multiple releases of an album and the “main release” has proper genre attribution but none of the other releases do.

  1. Does Roon fill in the blanks in these situations?

  2. If a user fills in the blanks by populating genre metadata into their file based metadata using genre names corresponding with the genre names used by Roon; and then has Roon merge file based metadata with Roon’s metadata, does/will Roon Radio any of your other “smart” stuff in the future leverage this or ignore it because it doesn’t originate within Roon?

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We do not only get genre data from Tivo. Whenever possible, we fill in the blanks based on other data sources.

That said, we do not take genre attributions from user edits or file tags into account in machine learning systems. Personal genre attributions are personal and often contradictory. We feel that mixing everyone’s genres together would lead to more problems than it solves.

It’s worth keeping in mind that genres are only an incidental ingredient of these algorithms. We do not select content based on genre, and it is not part of our model for determining the similarity of content to other content. Other models do most of the work here, and the ways in which we use genres are not particularly sensitive to the sometimes-patchy coverage of genre data.

Thanks, appreciate the explanation and the time taken to provide it.

Another missing instrument: tenor drum.

It’s common enough to have a Wikipedia entry (Tenor drum - Wikipedia) so ought to be in the database.