Customised tagging - will this cause Roon problems

Continuing the discussion from Multi - Disc Albums / How to Combine 2 Discs from the ska album into one multi disc album:

I’m new here so I am just getting used to the way posting works.

I have a NAS music library and am wondering how much my custom tagging may affect how Roon sees the collection.

For example for multiple disc sets, I tended to group all the files together within one album folder. I edited track number tags to read like this :-

101…117
201…218
301…316

The rationale behind this was to see just one album in a library “Album” view, and secondly when track 301 was playing, I was able to relate back to know that I was listening to track 1 on the 3rd CD.

What may turn out worse (in terms of Roon recognition) was that I tended to remove the Disc number tag because I did not want to see “Disc 1” being shown in my music player as it did, even for albums where there was only was one disc, which was true for the majority of my collection.

Will I need to do some tagging work if and when I decide to trial Roon as a music management / player?

Hey @Jeff_C – sadly, I think some of these tagging decisions are definitely going to affect the quality of your identifications in Roon.

If we’re not able to look at, say, 70 files and say “ok, 1-16 is disc one, 17-33 is disc two, etc”, then you’re unlikely to automatically get the kind of extended metadata that makes Roon unique.

If you add your collection as a watched folder, you should be able to get a sense of what works and what doesn’t. For example, with the aforementioned 70 track example, you can go in and edit the tags and you should see better metadata as soon as Roon’s directory scanning notices the change and makes the correct ID. The hit in our database should happen automatically.

Alternatively, if you have the 70 tracks showing up as a single disc, you may be able to make the match manually in Roon, by clicking the little pencil on the albums screen and choosing Identify Album. Obviously, this isn’t as nice as an automatic match. Whether it’s nicer than editing all the tags is up to you.

I’d also suggest reading through @jeremiah’s post here.

Thanks for the question @Jeff_C – let us know if any other questions come up.

Thanks for that @mike. I pretty much expected what you had to say.

The only other fairly major tagging decision I took when ripping my CD collection was as follows and I do not know whether this will hurt the way Roon makes identifications

Say I came across

(1) CD of Beethoven works by various orchestras and conductors
(2) CD with various composer works by a single orchestra and conductor

For (1) I would make Beethoven the “Album Artist”, and the various orchestra and conductors the “Artist” (track artist)
For (2) I would make the common (to all tracks) Orchestra and Conductor the “Album Artist” and Beethoven , Mozart, Schubert etc would be the “Artist” (track artist)

Because not many music libraries catered for searches on Composers (or indeed Conductors or Orchestras) I did not meticulously populate those tags, but most composer tags are populated, whereas I cannot think of any instances where I populated the Orchestra tag

A typical instance may look like this
Name on CD spine “Symphony No 5”
I would make the Album Title tag “Mahler - Symphony No 5 [Sinopoli]”
Album Artist “Mahler”
Artist “Guiseppe Sinopoli / Philharmonia Orchestra”
Composer " Gustav Mahler"

By naming the album title like that I was able to search my Album listing more easily (and I was able to use the Album listing almost exclusively).

I did not want to see loads of entries as below

Symphonie No 1
Symphonie Number 1
Symphony No 1
Symphony Number 1
"
"
for every classical composer who has written a symphony

Will any of these tagging decisions have repercussions if I want to trial Roon?

One of the major frustrations we set out to correct with Roon was the way most apps handle Classical music. Your strategy makes sense, because most music players focus on four ways of finding music: Artist, Album, Track, and Genre.

Of course, these are all poor fits for Classical music – Beethoven recorded no albums or tracks, nor would he be considered an Artist in Roon (which we use to mean “performer”). A Classical CD could reasonably be classified by who’s performing the music, who’s conducting the music, who composed the music, what kind of instrumentation was used, what period the work was composed in, and so on.

None of this is to say that our handling of Classical music is perfect, but we do feel that browsing by Work and Composer makes a lot more sense than trying to shoehorn Classical into the conventions of pop. This type of browsing is dependent on getting good identifications, which in turn is dependent on how close your tags and folder structure is to what’s in our database.

Of course, what’s in our database is dependent on how the music was originally released. Sometimes the composer might be the artist, but more often it’s the conductor or orchestra. If you’ve replaced this information with the composer, it may make an automatic match less likely. Ditto for changing the album titles.

My previous point is still relevant – you could edit the tags, but you could also just add your music in a watched folder, which will ensure your files aren’t modified in any way. You’ll be able to see which albums get extended metadata, and which albums are unidentified, and you’ll be able to correct the latter group right in Roon. I think you’ll find the connections we discover in your library are worth the effort, but my recommendation would be to go for the trial and let us know how it goes.

Let me know if you have any other questions @Jeff_C!