Apologies for all the questions, but I’m clearly excited and starting to think of the possibilities. Will your software provide functionality and allow users to add custom metadata to the database, e.g. I may want to add a genre tag “Guitar Virtuoso” to all of Steve Vai’s albums and/or tracks in which he appears. Ideally it could be done at the push of a button rather than track or album at a time.
The databases are built to support comprehensive editing functionality. We have basically made every entity and field in the database editable. So, this case will be possible, along with many, many more things that you might want to do.
Full editing functionality will not be available not immediately at launch. With such a rich metadata model, the editing user interface has a immense amount of surface area–getting that UI built and polished just didn’t fit in to our launch schedule. Until that work is done, Roon will support several editing flows focused on correcting mistakes or shortcomings in automated metadata retrieval.
It would be really helpful to know what editing functionality is actually available (or even ‘about to be made available’) at each release. At present, we’re nearly all new users, so I guess I may not be alone in being unclear about things that I can’t do because I don’t know how to do them, versus things I can’t do because that functionality isn’t available yet. Specific examples are of things I can’t do would be:
- edit existing tags
- upload new / different album art
- directly edit track names / album titles.
Absolutely not a complaint - this is, even now, a major step forward
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- edit existing tags
We have an export feature that will take the metadata in Roon, re-tag your files, and put them in a new location, nicely organized and “clean”.
We do not have in-place tagging in the roadmap right now–destructive operations on user files are something that we will have to consider very carefully. If/when we get it wrong, content can easily become un-recoverable. Doing it as an export operation more-or-less forces you to have a backup of the original files in case something unexpected happens.
- upload new / different album art
This you can do today. On the album screen, click the little edit pencil in the lower right hand corner of the top area.
- directly edit track names / album titles
This is a relatively high-priority item for us, alongside a mechanism to prefer local album/track titles from your tags + probably track/media# editing as well. These seem like baseline requirements for achieving sanity when things don’t go perfectly with automatic identification.
This is absolutely critical – can you shed any light as to when this will be activated, or at least what internal priority you are assigning it?
We know how important this is. It’s very high on our list and the work is already in progress.
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Hello, I would like to follow up on this post.
I am seeking an easy playback interface across multiple platforms which could satisfy two needs. One would be custom metadata, and one would be scrubbing FF/RW for all tracks.
I have searched quite far and wide, and so far the Naim products are the best option I have found, but they can be quite pricey .
Does Roon currently allow for custom metadata, and support it even when entered from other software?
To give you an idea, I have been cataloging analog recordings for a client which include classical metadata tags such as “conductor”, “orchestra”, “soloists”, as well as “year” etc. I have encoded the files in FLAC and for quality and to be available across platforms.
The client is a Mac user and has used iTunes, currently I am having him use VLC temporarily since it supports FLAC on any platform and is free.
Seeing what Roon does, I am excited to find out what is possible.
Thanks!