I would like to remove performers from classical music in my library. I prefer to just have composer credits determine what is displayed under artists. I've removed everything from my tags in artist/album artist and left composers blank, etc. I configured Roon import settings to 'prefer file' for library metadata. There should be no performer information left in the tags, but I'm still seeing my Artists list littered with performers. How do I get Roon to only display what's actually in the tags?
Roon is opinionated software and I suspect that you may not be able to bend it to your way of doing things. However, let’s see what the support team have to say…
I have to admit, I am kind of surprised. I would figure that telling Roon to use the tag information from the files would…you know…only use the tag information from the files. If it’s doing other ‘helpful’ things with the metadata in the background, invisible in user settings, that’s, to me, not great.
Thank you for your post. The confusion is understandable - however, something to keep in mind is that Roon, as a product, is metadata-enriched and will always consider descriptive metadata sources outside your own local files.
Even when you’ve set your own file tags to a higher weight, the server will be indexing available metadata and referencing upstream libraries to add additional descriptive information for library objects. Roon generally doesn’t function well for local file metadata curation as a siloed use case.
Please see the above post from our moderators, including the linked article, for a thorough explanation.
If I go through the app and edit the artist links associated with the albums in question, I’m assuming that, unless I do a library rescan, it should keep things the way I want them. Can you confirm?
At its core, Roon is designed to enrich your local music with Metadata, that is the “USP” of the product, indeed, one of the main features that distinguishes Roon from most other music server software.
While I honestly believe you can tag and listen and display your music in any way that you want (though I personally wouldn’t even know how to find anything in my library without artists, composers, etc. all correctly tagged), it does seem a bit odd that of all the available options you choose a piece of software that was primarily designed to do the exact opposite of what you want?
I think unidentifying all your albums will probably do what you want as that prevents roon repopulating album performers on subsequent scans. I regularly unidentify roon albums where there is no value added by roon identification or where unidentified albums with a complex composition hierarchy are much better formatted than roon identified ones. You can, if you are sufficiently motivated, recreate manually almost all the metadata that roon retrieves automatically during the identification process. This can give you great control over the end-result. I’m not sure though what useful roon functionality would be left if you unidentified all albums or how practical it would be depending on library size. I have probably unidentified no more than a few percent and done that over a period of many years.
You are correct, in that I do enjoy that value-add to Roon. And for most of my music, this is just as I like it. Most of my collection is rock, and Roon fills in the details and that’s fine. But I’m also a bit of a rabid opera fan, and I have a couple fairly sizeable Callas collections and other composer-based sets. Seeing as the orchestra, the primary performers, and sometimes the chorus all get added to the artists list, it more than doubles the list of artists of my collection. And to be frank, it’s not data I particularly care about. I’m not so much of a fan that I would be on the hunt for a performance of La Boheme with the Met Opera orchestra, as much as I’d be looking for a performance of Turandot with Joan Sutherland. And since I will only have maybe two of those, I don’t get a value add of that huge increase in my artist list.
In terms of answering your question more specifically, I was kind of having a hard time finding software that would sit on my NAS, output to my Yamaha receiver, and allow me to one-stop-shop both Qobuz and my NAS-based personal library from my phone.
Well, what I have tried, is going into Roon, selecting an album, editing it, and minusing out the extraneous artist data I don’t want. So far, it seems to be honoring those edits and not re-adding them back in.
Yes. This is a really annoying feature of the way roon handles Opera and any other Classical styles with large forces and large performer casts. Because of the large fonts it leads to difficult to read and navigate screens with certain genres. Roon wasn’t always like this. Primary artists used to be one or two key soloists, the orchestra and the conductor. The same as you will find on the spine of the CD. But a few years back roon started adding in the entire cast and cluttering the main album screen with sometimes 10 to 15 or so performers in large fonts which clearly do not fit and often extend past the screen margins in any case. It can take quite a bit of editing to make screens readable with certain Classical genres. Smaller fonts similar to those used in other players would have been a better choice.