I’m grateful for much of the information about albums and works Roon provides. The historical accounts of classical compositions are particularly useful. I wonder, though, if there is or could be a setting to disable editorial content like album reviews from AllMusic. I find these reviews most problematic when they’re negative, but I’d prefer even positive commentary not be made an integral part of my library. Is it possible to disable editorial content? If not, could that feature be made available in the future?
I second this. I’m currently evaluating Roon via the trial period and liking a lot of what I am seeing, but this oversight really stood out for me. An option to disable imported editorial content from Allmusic would be a worthy addition, but I’d go a step further and also request the option to be able edit this field too so users can copy/paste text from preferred sources, or write their own synopsis/review, to have displayed there instead should they so desire. We can add/delete/edit just about every other attribute for an album, so why not this?
Quite honestly if Roon is supposed to reflect my library and my taste then I don’t really desire to have it littered with other peoples opinions about the albums in my collection whether they be positive or negative. It no longer feels like my personal library if that content is going to be getting in the way. You’re free to edit this kind of data field in something like Plex, so to not have it here, especially given the cost, is immensely disappointing.
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I subscribe to and Trust Gramophone, they often ( VERY) disagree with the Roon comments on albums
Same thoughts
Mike
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What about an option to disable all metadata ?!?
Honestly, the metadata including reviews of albums is just the point why ROON is so great. Perhaps the possibility to add your own comments could resolve this issue.
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I agree about adding reviews but with the supplied reviews, one doesn’t have to read them if they are not interested. Or perhaps we should read them to gain perspective with an opinion we don’t agree on.
If we are just spoon fed our own opinions, what’s the point?
An observation is that whatever the Roon team do; there are people who love it and people who love it less… (MQA anyone?) they certainly can’t win and as such should just build the product they want to build as and when.
We all know they are listening…
I’d agree that disabling the reviews currently available would be a way backward. There’s enough software around which doesn’t do enriched metadata so roon shouldn’t turn out to be another one of that breed.
More reviews - like hinted at here by Mike and for instance requested here - seems like a way forward. 
Similar topic to …
Unsurprisingly, I don’t think there should be an option to disable reviews … they’re hardly in-your-face either. Indeed, I would welcome more curated content! 
Such features differentiate Roon from other “traditional” (boring) music players.
Roon looks at your music and finds photos, bios, reviews, lyrics, and concert dates, and makes connections between artists, composers, performers, conductors, and producers.
What you get is a searchable, surfable magazine about your music.
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Yes Martin, I”d like to see more curated content too, artist & album info as much as possible. Clicking around in album reviews (or via artists) makes it a journey. This was one of the reasons for me to buy a lifetime.
There is a topic / request for more metadata I thought, but can”t find it anymore.
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I fully embrace the concept of curated links to bios, lyrics…etc very much. I’d love to see an option to open up attached pdf’s of digital liner notes someday too, and the requests for links to multiple reviews are something I could get behind as well as it’s often interesting to read what other people think (especially if we could go way back and read how an album might have been thought of decades ago and compare opinions then to to potential contemporary re-appraisals). That’s all great, but a third party opinion embedded into the actual library pages of every album I own has no personal relevance to me, and if I wanted the view of someone I didn’t ask telling me how terrible something I like is then I’ll hop onto Twitter. Yes, you can simply not read them, but ultimately my feeling is that it boils down to the simple question of who’s collection is this? It’s mine, it’s a beloved reflection of my tastes and interests that span my entire life, but inevitably it feels a lot less personal when everything is rated and reviewed by complete strangers.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d welcome what’s there now always being the default, no need to change that at all, but I see no harm in having options to disable or personalise the review/synopsis text, especially (again) when Roon let’s you edit pretty much every other feature and detail displayed about an album.
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I do, both from a product management perspective and ultimately for the user.
What I’ve learned about Roon is that it challenges the way you interact with music. Roon confronts the traditional idea of a music player and has few bounds. Indeed for me, I have had to rethink what I want from a music collection.
I realised, after living with Roon, that I’m not so interested in collecting–although it’s hard to let that go–and far more absorbed in listening to a diverse spectrum of work.
Roon enables me to do this and I don’t think any other music player comes close.
Perhaps this is why I will resist suggestions to turn Roon into another generic player.
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I just love the way it “meanders” me (is that a word) through my collection listening stuff that’s been “hiding” for years not to mention an odd foray into Tidal
Mike
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The ideal thing would be liner notes, but I don’t think there’s any comprehensive source like AllMusic for that data.
The problem with AllMusic reviews in Roon is that they appear where you would expect to find liner notes: they seem like information about the album, but in fact they’re reviews. Perhaps if Roon’s metadata expanded to include more sources of editorial content, under something like a “Reviews” page or tab, the presence of reviews would only be positive.
I noticed that AllMusic replaced the cringe-inducing review of Hilary Hahn’s Elgar and Vaughan Williams that appeared a few times on this forum as an example of how bad the reviews could be. That’s progress!
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Certainly not comprehensive, but not entirely useless, either: http://albumlinernotes.com
And TunesMap is interesting.
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The real problem… is that the quality of the AllMusic metadata is absolutely terrible. In every respect. There’s a lot of it, that’s true. But this is one of the best examples I can think of in our hobby that quantity <> quality. Really it’s awful. Roon does so many things well on the audio side - I realize that they have positioned their product around the metadata… I suggest a pivot! Pivot to the audiophile/sound quality side, The metadata quality is an issue for their target customer, I wonder how that disconnect could ever have happened. There is no way that anyone with deep knowledge across multiple genres of music could ever have thought the Rovi data didn’t suck.
Please open the framework and give us alternatives including supplying our own metadata in the old school way - 100% from tags.
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Would love for an option to disable them.
The biggest issue I have with it is that it hinders focus filters. I want to see albums that I’ve rated myself.
People constantly say “Just rate those albums and it’ll cover up allmusic’s rating!” That does not work when there are albums I have not listened to yet.
The only way to remove editorial ratings right now is to use the “None of these look right” option and “Basic file information”. However, as far as I know, it’s not possible to do this in batch. It’s massive labor work to do this for every album that has editorial ratings. So just make it easier for us and give us an option to disable it.
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You never said what you found to be terrible. Care to share?
- confusing artists with the same name that aren’t the same person
- sub sub sub sub sub genres that are completely meaningless to anyone
- reviews supplied by persons that have no qualifications or are anon
- inconsistency across all meta-dimensions
- classical meta data that confuses artist and composer
- album art from specific reissues that doesn’t match the library instance
- missing or unidentified albums
Off the top of my head anyway
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I don’t believe AllMusic is responsible for most of your well-justified complaints. I think they just happen to buy their meta-data from the same source Roon does.
I’m pretty sure all their review are written by staff, i.e. named journalists/ music critics AllMusic.com does have user reviews but they’re not displayed in Roon.
As @xxx says most of your complaints aren’t with AllMusic. Although I gave up on tagging genres some years ago I think they do have value (behind the scenes) in Roon when it comes to discovering new music.
I don’t want to be an apologist for Roon or their databases, but I have a newfound appreciation for the difficulty of the metadata process. I looked for a particular album with a tagger and found ten (10) listings for what was the identical music! Different labels, different covers, different countries, different languages, different album types, and different catalog IDs. On top of that, my album was not among the choices. What a bunch of goo!
Plus I think Roon is trying to meld information from other DBs or sources. Ugh.
The whole artist/composer thing is definitely a residual DB problem that was standard practice before composers had tags. They had to appear as primary artists in order to be searchable or presentable by the taggers of the day.
And you are correct that there is no one DB with all albums. (Vinyls seem best to be covered by Discogs.) But ROVI is, I believe, the largest library. To become more accurate in its IDing, Roon would have to fold in additional sources which would compound the AI coding requirements.
Problem is, there is no industry-wide entity that is driving DB consolidation. Until that happens, or someone invents a way to monetize the process of improving the DB error rate, the goo will perpetuate, I’m afraid.
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