@ged_hickman1. No, whatever happens to the metadata, the music itself is untouched. The worst case scenario is that the music is mis-identified in Roon (ie the display is wrong).
I’m a recent convert to Roon and while there’s clearly work to be done to make it a great platform for classical music, I’ve been pretty impressed by its ability to identify the CDs and downloads I’ve been throwing at it.
Thanks for that Philip I was wondering if one of the parts that was identified incorrectly became detached and so didn’t play in the right order.
I really only listen to rock/pop. When listening to classical pieces either listen to a whole work or highlights so I’m either using roon as a cd player or a mix tape. Hence the question
Ged
So, here’s another quandary. I’ve just ripped a compilation CD that appears not to be in Roon’s database so I’m using the file metadata instead.
I’ve done my best to ensure it’s consistent. Here’s how it looks in Roon.
Tracks 1–4 and 9–17 nest as I’d expect them to. But tracks 5–8 don’t. What’s going on here? Am I missing something?
Is track 6 really symphony no. 2 movement 1?
Hi @Philip_Gibson,
I experience everything in your screenshot. It is not just the nesting that is wrong. None of your works have been identified as compositions either and they are standard repertoire.
This is what I do:
You have the composer in the track name. This needs to be stripped out and placed in the composer tag using “first name last name”. Two of the composers are Russian and there can often be a large number of “equivalents”. You have to use an equivalent that roon knows about to get a composition ID. A trick I find that works is always use “Sergey” instead of “Sergei”, “Sergej” etc with Russian composers. But on occasion you will need to re-spell the last name as well. For example, Rachmaninov instead of Rachmaninoff.
You have several delimiters in your track names. Including colon “:” and dash “-”. Roon uses these delimiters to work out where the WORK ends and the PART begins. If you have both colons and dashes or multiple dashes then this will confuse roon when it tries to nest the work. You can try reformatting your TITLE tags to make it clear to roon where the WORK ends and the PART begins but a lot of the time this is impractical or too hard or time consuming and it is just easier and quicker to leave the TITLE as is and split the TITLE tag into WORK/PART tags.
It is not necessary in every case but in order to get a composition ID you may have to replace your WORK name with a work cannonical name. Just look up your works in allmusic and use the cannonical formulation you find there. Often this will depart markedly from the WORK names you have from the artwork or label website. With simpler titles, often just adding an opus and/or catalogue number is sufficient. With more complex titles only the cannonical names will work.
You can try:
Georges Bizet
Symphony in C major (“No. 1”)
Sergey Prokofiev
Symphony No. 1 in D major (“Classical”), Op. 25
Igor Stravinsky
Pulcinella, suite for orchestra
If track 6 should be symphony no. 1 - movement 2, then this is easily fixed.
If track 6 is indeed symphony no. 2 - movement 1, then the problem is that Roon finds a common stem immediately after “Prokofiev”. Tony’s suggestions are sensible.
In general, ensuring a good, unambiguous, common stem in the track titles is important. Adding opus and/or recognized catalog numbers is also a good idea.
However, if you don’t have another instance of the composition in your library which has been identified by Roon (i.e. come from Roon metadata), Roon will not, as yet, “identify” a composition (against Roon metadata) from file tag metadata.
@joel. Thank you for spotting the obvious (but not to me!) mistake in track 6. And thank you for your good-natured patience and assistance. The tracks are now nesting correctly. But, as I’m about to point out in my reply to @Tony_Casey, the works are not displaying as works, and that’s mystifying me.
Instead of trying to edit track names to fit Roon’s WORK and PART parsing heuristics, which are good but not infallible, I do 3 things: 1) Find the WORK in Allmusic.com, including making sure it is the correct version of the WORK (taking into account instrumentation, edition, excerpt vs full, …) ; 2) Make sure that COMPOSER is spelled as in Allmusic.com; 3) Add WORK and PART tags to each track matching what 1) found. I use a tag editor (Matadatics) to do this. Result, much success in getting WORKs identified.
@Tony_Casey. Thank you for your helpful reply – I’m really learning from your experience and greatly appreciate the insights you’ve offered.
As you can see from this screen grab…
…the movements/parts are now nesting as I’d like them to under the individual works. But the works aren’t showing up a such.
Here is how I’ve permed the metadata:
BTW, I’ve tried both Sergei and Sergey for Prokofiev.
So, have I missed something or am I just onto a loser here?
All the best.
Likely that the WORK names inferred by Roon do not fit the names in its database well enough. As I wrote above, the best is to leave track names alone and use WORK and PART tags that agree with Allmusic.com, which is one of the main sources for Roon metadata. Works for me, anyway, with works from Bach to Berio…
As I said above, do you have other identified copies of these works in your library?
This is great, thank you, @Fernando_Pereira. I’m Mac-based and the tag editor I’m using (Meta) doesn’t support WORK and PART tags, unfortunately. Can you recommend a Mac-based tag editor that does? I looked at mp3Tag, which can be run in emulation mode, and found it way too intimidating. Best wishes.
Try Yate. It’s not free but good. It’s rather feature rich, which - so be warned - may be (too) overwhelming. A trial is available.
@Fernando_Pereira. Thank you for the recommendation. I’ve downloaded and installed a trial version of Yate. I’ve loaded the album and had a play with Bizet’s Symphony in C.
Here’s how I’ve permed the metadata:
And here’s the result:
So now Roon is recognizing the composer but see the movements as four separate works. Can you tell me which other settings I need to change?
I’m not Fernando 
but anyway and since I’ve brought Yate into play: the track titles should still be set to Work title - ## Movement number - your Symphony in C has got unified Track titles which is probably not good. Append the movement names (back) to the track titles then roon should be able to distinguish the tracks and maybe even group them together. (Added: Keep the work / part fields, of course.)
Note: you could automate the task of adding content from one field to another with Yate but maybe you save that experiment for later and stick to manual.
Thanks, @anon47919701. I think I’ve done as you suggested.
But it’s not giving me the result I was hoping for.
Can you help me spot the undeliberate mistake?
Well, you hope for composition identification, right? The grouping looks fine in your screenshot.
What you could try:
Yes, you hope! There are no other copies of those works in my music library right now. So can I add the album at musicbrainz via Yate? Or what’s the best way of going about it?
No, unluckily you would have to do this at the musicbrainz site with all the hassle this involves as setting up an account, reading the guidelines - and you really need to read the guidelines, especially for classical music - and then entering the data more or less manually, if you’re not familiar with things like Tampermonkey (I’m not, so don’t ask me 
…).
Maybe others have better ideas. Sorry.
