New Roon user (about 3 weeks), and since getting Roon I’ve been cleaning up some digital files and organizing them better on my hard drive. I have a few questions about genres and re-identifying albums.
Does Roon use file tags, in particular, the genre tag, to help identify an album?
Does Roon use the genre tag to make their overall genre tag or is Roon’s genre tagging 100% independent of the file tags? I can see when editing an album in Roon that it shows their genre tags and the file genre tags…this is how I found that Roon isn’t finding any genre for most Grindcore and Death Metal records.
When I re-tag, rename, or move files, Roon seems to almost instantly recognize this new information which is great. But when it does recognize these changes, does it re-identify the album?
I read some documentation about manually telling Roon to reidentify all albums in my library but I could not figure out how to do that. Under Setting → Storage → “my folder” I can select Force rescan but it doesn’t rescan my library. It does something but it takes 1 second so it appears to just look for changes. Is there a way to re-identify my entire library? I did see how to do an individual album but that isn’t useful for 1000s of albums. Of course, if Roon re-identifies when I re-tag, rename, or move files I don’t need to do this.
Is there a reason that Roon doesn’t find genre tags for some genres? I have 100s of Grindcore, Death Metal, and Industrial albums, yet those Genres are not showing on either my Genres page or under the Focus sub-genres. If I look at Metal and then the focus genre filter for the possible sub-genres it’s recognizing some much more obscure sub-genres, which is cool but not Death Metal?
In this Metal example, I’m seeing wonderful sub-genres in Focus including; Doom, Thrash, Stoner, Crossover, Crust, and Sludge. But not Death Metal?
@Michael_Howes - I’ve moved your post from the #support category to the #roon category of the forum, because it’s a set of questions about how Roon works, rather than a problem to be solved by the Support team.
I looked at the genre mappings last night and basically thought…eh, looks good to me…it’s all 1-to-1 by default which I’m good with. I’m mean it did cause my own personal debate, which I’ve had for 25 years, is it Avant-Garde or Avantgarde
I left the default genres, Use Roon’s genres, for now. I’m actually fascinated by comparing what Roon came up with to how I’ve got things tagged and for the most part, we match. I’m really asking because none of my Grindcore, Death Metal, or Industrial records are being tagged…in other words, it’s not that they are being incorrectly tagged. It’s that Roon is not giving these a genre tag. I’m happy to see that you had some Grindcore and Death Metal recognized. By my count, I have around 160 death metal records, 256 grindcore records and 30 (probably more that I don’t have tagged industrial) industrial records. And a spot check of 20 of these and Roon assigned no Genres. Hence my question about if there is a way to re-identify my entire library.
I also have all kinds of albums that are not tagged with genres automatically. When the genres are missing by the metadata providers, then Roon doesn’t have them. I would guess among 256 Grindcore albums are many rather obscure ones that simply have poor metadata. It happens a lot with obscure stuff. But if you have reliable tags in your files, then you can tell Roon to use those.
What I find strange is that genres like Death Metal are missing completely in your Focus. Surely among the 160DM and 256 GC albums you have some less obscure ones that do have automatic genres from Roon, so in this case DM/GC should appear in Focus. I dunno, something easy like Death for DM or Napalm Death for Grindcore.
agreed that many are more obscure bands and releases, particularly with grindcore being digital versions of DIY 7" releases.
But my 2 Death albums, one of which is Human has no genre tags
Rotten Sound albums were tagged as Heavy Metal so I at least I found grindcore releases that were tagged. I just now went through some better-known death metal bands and found a handful that were at least tagged heavy metal, Nile, General Surgery, Vastum, etc.
This all leads me to a new question. Looking at import settings for some file tags, track composer credits, main performer credits, etc there is an option of “Merge Roon and file” …is there such a setting for genres?
General Surgery has no DM genre for me, just Pop/Rock and Heavy Metal. Vastum has P/R and HM for 2, the other 2 only P/R. So that’s clearly simply missing tags on metadata services.
I don’t use genre file tags, so may knowledge is limited, but if you enable both these settings, it seems to me that it should use both?
Thanks for the Death - Human example is great, thanks and leaves me with 1 question, well, maybe 2.
What version of the album do you have? Mine is the 49-track 2xCD remaster from 2011 which I noticed Roon has marked as “Unidentified”
I noticed when browsing to look at my Human release in Roon I found it by going into Artists and scrolling and the band isn’t there! The album is grouped under that Detroit(??) proto-punk band Death along with DM Death’s The Sound of Perseverance release which is also the recent 2xCD remaster. Going to have to figure out if I can get these remastered/re-issued releases recognized and how to separate the different Death bands.
Thanks for all your help, I’m learning a lot about Roon just digging around because of your replies.
Now I’m wondering if there is a way to filter all “Unidentified” albums in my collection.
Good question, the Human I showed in my screenshot is my primary version and that’s the 8 track from Qobuz with release date shown as 4 April 2011.
Qobuz also has the 49 track, release date shown as 21 June 2011. It appears as another version of Human under the Versions tab (I have the Show Hidden Tracks and Albums setting to off) and it’s of course identified and has the same genres:
Human is of course a pretty huge album and should normally be identified. If it is unidentified, Roon does not assign any metadata to it, and hence no genres. (How could it - unidentified means that it does not know what this is).
You can click on “Unidentified” and then try to find the right one in the list and assign it. Or click the (…) button for the album and then Edit, there you can also do things like identify
However, with well known albums like this it should not be necessary and auto-identified. I think something is wrong with your imports or file tags. As this is a 2 CD album, did you follow the guidelines for disk sets?
Do you have streaming services at all? You should have at least one identified album by an artist in the library to get reliable artist matching, if there is more than one artist with the same name (and a streaming service is the easiest way to find an identified album). Else it can pick an arbitrary one or create a new one with the same name when you add a new album to the library.
It also happens when editing other credits within Roon.
I did not know there were guidelines for multi-CD sets. I’ll search those out. I also just noticed, looking at my hard drive I’m not even following my own standards for the Human release. All tracks from both discs are in the same directory…usually, I put the discs in their own directories.
Good. So what I learned from painful experiences is, before importing files into the library I ensure that every credited artist is already represented in my library. If I am not sure, I search and add such an album from Qobuz. Then I import the files and, if necessary, edit credits in Roon. They will usually then auto-match well to the correct artists. And after that, I remove the albums from the library if I added them just to be artist representatives.
Albums - Focus - Inspector - Indentified. Then click on the blue highlighted “+ Indentified” button and it will turn red and show a list of your unidentified albums.
