Feature request: search by instrument

Roon Software Discussion
1

Yesterday I wanted to listen to Samuel Blaser’s Consort in Motion albums, and I blacked out on the name. I had no useful metadata that helped: Genres are vague, and Jazz is not meaningful signifier in my library. I have some tags of my own, but Chamber Jazz still has 600 albums. It wasn’t a recent acquisition.

Dang. This ever happen to you?

What I wanted, in this case, was to search on Trombone. Roon certainly has the metadata, it’s possible to index on that.

To be useful, we probably need to limit to Primary Artists, it isn’t very helpful to list all of them (e.g. albums with a drummer?). Or we could present two groups, primary and all other credits: sometimes I may have forgotten to list a jazz accordionist as primary.

Could be in Focus, same UI as Labels.

4 Likes
2

Like the request but at the rate metadata is being flatly ignored in favour of bells and whistles I’m not holding my breath.

1 Like
3

I started tagging my collection early on with Jazz Saxophone, Jazz Piano etc. Just sorta helpful

In the Classical genre, Roon is fiddling with an Instrumentation tag. It wouldn’t be much of a stretch to piggyback on that idea with a set of jazz tags. It shows up in the Composition screen.

4

Very nice request. I have been searching for songs with a hammond organ in it a while ago, no such luck. Would be nice to be able to. Might lead to discoveries as well. Ever heard of an instrument called the “Audio Generator”?

5

I did too, but I quit. Too much work.
If I wanted to be a librarian, I would have been a librarian.

Laziness is the mother of invention.
And the credits already exist, reasonably well, and when they do not we tend to fill them in.

6

I did not make my point well. I too quit tagging after a while.

I agreed with you: user tagging is only sorta helpful.

7

I too am tagging like crazy to try and get this sort of functionality in place, however, without .AND. to combine tags, we’re pretty stuck :frowning:

It’s only ever going to be a part-baked solution.

Please the Gods Of Roon, take into consideration this functionality.

8

Creating an index based on the existence of a piano credit for an album should be straightforward.
It would be more difficult to identify a piano solo, or piano trio, or the duos discussed recently in the Music section, and it would be unreliable because many albums identify only the primary musicians in Credits (hrmm ACT).

Step at a time.