First impression : too good to be true?

Hello,

This is my first post here…

Until recently, I couldn’t care less about Roon, because I was rather satisfied with my use of JRiver or Audirvana+ to explore my (carefully tagged) collection of more than 4000 Albums (among which around 1000 in DSD…) and the Qobuz catalogue (Sublime+), but when I learned about the Qobuz integration in Roon, I decided to give it a try !

I am at the beginning of my trial period, but I already realize that the Roon database is far from exhaustive (around 10% of my collection is not identified) and sometimes erroneous or incomplete (I will create a specific topic for that one…), and also that a fair amount of my multiple-disc albums are not grouped together (although they have the same album title, and use the disc number tag…), etc. etc.

So, my first impression is that

  • Roon cannot certainly be the only tool to explore one’s music, and that for example I will also be using JRiver for precise exploration of my collection,
  • If I want to combine Roon’s powerful metadata model and hyperlink navigation (which is very useful for me, especially in the classical genre) and the same degree of control and accuracy that I get from JRiver with my own tags, it will take me a lot of time to review each of my album and make the appropriate edits in Roon, if necessary.

I wonder if it is the same feeling for the majority of people like myself, who have spent a lot of time on their own tagging of their music collection, and do not want to lose some of its “power” when using Roon… ?

Anyway, I will continue to explore the Roon features, try to correct some of the incoherence I have spotted, and also… listen to music !

Thanks in advance for other’s feedback and advice…

First things to note:

  • multi cd sets need to be named cd1, cd2, cdx or otherwise files named 1-1 ,2-1, x-1 etc. for matching to me optimised.
  • 2nd is that in settings you can have Roon prefer your metadata over its own or combine them e.g. genres.
  • Focus provides many ways to slice/dice your collection and you can bookmark them.
1 Like

Thanks for your answers !

Ok, but I thought my way of tagging would still have been easily recognized by Roon… Anyway, I will look more precisely into that problem…

Yes, I will try that, but for some metadata, I will certainly have to decide on a case-by-case basis…

Indeed, that’s one of the features I liked in JRiver, and that I will also use extensively in Roon ! The degree of customization of such views seems much lower in Roon than in JRiver, though… (but much simpler, I have to admit!).

Note that long-pressing (clicking and holding) on a focus criterion gives you the inverse criterion (e.g., Qobuz > Not Qobuz).

The criterion tag will turn pink and the name will be preceded by a minus sign when you’ve flipped the criterion.

The Roon Knowledge Base will help with the learning curve. This article explains how to prefer file metadata globally.

In the past spent so much time ripping my relatively small cd collection to Flac only to find that half the time they were not tagged correctly " even with expensive paid for programs ". Then spent as much time again boringly using another utility tagging each rip correctly and in the end decided life was too short. So now just buy Hi-Res on line add to Roon, Job done! and continue to listen to my CD’s the conventional way or stream what I have on cd occasionally.

2 features you need to master

Bookmarks- these are dynamic, so if you Focus on Beethoven, Bookmark, any further Beethoven albums you add will show next time you use that bookmark

Tags (a la Roon not a la JRiver) these are non dynamic ideal for grouping albums eg the Beethoven Edition 20 volumes , they will never change so a Tag is ideal

Pitfalls of Roon are highlighted regularly , the biggest shortfall for Classical is in big box sets

As mentioned your folders must be simply CD1 with no additional text or else Roon will see them as separate albums

Search the forum for classical metadata, you can find some interesting reading

Personally. I use Roon but keep my JRiver library current to handle the big boxes eg Brendel Complete Phillips etc where you can specify the view you want. Roon allows little customization

Keep asking , there is a die hard group of classical fans , between us we’ve seen most things :see_no_evil:

You will get caught in the love hate relationship