It’s a fine idea, but the Focus folders view is very limited in terms of tier level access, and also it means manually going through all folders after you’ve worked on them in windows to then make them into tags. I did this with classical composers for a while but just put it on my LTS list (life’s too short). Some of us have spent 100’s if not 1000’s of hours curating into 1000’s of folders, pre-Roon, so it’d be darned nice to be able to reap the benefits of all that work within the Roon framework.
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Roon has just made all that work we have all done, obsolete…
Ducking down now…ahhh
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Well not really. Just more work to get it “just so” in Roon. No deal breaker, as I like the Roon experience way more than the need to view by folder, but it would be a great bonus feature 
To highlight the problem, there are many instances where I would like to find a specific piece of classical music, so I search for composer and it’s not found, search for conductor, not found, search for orchestra, not found. Finally via some combo of conductor AND orchestra i manage to pin it down. And that’s not to mention the 10% or 1000 or so albums in my collection which are not id’d by Roon and for which therefore I would need to tag correctly myself to be able to accurately find them 100% of the time. In my folder system it mentions in the folder name, the orchestra, composer, conductor and piece, and my folders are all listed on a spreadsheet, and numbered sequentially and stored sequentially according to discrete number so I can relatively easily locate the item. If the folders were visible and searchable (using substrings) in Roon it would be superb.
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I wonder why you did maintain your folder structure so meticulously and never thought about adding this exact information into tags in the first place?
I more or less manually tagged my classical music collection over a period of several years, and yes - it was an absolute pain in the butt. I did not care about folders at all, because tags promise a much better data retrieval. It would have taken me a comparable effort to maintain this information in folders and file names.
Nowadays, there are so many software tools available that can convert folders and filenames to tags. Why not go that route?
I think it may have a lot to do with humans just being used to think in “folders” and “exact locations”, as far as digital data is concerned. It’s just not comparable with physical data like real CD’s, real books and photo prints.
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Yes sure, there are options, but it’s yet more work to work out how to use the 3rd party software properly and put the folder data into a free tag field, then get Roon to use that tag in preference. We need an IT degree to work all this stuff out in the end
Ps… i did tag about 2000 albums as you say, manually, but it went on my life’s too short list again!
The point is, that Roon is nowhere near 100% successful with its identifying procedure or online data allocated to identified albums, therefore, IMHO, it should be far more accepting of our own methods of cataloguing be it to use and modify tags directly or using file structures to display and find music.
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Partially. There are wholesale gaps in Roon’s metadata where composers and featured artists are concerned. It improves as the upstream provider improves, but it’ll never be perfect. I still tag meticulously.
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The more that I use Roon, the more I’ve found myself removing file tags from my collection. Perhaps I would say that, but there are a number of reasons for this:
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I’ve found a lot of metadata in my dbPowerAmp rips from the Rovi (née AMG), MusicBrainz, GD3, and CDDB databases which is simply rubbish. OTOH, letting Roon take care of everything means that the metadata improves over time.
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I don’t want my own file tags to get in the way of future metadata improvements. Preferring file tags is not something that I want to do.
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I am no longer prepared to spend time curating my library when Roon will do it for me. Of course Roon metadata is not perfect (yet!
), but these days I choose to do other things with my spare time. -
I have another important motivation which is that, without relying on file tags, my home library directly reflects my efforts on metadata. Eating my own dog food I guess.
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I agree with your 4 points.
Although it is against my pride and all the work I put into that metadata.
Still Classic ( specially classic collections) is far from perfect.
But yes: I like the way.
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I would not agree on those points as far as classical music is concerned - but you probably guessed that… I am also afraid that we are getting off-topic, but I still reply 
I’ve found a lot of metadata in my dbPowerAmp rips from the Rovi (née AMG), MusicBrainz, GD3, and CDDB databases which is simply rubbish. OTOH, letting Roon take care of everything means that the metadata improves over time.
you’re right. lots of 3rd party metadata for classical is trash. But how do you want to derive proper meta-data in Roon, if your sources are already compromised? Classical music metadata is a nightmare, but as long as I tag it myself I can at least ensure one important thing: consistency. For me that’s the key in my Roon experience. I do not care too much if some metadata is missing, as long as the basics (artists, composers, works) are at least consistent.
They currently are in my library based on tags (well, mostly…) and if I let Roon do all the work, I have to do double work to correct and align compositions and performers that have been consistent already. Why would I spent effort on telling Roon which compositions are the same, if I already did that with my tags in the first place?
I could rephrase your third point:
I am not prepared to spend time curating my Roon library when I already have done that using my file tags…
I know that’s a minority opinion and it is based on classical music only. If woud listen to other music I’d probably be as happy as I could be with Roon
In my case, I had about 3-4000 albums before Roon was a twinkle in my eyes, retroactively tagging to replace a catalogue done using the file system is an oppressive idea. I suspect it will be the same for anyone coming from DNLA setup.
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I agree, definitely Classical is the main bugbear. For other genres, it’s MUCH better. Unfortunately perhaps 15-20% of my collection is classical.
@joel I’m not sure I quite understand how removing tags on your local files helps improve the situation? I think I’m missing a step here? Is it because our tags are being automatically uploaded to databases somewhere? By that logic, surely well-curated tags will go to help the global situation of poor tag informatio?
I find that for many new releases, e.g. the latest Tommy Emmanuel (which is basically a collaboration album) and some older albums none of the collaborating artists are listed. Similarly, composer credits are often missing. This means the albums never appear when looking at the collaborators’ albums. It also means you will never find all performances of a song as Roon doesn’t consider them the same. Adding the metadata to my files the problem disappears.
I think there’s real merit in Roon exploring doing some analytics on album data and running updates which it can then feed the upstream providers. An example would be finding all instances of a song by an artist where the composer is missing and updating that field using the composer metadata of instances of that south by the same performer where the composer field is not empty.
Oh so not. There are many great things about Roon and as soon as I experienced it I knew I’d be switching to it as my primary home listening mode. But since then I have not been able to customize my listening experience by only listening to deep tracks, or only listening to hits, or selecting upon a number of custom criteria I had embedded in my curated library. I loved that and I do miss it occasionally.
Whether it’s folder browsing, folder/file name conventions, or customized embedded metatags, many of us had existing curating work that doesn’t port well into Roon and which would be very time consuming to manually re-create in Roon.
It would just be oh so nice to be able to have Roon and be able to batch import that work. I’m not going to repeat doing it all over which means my Roon experience, while still on balance the best relative to any other software, is not as good as it potentially could be.
I have a suspicion one reason this inter-operability has not been implemented is that making Roon interoperate with our custom curating means we are not quite as entrenched in Roon; because our curating work would then be done at least partially outside Roon, which means Roon doesn’t own our library as much as it could. I personally feel this is a drawback and not a benefit of Roon. I’d keep subscribing even if curating work was more inter-operable; matter of fact I might invest more heavily in the Roon ecosystem because then I’d know the work I do would survive even if Roon doesn’t.
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Agreed, the ability to have user defined fields imported from tags and then to be able to have them treated as fist class citizens would be great.
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It sure would be nice. As above, I suspect that is a tactical decision so as to make the curating work not inter-operable, and thus users that invest in curating become more invested and stuck with Roon. That in and of itself wouldn’t bother me as much if Roon were a stand-alone piece of software, but if Roon disappears as a subscription service, while it will still “play” according to the Roon team (they say they will release a version that doesn’t check for subscription), it would be a pretty crippled piece of software and stuck in development as of some specific date.
True. But with that automation approach, the effort doesn’t scale with the number of albums, same effort on your part for 10 or 100 or 1000 albums. The little computer chip is working its heart out. This is typical, the learning curve of setting up automation isn’t worth it for 10 albums, probably for 100 albums, definitely for 1000.
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Granted, I don’t do much classical.
But still: given a reasonably high success rate, I just rip/download and throw it in there, and in those cases where Roon can’t identify, I manually fix them.
No reason to meticulously tag the stuff that would work automatically.
Depends on the metadata. In the Tommy Emmanuel example I gave above I want to know who’s collaborating., so I had to capture it myself. Many other examples like that.
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Yes, That Tommy Emanuel album needs sorting. A. Delmore wrote Deep River Blues if that helps. Now I got that from credits on Brooks Williams album The Shreveport Sessions. Great song.
https://i.imgur.com/bs8U4HN.png
I probably put that in myself from the sleeve notes.
I am a music lover, collecting 3,4000 albums in folder mode over a long period of time. I strongly hope to increase the mode of folder browsing. Many of my friends have made such an appeal. On behalf of the roon‘s’developers can be considerate of our thoughts and able to add this function in subsequent versions