I can understand why some want to be able to do their own tagging to a great degree of detail and no doubt some of that will be coming soon with 1.3. For me though I am not interested in this. I am never going to spend the time and effort needed to manually input even relatively small amounts of metadata/tags into my albums/track. It’s just too time consuming and stops me enjoying the music.
What I really want is for Roon to automatically and correctly find as extensive metadata as possible for all my music without me doing anything. I would prefer more efforts on this front than extending the manual editing/input of metadata, though I’m confident Roon is working on both.
Unrealistic I suppose (and certainly a huge project) but wouldn’t it be great if Roon’s own identification and meta data was so good that we did not need to do anything with metadata ever! Certainty that should be Roon’s long term goal if it isn’t already.
This is probably an achievable goal for the average user but not for the connessouir or anal or others with specialist interests.
Phil, when you say: “What I really want is for Roon to automatically and correctly find as extensive metadata as possible for all my music without me doing anything.” I could not agree more, but as Roon relies on a third party supplier of metadata we are all at the mercy of that supplier. And might I add, we have no ay to flag any data is incorrect or amend it for all.
I think that as Roon’s user base gets bigger and bigger, and those like myself who WOULD take the time to complete metadata in my collection, the possibility of Roon accumulating the combined metadata from it’s own user base must surely be a possibility? Perhaps that is what is planned for Roon in the future who knows.
Given that one of the key points of difference between Roon and all other music playback options out there is in fact metadata, and how well it is used within Roon, I would assume that many (although clearly not all based on comments within this very thread) will indeed complete missing metadata, thus providing Roon and it’s users with a rich source of metadata.
The key of course would be determining which data is correct if several users provide data that is not the same. Majority rules perhaps? Or perhaps even a button within Roon on each album that allows a flag to be set on the master metadata library at Roon headquarters, to check the data? Anything is possible…
My take on this is I would never bother with editing data on commercial releases as plenty is already there.
Where I will edit is lesser known music. The music that the majority miss out on.
I am fortunate to be involved in the running of a small music venue Www.littlerabbitbarn.com
Many of our artists releases are not covered by the main data suppliers at this stage in their career (Plenty are though) and I would like to add more data and reviews for these.
Also we record and film the shows (With Permission) some of which is on our web site and YouTube .
These recordings are properly mixed and given to the Artists. I also wish to add rich data to my personal copies.
Sometimes an Artist will re mix them for us and the ability to compare and learn from this is also helpful.
This data will never be available anywhere else as copyright forbids distribution of the recordings.
This does add an amazing dimension to the Hi Fi Music hobby. It’s great to also meet and get to know artists over time following their career on a more personal level.
Chris
I fully understand there are cases like these that need improved metadata features - in the interim that is until Roon reaches perfection and does it all correctly and automatically
Seriously though I’m more realistic than that and I can see that these features are needed I just would not want the focus on them and the fact that once they are there to lead to the answer to metadata problems/shortcomings becoming “do it yourself” rather than Roon continually getting better at doing it for me.
There are at least 3 user contributed metadata rich sources out there: discogs, musicbrainz and rym.
I seem to recall Roon already leverages musicbrainz to some extent. Not sure whether discogs is currently leveraged, but it contains a lot of the kind of metadata you speak of… only other than Roon there are no applications out there to leverage it.
What would be great to see is Roon ultimately creating its own master data comprising that it licenses plus community enrichment, which could then be spilled back to discogs and musicbrainz.
Why there are two freely available non-commercial metadata sources I don’t know. Guess for the same reason there are a zillion Linux distros out there.
