By far the most accurate genre information available today is from rateyourmusic.com. The genres are community generated and there is an elaborate voting system in place for primary and secondary genres which includes discussion between members.
Now there’s a website I’d completely forgotten about…just logged in and hell it’s come a long way. According to my profile I joined rym August 12, 2007
I use RYM all the time and would love it if Roon added as a source for their metadata database, as I’m finding rovi (all music) has so many mistakes and as far as how they name record labels, it has so many inconsistencies for example Sub Pop has albums under Sub Pop, some Sub Pop Records, and some Subpop looks like many different people input the data, so I can never see my whole Sub Pop collection at once because their credits all vary in how their worded… Many, many labels are like this.
It would be great if Roon could have links for each artist to a few other sites, as well as the current weblinks. This would be up for discussion but should include Discogs and Rateyourmusic, at the least. They both really do have some great features and a wealth of information and discussion.
Crikey, I’ve been on there since 2005. RYM used to be my way of discovering new music before streaming services and sites like ADM? appeared.
Strikes me that RYM have missed a trick in not packaging their crowd-sourced data better. I guess without an API it’s going to be pretty much impossible to do anything with it.
Scraping the RYM webpages for Genre information is not feasible I guess? I wrote a python script that adds RYM genre tags to my files however for commercial software like Roon with a huge user base I guess this becomes more difficult?
Yes, I just thought of this as well… and hoped it would be a feature request for it already. This would be the best meta-data upgrade I could ever hope for! Their genre categorization and sub categories are amazing.
Unfortunately, we currently do not. However we do have plans to introduce a comprehensive API in the future. We can’t provide an ETA or any specifics at the moment, but keep an eye on this ticket: RYMzilla #683 (Accepted) and the dev blog for updates on this.
I am not sure if RYM/Sonemic eventually launched an API, but as a hardcore user of both RYM and Roon, I’d love to see some kind of integration, preferably so I can give an album a single rating, and it’ll be reflected in both Roon and RYM!
Good to see other hardcore users of RYM here. I’m sure the lack of API makes integration difficult, if not impossible, but I would like to echo how great RYM’s genre map is. Roon should consider, at the least, allowing multiple parents for one genre.
Yes, it is the genre map and genre info where the real value is (more so than the ratings). Perhaps Roon can negotiate with RYM to scrape this info once a month/6 months (or do so without negotiation, fair use?) and then have using the RYM genre info a selectable feature in the preferences.
Alternatively Roon could create it’s own map inspired by RYM and let the community contribute and vote in the same way.