Genres in metadata

Hi - my first post - still on a trial of Roon. My biggest problem is one that has been discussed here, but perhaps not for awhile. Roon doesn’t recognize my genres. I painstakingly ripped 2000 CDs and edited the ‘genre’ category in metadata. However, Roon is recognizing many of them as different genres. I was using Logitech Media Server before this and it was perfect from the point of view of recognizing the genres. Is there an easy fix for this? I have no desire to import the entire library and have a different piece of software go through it and fix etc. - sounds like too much work. Any help appreciated.

T

I had some trouble coming to terms with Roon’s approach to genres when I first started using it. It still takes some getting used to, but it’s improved quite a bit, I think.

This is from the Knowledge Base:

Based on your comments, you might want to start off by going to Settings > Library > Import Settings > Genre Settings. Turn off “Use genres from Roon’s metadata database,” and turn on “Use genres extracted from file tags.”

thanks - I have these settings set as you suggest already - no success. From an older post apparently it has to do with ‘style tags’. These tags have to be removed in order for Roon to not recognize them as genres. Apparently a program called mp3 can do this. I’d rather not go to the trouble of doing this. Just wondering if anything had changed to allow an easy fix to this.

It looks like you’re talking about this thread, right?

I wonder how those “style” tags get in there? It seems not to be any software I’ve used, since I’ve never seen one in my library.

IAC, the advice given in that thread to use a third-party tag editor that can handle batch operations and delete all the “style” tags seems pretty good. Yes, it’s some work, but really, once you get things set up, it shouldn’t take much time. (And as it says in the other thread, back up first!)

By design, any editing you do in Roon won’t affect embedded metadata, so in this case, recourse to a third-party tag editor is the best way to tackle this problem.

So I finally deleted all style tags from all my files with mp3. Only a partial fix. It’s very strange.

For example, there is still genre that shows up called ‘symphonic’ for 3 CDs. I checked the 3 CDs and there is no word ‘symphonic’ anywhere to be found.

Most concerning is that there is still a genre called ‘Classical’. (Not my tag or preferred genre). When I click on that, then some of my tags/genres come up (e.g. ‘Orchestral’ - which is what the ‘Symphonic’ CDs are labelled as but don’t show as).

Also within the Classical genre, I get a sub-genre called ‘Concerto’ for only one CD. I checked that CD and there is no genre or style tag for ‘concerto’, only for ‘piano’ and ‘violin’.

Very strange. I have to say this is the one big point after a trial month of usage of Roon. If I can’t access my library in a similar way to how I would access my physical CD collection, it’s not worth it to me. For $500, this should not be such an issue. It was never an issue with Logitech Media Server, a much older and simpler program.

Maybe @joel will have some useful insights here.

If you can zip up the media for either of these and PM me a Dropbox link, we can definitely have a look at the media here.

Roon has a default hierarchy of Genres, which means Delta Blues is always going to start as a sub-genre of Blues. This hierarchy is fully editable.

Genre sorting can be edited in a few clicks for any genres you want to appear as a primary (or “top level”) genre. You can do this by navigating to Delta Blues, clicking Edit, and setting the “parent genre” to be Top Level.