Am reviewing and updating/rationalising and generally making more consistent Roon’s Genres metadata.
When I go to Album Editor > Edit Album and scroll down to Genres, I can see those which (presumably?) Roon has decided are most appropriate for the file being edited.
On first visiting this dialogue, each Genre button has a blue background with a ‘+’ to its left.
I typically want to change what’s there to begin with and either delete or edit it.
If I delete a Genre by single-clicking on the button, its background becomes red, and it has a ‘-’ to its left.
But the original Genre tag stays - even after Saving:
And the ‘Save’ button at the foot of that dialogue is grayed out preventing me from doing anything else to remove those (now red with a ‘-’) Genre tags as unwanted.
Is that the expected behaviour; can I override it and delete original ‘suggested’ Genre permanently, please?
If they are red and show the minus, they will not show on the album page, which seems to be what you want.
You can’t delete them completely on the edit page but that doesn’t matter. I suppose it’s because one might want to re-enable them at a later time, which would be difficult if they were gone completely
That’s right: I don’t want them to show on my Album Page… and they don’t .
But since I’ve essentially ‘superseded’ them (IMHO improved on Roon’s defaults), I guess I’d like to scrap them altogether. But it looks as though that’s not possible, is it?
Is there somewhere else that I can set my own Genres?
No, it’s not. Think of it like a list of default genres and you can check (+) or uncheck (-) them, but not delete them from the list. It’s not such an unusual UI behavior/element.
Type your own Genre into the search box then press Enter and they will be added:
You can customize the genre tree in the Roon sidebar > Browse > Genres. Select the genre, click its edit button and choose its parent genre or whether it shall be on the top level.
If you create a new genre, you can later remove it from albums where it was used. But the whole genre cannot be deleted; it will be empty if no album/track/artist uses it. So be careful not to pollute your genres with unwanted ones. (A workaround for this is to create a “dead genres” genre and move any unwanted custom genres into it. Not great but kind of works. IMHO it is a bug that they can’t be deleted, reported many times in the past)
I really only ever use ‘Avant-Garde’ and ‘Classical’. So the others are irrelevant.
Especially ‘Holiday’… no idea what that is
So could I create (presumably using the Genres editor > PARENT GENRE/Top-level genre > Edit radio button) a new ‘Top Level’ Genre - say called ‘Not Used’ - and move all the other Genres which I’ll never use (‘Easy Listening’, ‘Rap’ etc, though I completely understand why they are there) into Not Used?
Or would that risk compromising/corrupting Roon’s data structure?
Where does the Edit Album > Genres > ‘Localized genre names’ toggle some in and apply, please?
I believe this should be fine and shouldn’t hurt because Roon has to cope with users doing things like moving e.g. Metal out or Pop/Rock, etc., anyway. So that’s not really different.
The only problem might be that you will lose the original structure, I think, so it will be difficult to recreated it in case you ever want to, but it does not sound like it
In any case, create a Roon backup before making these large-scale changes, just in case there is an unexpected problematic behavior caused by it.
This does not matter if you run Roon in English. If you ran Roon in, say, German, then this would display the German genre localizations in the edit window, I think. It wouldn’t affect what you’d see on the actual album page, though. (At least that’s my understanding based on what Roon staff explained when this feature was in testing, but I run Roon in English and so haven’t seen it in action).
After what you kindly say, I think it’d be better for me to leave things as they are.
Although I could experiment with a ‘refresh’ ( ) of those Genres I do use… say to subdivide and ‘tighten up’ Classical etc a bit.
At the moment I’m rationalizing my tags, which also contain ‘Classical’ (sub-)categories. But thanks to the help you’ve given me, I may well revisit Genres after that.
It’d be helpful if I could apply the changes to multiple Albums at the same time; but I suppose that’s not possible because you can only Edit genres from each single Album’s Edit Album screen?
I described how to multi-select in detail here because the Roon help is not exhaustive:
(Note: There is a limit to how many albums you can select at once, I think 1000. In any case, it will be slow to apply the changes if you have that many selected, so be patient in this case)
… I’ve worked out just how to control selection with a mouse on macOS (13.6.1). I know right/Ctrl-click is involved. Selecting just one takes you to the Edit Album screen, and dragging doesn’t work.
To select whole ranges of albums (or it’s the same for tracks and everywhere else for that matter), you start the selection by Ctrl-click or right-click (or a long left-click works as well) on the first album that you want to select. Then hold the Shift key and click (right or left) the last album that you want to select. This selects the range of all albums between them.
With this range selected, you can add additional albums to the range:
To add single albums, click (left or right) any other album to add it to the selection.
To add another range, again click (left or right) any other album as the first album of the new range. Now hold Shift again and click (left or right) the last album of the new range. This way, you can, e.g., select albums 1-5 and 7-10. You can repeat this as many times as you want, e.g. select the ranges 1-5, 7-10, and 20-25 at once.
No. The fault is mine. I somehow couldn’t get it to work. But I can now.
Although I think I found a bug: when trying to remove a Genre over multiple Albums when it hasn’t been applied to all of them (in my case, testing, just three Albums) crashes Roon.
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