I have just over 500 unidentified Grateful Dead bootleg recordings in my music library and would like to know if anyone has found a way to get Roon to identify Grateful Dead bootlegs? If so, what naming convention are you using and what file tags and file tag structure?
Here are two examples of how most of the bootlegs are named.
Grateful Dead - Academy of Music, New York, NY March 22nd, 1972
The above is how I named the recordings prior to becoming a Roon user.
Grateful Dead - 1971-02-23 Capitol Theatre, Port Chester, NY
The above is how I named the recordings since becoming a Roon user.
In either case, Roon fails to identify many of the recordings. Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated.
If they are not in MusicBrainz or Allmusic you canât. So check via their website if they are and your metadata is correct? If not you can add to MusicBrainz yourself using Picard their app to add the Metadata for Roon to identify them.
I do this for all my unidentified albums. Only a few not bothered with as they are seldom played classical comps
Thank you! I gave it a try and found a few recordings to use as test cases.
After changing the recordingâs title to what is shown in MusicBrainz in Roonâs identification âscreenâ, the recording was found. Very much NOT automatic and very labor intensive. The prospect of having to do this for 500+ recordings means that these recording will remain âunidentifiedâ
Thatâs how it is no other ways to do it your metadtaa doesnât match its not psychic.
You can manually try in Roon or fix your sources. Or add them if they donât exist. You can try using Picard to match them album by album if someoneâs put audio footprints as well it might match that way.
CG is correct. The issue is not about the file tags and how they are formatted but rather the issue with getting Roon to identify the recording. All of my Grateful Dead bootlegs are fully tagged but, as CG stated, the tags and names do not match the tags and names in MusicBrainz so the recordings are not being identified by Roon.
Whatâs the benefit of spending the time in submitting them to Musicbrainz? Some shows have multiple audience sources, maybe a soundboard exists, or an FM broadcast, or a matrix of different sources.
I got the majority of my boots from Dimeadozen and source identification is important so as not to pollute or misidentify a bootleg source.
I suppose to some people thatâs not important, to a collector it can be.
Adding bootlegs to Musicbrainz would mean accurately recording the source in each case, the taper identity maybe, otherwise it could end up in as a free for all and Roon misidentifying a wrong source.
Making a mockery of the identified indicator in Roon.
oh, I didnât realize your files were already tagged - I thought you were just trying to use the Identifier for untagged files - What additional benefit are you seeing with having them identified by Roon if they are already tagged accurately / correctly?
For Grateful Dead show recordings submitted to the the Internet Archive there is a shnid associated with the specific recording - Currently there are 17K+ Dead show recordings on the archive. These idâs assist in not only identifying specific shows, rather with specific recordings of specific shows.
hereâs an example of a recording that was recently added to the archive recently - (id 169422) as you can see to the right, there are about 30 other versions of this show available -
I guess if this information was ever made available to one of those services, and the user had the proper id associated with their local files - they could be identified accurately. That might be helpful for folks whos files arenât already tagged .
My point is that unless the source is accurately uploaded to Musicbrainz, there is not much point in bothering.
Bootlegs, especially of popular shows can have multiple sources. Many of mine were downloaded in *.SHN format, untagged and had to be converted and tagged by me to FLAC.
I have my own way of tagging a bootleg if Foobar cannot do it, which probably differs to the next person, Musicbrainz will just be a mess and itâs not brilliant now for commercial releases.
The identified status in Roon for bootlegs will be far from accurate and so I donât see the point.
Thatâs a very good question because Iâve never gotten a worthwhile or definitive answer as to what are the benefits of an identified recording versus an unidentified recording within Roon. Sometimes a Roon identified recording/album has LESS information than a fully tagged unidentified recording/album. For example many new jazz releases, such as a recording by The XXXX Quartet (not a real recording, just a made up example) will be identified by Roon and the credits will show only "The XXXX Quartet, while the file tags have each member of the quartet listed in the âArtistâ field.
I have an âinfo.txtâ file for just about every bootleg in my collection. This text file is in the same directory/folder has the flac files. Iâve made several feature requests over the years asking to add the ability for Roon to read/display these text files, similar to how image files are displayed, only to have the request shot down. Even the newly folder browsing feature does not show these text files. Bummer.
Unidentified albums obviously donât give advanced metadata as Roon has no idea what they are to pull this info. But more importantly due to some odd design choice Roon constantly looks for metadata for an unidentified albums every time you change anything in your library. This maybe edit existing metadata that it also automatically does, adding or removing music. As soon as this happens Roon will go through the whole process of trying to identify these albums all over again pulling resources to do so. In some cases where users have large amounts of unidentified albums Roon grinds to a halt.
I edited the metadata in Roon to give all of my bootlegs, identified or otherwise, the bootleg identification. I wonder if one were to amend the releases to use local metadata and not Roon, it would stop this behaviour?
I mean why would it try to identify an album using local metadata? Would that be a workaround?
thatâs interesting - I didnât know that - Iâve never even looked at âunidentifiedâ stuff in my library. I just did and have about 4000 unidentified albums - Which is mostly Dead shows and other bootlegs. Interestingly, there are quite few real releases in there as well âŚ
Maybe there should be a flag added where when the BOOTLEG tag = âYâ (or some other chosen identifier) then you would have the option of excluding the album from the rescans?
