It would be really nice if tracks could be grouped into acts for operas - in the same way that movements are grouped for symphonies, etc. I tend to listen to operas an act at a time and this would save having to select the individual tracks which can be error prone.
2 Likes
When you have a fully identified CD, you should get the work as a clump, so that you can choose to play the work or the separate tracks.
The clumping of acts and scenes in an opera is something I think Roon could do (depending rather on the precision and layout of the metadata it receives), and I’ve opened an internal feature request for it.
It applies also to symphonies and other forms which could often also benefit from such “nested clumping”.
Yes, Roon handles symphonies, etc. very well - it’s one of its best features - and all of my operas are identified correctly as complete works. What would be great would be a way to clump tracks within works, so thanks for raising a feature request for this.
Has anything happened with this request? I would really like to group tracks within an album. Examples in the classical world are movements within a composition and scenes within an act of an opera.
Actually there is a work around. You can renumber media (=Discs) and tracks. It is tedious, but doable. For example, I just did the von Karajan Cosi with Schwarzkopf and Merriman which comes on three discs for the two acts. The last 5 recitatives/arias of Act I are on disc 2; Act II is on the rest of Disc 2 and all of Disc 3. I renumbered the five Act I tracks by changing the media to 1 and renumbering the tracks to 33 - 37 (the “real” Disc 1 tracks are 1-32). I then renumbered the remaining disc 2 tracks to 1-16 and all the disc 3 tracks to disc 2 tracks 17-33. This took about 15 minutes and would have taken less time if roon’s editing allowed you to just move to the next track without saving and starting all over with the next track (see how Media Monkey, for example, does it). Unlike physical cds, roon doesn’t care how many tracks are “on” a disc. I have also done this with several versions of Magic Flute. The time spent was worth it to me as I, like a much previous post, tend to listen Acts rather than whole operas, as I think Act I of Cosi and Act 2 of Magic Flute are more interesting than their companion acts. It would be even nicer if one could also rename Disc 1 to Act 1 and Disc 2 to Act 2, etc., but I couldn’t find a way to do that.