GUI needs attention for large box sets

What really needs attention is the underlying metadata related to box sets. Many box sets (like yours) are comprised of individual albums, sometimes completely unrelated e.g. classical box sets and other times bonus disc(s) or a series of related albums such as live performances etc. Regardless, Roon doesn’t have metadata for these and thus cannot show the discs in a meaningful manner.

There’s a need to accommodate the discsubtitle tag and to use it when it’s present in a user’s tags to make what you show above meaningful (and yes, the GUI would need enhancement to facilitate this). Each disc should also be capable of carrying it’s own cover art whereas the box set should also have cover art for the overall box set.

I suspect Rovi doesn’t carry album title info (discsubtitle) for box sets. It’s thus likely we’d have to manually add same to our tags to benefit from this…something I’ve already done by populating discsubtitle where applicable and filing such box sets as

  • ‘artist - boxsetname/cd1’, ‘artist - boxsetname/cd2’, ‘artist - boxsetname/cd3’ etc.
  • storing folder.jpg for the boxset in ‘artist - boxsetname/’
  • storing the album specific folder.jpg in ‘artist - boxsetname/cd1’, ‘artist - boxsetname/cd2’, ‘artist - boxsetname/cd3’ etc.
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It’s worth saying that the current metadata inside the individual discs of these box sets (click on ‘disc 63’) isn’t terrible – it’s ok. But there is no metadata about subtitles of the discs. It would be good if users were able to somehow enrich their metadata here and it gets pushed to the cloud for everyone, rather than everyone having to manually edit their tags (or on waiting on Rovi magically doing it for us).

One thing that could be done now, without enriching existing metadata, would be to give a view on the large box set that splits it by works rather than discs.

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@brian @joel this is ticket 13753 and also https://dev.roonlabs.com/portal/boards/2/topics/209 (from 2014).

Let me know if you want to discuss. It’s a big deal: a major block to finding stuff in a classical collection, and is “only” a matter of leveraging metadata you already have. Hopefully it’s low-hanging fruit.

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I’ll second that. Poor handling of large box sets is one of the really big drawbacks of Roon.

I found a way of manually dealing with box sets where each CD contains an individual album:

  1. Let Roon identify the complete set.

  2. After everything is identified, take apart the box set. Remove the CDs one by one using the “Fix Track Grouping/Remove Disc” feature from the box set. Be sure not to change the CD number. Then you have an individual album with Roon tags intact. You can edit album title and album art manually.

  3. Do the same with the next CD in the box set.

In this way you can “disassemble” the box CD one by one while keeping the Roon tags. It’s a complete mess, but it works. It’s a process that could easily be automated if we had a “Split into individual CDs” button.

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Yep, I have been asking for better handling of box sets for some time. It’s on my current wishlist for the next version:

Other threads about it:

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Thought this might be here with 1.3. Hope this is high on the priority list now :slight_smile:

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Any comment from the devs on this? @joel?

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@danny perhaps you could comment here? I know that other users as well as myself are keen to hear if there are any plans to improve things in terms of box set handling. Thanks!

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Any activity on box sets from roon? Many of thee box set threads seem to go back years but nothing changes.

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The Roon team works extremely hard, and has to balance many pressures (fixes and requests alike). So let’s show patience. And that’s coming from someone with a relatively huge number of box sets…

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Hi @Ludwig .

Are you seeing any practical limits on the sizes of box sets? Maybe past 100 or so? Or even roon crashing with very large box sets? I don’t mean the general unusability, just the basics of practical GUI response and performance. I had tried with a few box sets up to about 60D’s and although pretty much unusable I hadn’t noticed any basic response/performance issues.

I finally got around to the Decca/DG complete Mozart (200CD). Apart from an unusable screen of [Disc 1] . . . [Disc 200], I found I couldn’t even physically navigate at all because of such slow response when clicking on the individual disk links. It also crashed roon a couple of times when I attempted to groom the metadata. The box naturally splits into five “vols” of 20 to 50 disks each, so I split it up and now these problems seem to have gone away.

I don’t find roon’s box set handling usable beyond about 10/12 CD’s and often unmerge box sets but I still like to upload and groom the data if necessary because the individual performances then usefully show up in other much more usable composition or artist screens. I really like the way roon does that as otherwise in most of my box sets, beyond a few favorite performances, I often don’t really know what is on them.

Most f the really Mega sets split logically . I am finding it helps. Roon certainly doesn’t like Mozart 250 on my system

Mike

I have not found an actual limit. My largest box is 114 CDs (Brendel).

Since the performance of boxes was optimised some months ago, I find them fast enough.

5 posts were merged into an existing topic: Bug: Roon misidentifies discs 100-126 in a box set a disc 1

Has anyone from Roon weighed in on these box set issues? There are many threads asking for a solution but I haven’t seen any indication that there is anything on the roadmap.

Just to provide yet another example of what a supreme pain it is dealing with this issue, compare how Roon deals with Mozart 225 with how it looks in JRiver:

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This is still a very big issue, I have worked around it by getting from various sources a listing by CD . I save this as a pdf so at least I can see which CD no relates to which content,

In JRiver I use 3 custom tags , BoxSet, DiscName and DiscVolume to allow slicker navigation and identification of each CD’s content

I can even define an album name and artwork for each CD in a box

Just another example of poor classical cover

Most of the time now I revert to JRiver for classical rather than punish myself

Unless Roon does big things to enhance the experience for classical libraries I can’t see myself renewing at the end of my year starter

Sad but very frustrating

Mike

PS I have Mozart 255 in the library so the hyperlink view goes up to 200, just to add to the clutter

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There seems to be a conspicuous absence of developer input into this thread, despite the issue having been raised by many and on repeated occasions. Perhaps a comment from the devs may be helpful at least to acknowledge the issue, or even to provide a little information regarding the Roon team’s thoughts on the matter?

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Things seem to go quieter in the weeks/days preceding a significant release. Maybe we’re in for a treat!

There are several threads about classical navigation, all silent from Roon’s end

It’s a big elephant to bite off with only a few dissenters I think it’s low priority

How do we up the ante ?

We can only hope, and use alternative methods until they bite

Mike

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In windows media player ( yes not comparable to roon I know), in artist view all albums form that artist is listed with tracks on one side, maybe box set view should consider such an approach