I browse and at times purchase downloads based on recommendations in the Classical Community Conversations blog (and thanks to it’s contributors )
I downloaded Händel’s Water Music Suites Nos. 1-3, HWV348-350 from Presto Music, did some tag editing in Yate and uploaded it to my library that syncs with Roon. While listening to the album last night, I kept seeing (and still see) Mozart as a performer. I went back and checked my tag edits and everything looks in order:
I can still thoroughly enjoy the album with Mozart getting near top billing, but I would like to understand why this happened and what I can do to clean it up. Any thoughts?
I’ve checked our cloud metadata – we appear to have only one instance of the album – and there’s no Mozart on it. As per @DDPS‘s suggestion, you might want to look for some hidden tag metadata.
Can you confirm that the album is identified in Roon?
One of the things I recently learned, and now use extensively, is to pull in the metadata from either Discogs or MusicBrainz using the Yate-supplied wizard:
It’s really a nice feature that auto-populates most of the tags. I sometimes have a hard time finding an album in MusicBrainz (as I did with this album- but you found it!) so I used the Discogs wizard. Regardless, the Discogs version appears clean with no signs of Mozart.
Don’t worry about it at all – the Roon metadata database is what it is, and you have to live with it. Practically every complex search I make for items in Classics ends in disappointment I’ve even stopped reporting that because I’d have nothing else to do but report it.
I’ve had lots of metadata questions over the last year. In fact, before posting here, I did a Google AI search on this topic and one of the referrals was one of my past posts about Roon metadata…
Anyway, I wanted to share two other screenshots from what I’ve uncovered. I went into Track editor:
And there is Mozart as a primary artist. So I could clean the album by deselecting Mozart for each track. However, before I declare this solved, might there be other solutions that explains why Mozart is showing up?
It’s strange because there is no Mozart in Roon’s metadata in the album version that I can add from Qobuz. (As one would expect based on Joel saying so).
Just to be sure: You are aware that you can multi-select the tracks and remove a credit from all of them with one action? (Just to be sure you don’t make such changes multiple times for each track separately)
@Suedkiez I couldn’t make that work. I selected all of the tracks Suite No. 1 in F major, HWV348 (one of three suites), right clicked on the three dots, made the edits, and saved. Only the first track was corrected.
This may be “solved,” but it is going to leave a lot of questions for those of us who believe we know how Roon works in this scenario…it still doesn’t compute…
Don’t click the three dots next to the track. These three dots always apply just to the track they appear on. What you have to do it is select multiple tracks and then click the (…) button at the top, to the right of the “xx selected” menu, then click Edit…:
Then you can make edits for all that’s selected at once.
And you can do the same for all kinds of things, like e.g. several selected albums to make an edit to all of them or the group them, several selected playlists to delete them, several artist to merge them, several compositions also to merge them, or whatever. (When selecting several artists or compositions for a merge, the “Merge” button will appear top right).
And there are various ways to select items. E.g., you can, on Windows or Mac:
Select several items at once (whether they are adjacent or not) by holding the Ctrl key and clicking each item to add it to the selection.
Select a range of adjacent items by selecting the first one while holding the Ctrl key (which will start multi-selection), then release Ctrl and instead hold the Shift key, and then click the last one in the range. This will select all between the first (Ctrl) click and the last (Shift) click.
Select a range as above and then add various individual items to the same selection by clicking them while holding Ctrl
Select more than one range at once by combining these steps: Select one range as described, then select some other item while holding Ctrl, which will start a second multi-selection, then hold Shift again and now click the last item of this second range. Now you will have two selected ranges.
Select all items in a view by the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+A.
For this, all items must be of the same kind, like all tracks or all albums. So this doesn’t work e.g. in Tags if you have mixed items in the tag, like albums and artists - then you can’t multi-select those.
On mobile devices, the options are limited, but you can long tap one item to start a multi-selection and then add more items by tapping them. (They show a circle with a checkmark).
In all cases, you can then open the (…) menu at the top and perform an action on the whole selection, which can be any of the actions you see in this menu.
Side note: Instead of starting a multi-selection by Ctrl-Click, you can also do so by just a click with the right mouse button.
As always in Roon, all these library actions (group, edit, merge, whatever) only work if all the selected items were added to the Roon library.
@DDPS I agree! I would like to know what triggered this. But I also wanted to clean my metadata so Mozart wouldn’t appear as a performer. So that latter part was solved, but not the former.
@Suedkiez I manually completed the edits. I’ll look at your solution when I have more time (more than the ten minutes it took to do it manually) for additional tips of the trade.
You should because it will speed up your editing in Roon 100 times (like doing this for all tracks of your album at once would have taken a few seconds), and some things are only possible if you know how to multi-select things (like grouping alternate album versions or merging artists or compositions).
(Using a (+) for remove is admittedly maybe a bit misleading. Anyway, that’s how it is - read it as meaning “add credits to the remove list”. And if you click the (+) button below Add, you can instead add credits to all the selected tracks at once. By the way, you can also scroll through this window to see more options, such as recording place and date to make them the same for all tracks.)
Then you get a combined list from all the credits on all of the selected tracks. You can scroll through them (or filter, top right) and check those that you want removed. (I don’t have Mozart here so I am selecting arbitrary ones):
Then click Done and you will be back in the main track editor window. The ones you are about to remove will be listed in red. (You can still click the X to remove them from this list if you change your mind for one or more of them). Finally, click Save to confirm and really remove them:
And by the way, you can also do the adding and removing (plus any other edits) at the same time. Just click the (+) for Add to add some, click the (+) for Remove to remove others, and apply it all at once.
)
I’ve even stopped reporting that because I’d have nothing else to do but report it.
