Hard to find first ever recording of a specific song or any track of music

Many times I struggle to find the first ever recording of a song or composition and this is really very important for me. I try to find it by sorting the tracks by release date but the release date is not always the real one so this does not help.
Is there any other way? If not, would it be useful for ROON to mark/tag somehow the first ever original recordings of all the tracks?

Both release date and original release date are originating from roon´s internal metadata sources (MusicBrainz and Xperi/Tivo). The data is vastly unreliable and in many cases outright wrong. My guess would be that what you are desiring will not be reliable on the base of existing metadata.

Are you using a streaming service like Tidal or Qobuz attached to roon? If yes, the list of recordings per composition is anyways flooded according to my experience, with the streaming service pushing in additional unreliable release dates in many cases. With Tidal, it is a mess, Qobuz is only slightly better.

If you use solely local files, you might be wanting to manually correct release dates. You can also play around with roon either preferring ´release date´ or ´original release date´ for sorting.

I do not quite see where such data should be coming from on a large scale. We are talking about millions of compositions. I fully understand your desire but personally have given up on that, as particularly with vintage pop, jazz standards or alike the situation is vastly unclear who has recorded what first. From 1920s to 1960s is was pretty common to release a recording as 7" or 10" single, independent from any album containing the same song. Most of streaming services and meta databases are basing their information on album releases, though. In the digital era mostly albums have been reissued, the information on single releases is presumably lost in most of cases.

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I do not disagree with you. I use tidal and this is a source you cannot rely on for release dates of albums as well. However, I still believe that there must be a way to have Roon mark the most known of the cases. For example the famous songs may have more than 100 executions when you search for their tracks. I am sure that for these famous ones there will be some way to mark the original execution. If I search in internet I always find which execution is the original one. Now with AI there may be some way this to be incorporated in Roon even if this will not be 100% true.

I doubt there is a reasonable way to make such judgement based on A.I. or any database operation. Even if recording dates or original release dates exist as reliable tags, it does not mean the first one is the most popular one or the one you are searching for.

For some compositions, Wikipedia is a reliable source as they sometimes have a sentence about who made a song popular. But this is not very common, and far from qualifying as structured data.

There are some cases having more than 5,000 recordings:

Particularly with Jazz standards, songs from a Songbook or alike, even for musicologists it is impossible to say which one was the initial or first one. I agree, though, that even with roon´s excellent focus filters, the sheer number of recordings is confusing.

There is a feature sorting them by popularity. I have no idea what this estimation is based on (definitely nothing to do with ´initial recording´), but maybe it is helpful for you?

In a composion, there is also the possibility to sort by recording date, isn’t that what the OP requested? Of course you are still bound to the accuracy of the metadata, but that is not a roon issue.

In theory yes. Practically most of albums seemingly do not have an assigned recording date. Some classical albums do, but the information is not really reliable.

What I noticed: Using the album cover view on a composition page sorting by release date is somehow more reliable than the list of recordings. There are still a lot of errors, though. I doubt there were jukebox hints from 19th century :wink:

Thanks all for your replies and the good will to help.
I understand that metadata carried from any external sources are a chaos and the amount of data is huge but our discussion is an admission that authenticity of data of any music library is valuable and it’s good to discuss about ways to overcome.

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