I was just browsing my classical genre and noticed some entirely inappropriate albums in that view. I think it’s caused by Roon defaulting to the assumption that Film and TV/Musical/Show categories are sub-genres of Classical, which is an assumption I don’t want to make with my library. Is there a way to edit the subgenres of the parent Classical so that I can remove entries that are tagging non-classical content?
thanks.
You can go to any genre and click Edit:
Choose Edit under Parent Genre:
You can then choose the genre’s parent genre or make it a top-level genre:
thanks, I had found that screen but I guess I am being dense, I can’t figure out how to remove sub- genres, I keep getting an error message when tapping on sub genre that it cannot be set to a parent of itself. I’m finding the design of this functionality rather cryptic.
You cannot delete a genre, you can only change its parent genre. If you could, there would probably be a “delete” button in the genre. (If you hate a genre a lot you could create a new top-level genre and call “hated genres” or whatever, and make it a parent of any offending genres. It’s a workaround at least
thanks, but I can’t figure out how to change the parent genre. In my library the sub-genre Show/Musical is nested in Classical. I want to move it to the parent Stage & Screen so that musicals don’t show up in my Classical view. I can’t see anything intuitive in the interface that allows me to do that, I’ve tried both iPad and PC clients. Surely moving a sub-genre to a different parent is possible?
Is there something you can’t do when following the screenshots I posted above? They show every single step:
If this doesn’t work for you, please post a screenshot for every step of what you are seeing. This will be faster than having me guess at it 
Because I want to move a sub-genre out from Classical, I am starting with Classical.
I access the edit function:
I scroll down and click on the sub-genre I want to manage, expecting Roon to give me an option to either make it a top-level genre or to move it to a different parent, and I get this
ok, I figured it out, but for me the design is extremely convoluted. Although a long-term user of Roon, it’s never occurred to me before that when access the main Genres section, there is no button available to “show all sub genres”. After clicking on Classical and scrolling at length down the screen, I found the sub-genres of Classical, I was then able to drill down to the one that I wanted to move and change its parent. Thanks for the help with this, the issue for me was that the main view of sub-genres was something that I didn’t even know was there, as it never occurred to me I needed to scroll down to find them. A main-view button to “expand all sub-genres” or something similar would have made it much more obvious.
Again, thanks for the help.
There’s your mistake. You go to the genre whose parent you want to change, not to the parent to change it’s children
Indeed. In order to manage sub-genres the user has to know that if they scroll past info on various categories that may or may not be of interest, they will eventually arrive at sub-genres. i.e. the design requires that the user knows that the off-screen info on sub-genres is there if they explore the interface sufficiently. For me that’s not good design, but these things are to an extent subjective.
A search/filter in the edit dialog would help. However, note that you can search for genre names in the global search (magnifying glass top right), the genres will usually appear at the bottom of the search results page. Don’t know if this is helpful for you but it might 
the light-bulb moment for me was realising that there had to be a main-view perspective on sub-genres. At first I looked at settings to see if I could toggle on subgenres, and then as mentioned after some random scrolling I found them. There are probably several ways in which this could be designed better, including your suggestion to modify the edit dialog. After all, if clicking on Edit for a main genre, it’s reasonable to assume that drill-down to subgenres will follow. But there you go, after several years of using Roon, I’m still figuring out how to use it.
I appreciate this thread. I’m also a long time user and always struggle with this. It isn’t intuitive at all for me.
I don’t use this feature often , but when I have, it’s been a completely frustrating experience.
I’ve bookmarked this thread for future reference. 
Thanks for clarifying the procedure, @Suedkiez
Agree, my expirience is that you can,t rely on Roon genre. I use tags to manage genres. With Roon you have total mess. I supose everybody must have the same problem and esspecialy if you have number of compilations. As I see, solution (which I mention so long ago) is that every album must have main genre and then subgenres. Now all genres in one album makes it dificult. Is it country, country rock, soft rock, acoustic …every genre is treated the same.
I was completely frustrated about this Genre issue when I started with Roon 5 years ago and am very surprised that there still isn’t an easy & intuitive way to manage them. Hope somebody from Roon reads this?
My solution has been using my own Genres in the Metatags - not the mess Roon suggests. Or the bypass of using Roon Tags.
I think you’re perfectly right here. Roon follows an interface design principle which is very close to the underlying concepts of computer science in many aspects - which in turn makes it very slim and clear - at least to the computer-science-savvy user ;).
Theory of interface design states “the aim interface design is a user interface that is designed in such a way that the widest possible circle of users experiences optimal fulfillment of their wishes/needs/goals through appropriate action steps.” In practice, tests are usually carried out on the respective target group during the design phase.
If there were more casual (not so computer-affine) users like you, who wanted to tinker with the inner workings of the “machine”, then those responsible for Roon would certainly think about redesigning the interface.
Given Harman’s acquisition of Roon technology, it is conceivable that this will be a way to focus more on the needs of non-computer literate users, - but I don’t think so. Their desires certainly don’t go in the direction of getting their hands dirty by tinkering with the innards of a musical interface.
I think that in a short time we will have completely new patterns of interaction with music, through the use of AI and a natural language interface. This is obvious, since the musical universe is at least as complex as the text-oriented one - and all the data is already available in digital form.
If you engage in genre tagging, you end up becoming a clerk of your music collection and will have less time to enjoy it. 
There are also the problems of consistency and intersubjectivity: What I categorize one way today, I may categorize differently later because I have learned more in the meantime. - What I label as folk rock, someone else may see as country rock, and so on.
As an early adopter of streaming technology since the days of SLIMDEVICES Squeezebox / Squeezeserver (later Logitech LMS), I have seen many attempts to improve the situation of musical tagging/discovery. From today’s perspective, all of this has cost a lot of time and achieved little. Only with the best deep (“intelligent”) musical discovery methods, which are increasingly being used by streaming providers, has the quality of my music consumption improved significantly.
I think we are now relatively close to the introduction of AI-supported clustering methods for our beloved music. Together with spoken interaction, this will take us to a completely new level.
agree with much of what you say, though I would regard myself as tech-savvy and coding-savvy if not computer science savvy. But it’s likely that my thought process re intuitive design is very different from Roon’s, hence the laborious effort to figure out how to change parents for subgenres.
The issue I encountered with figuring out subgenre management relates to a wider problem I see with Roon design, and that’s the sheer amount of clutter. There is a Roon-knows-best approach that we have to take or leave. So scrolling down the home screen, I have to wade past the listening stats even though I’ve never looked at them since the feature was introduced, before getting to home screen content that is of much more interest to me. It would be so much better if the elements could be selected per user preference, and ordered accordingly. And on the main menu, I’m stuck with “My Live Radio” being much lower down the list than “Live Radio”. Well surprise surprise, the stations I’ve tagged in “My Live Radio” are my go-to stations, so it would be nice if I could move that section to a more prominent spot in the menu.
Finally, I would agree that manual management of genre tags feels like a dated concept. I too started out in the LMS/Slimdevices days (I still have a working Squezebox kit in the garage), and occasionally I switch from Roon to MinimServer for a more focused experience, but the main positive for me with Roon has been more time on discovering music and much less time on curating file tags. And now that the power of LLMs is all around us, Roon’s current approach to genre management will surely be considered quaint very soon, if not quaint already.
Oh dear, I guess I embarrassed myself quite a bit. I am not a native english speaker so I probably missed the signals in your post that you are a long-time accomplice… 
Yes, I absolutely agree with you about Roon’s idiosyncrasies, but I have refrained from criticizing it because I found the overall concept to be brilliant within a previously completely uncontrolled zoo of audio devices and the implementation has always worked fantastically, apart from a few minor problems.
Apart from the usability problems you have raised in this thread, Roon will certainly also have a harder time competing with current multi-room streaming approaches such as Bluesound in particular. But that’s probably another topic…
Really interesting discussion. I only have my personal collection in Roon (no Qobuz/Tidal hookup), and I browse top-level genres quite a bit—for example, the Stage & Screen genre which includes movie/TV scores/soundtracks as well as musicals. However, the sub-genres seem too finicky to be useful. I don’t blame Roon, as I assume genres come from external metadata sources. Beyond the top-level genres, I’m happy creating/using Tags for personal categorizations I’d like to filter by. For example, I’ve tagged 21 “Anime” albums, but digging down to the “Anime Music” sub-genre only yields 13 albums. I also have a tag to filter out (or in) my small amount of non-physical (“Digital Only”) music. The ability to exclude a Genre or Tag is one of Roon’s most awesome features in my book. Honestly, I’ve been using Roon for a while now, but I only found the “Go to Composition” explanations the other day. Talk about metadata!! Wow.
