Help with tagging of Classical music

[Antonello_Izzi]

Hello,

ATTENTION: this is a long post. I’m sorry.

I’m asking for help from the community in order to understand if I’m doing something wrong here. Here is my problem.

I’m ripping a bunch of 10’’ vinyls that I inherited from my Grandfather. They are from late 1960, of no particular economic value (but of invaluable sentimental value to me). They are mainly part of the collection “I Grandi Musicisti”. Here is one of them (which I will use in the following to detail my problem with metadata): Claudio Monteverdi – Claudio Monteverdi II (1967, Vinyl) - Discogs.

As you can imagine, I do not expect this vinyls to be identified by Roon. So, I used Mp3Tag version 3.11 to tag the tracks myself. Following the guide at https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/file-tag-best-practice#Achieving_Great_Results_From_File_Tagging I properly attributed the following tags to each track:

ALBUM = Claudio Monteverdi II (I Grandi Musicisti n.100)
ALBUMARTIST = Carlo Felice Cilario
ALBUMARTIST = Rudolf Ewerhart
COMPOSER = Claudio Monteverdi
CONDUCTOR = “each track its own”
ENSEMBLE = “each track its own”
GENRE = Classical
PART = “each track the correct one”
SOLOIST = “per each track, the list of soloists”
TITLE = “each track its own”
TRACK = “each track its own”
WORK = “each track its own”
YEAR = 1967

Here the view from Mp3Tag:

When I import it in Roon, the first thing I notice is that the GENRE tag is not honored. I have to attribute it manually. After that, the entry is correctly recognized as a Classical work and I get the proper WORK/PART grouping. Also the composer is “apparently” recognized: “All track composed by Claudio Monteverdi”. Each work is attributed to the right performers. For example, the work “Orfeo, favola in musica” has the following attribution:

Performed by Coro Polifonico di Milano e Orchestra dell’Angelicum, Irene Companez, Plinio Strudthoff
Conducted by Carlo Felice Cilario

Everything seems to be fine, until I get to the Credit section. Here this is what I see:

With this I have two problems:

Problem n. 1

“Claudio Monteverdi” is correctly recognized as a Composer, but it is not linked to the “Claudio Monteverdi” record which already exists in Roon database:

So, my vinyls are not in the “In your library” section if I look at the page. Instead, they are “attached” to a different “Claudio Monteverdi”

So, I have now effectively two “Monteverdi” when they should be one. This is true for all other composer I’m bringing in. Either the album is “identified” by Roon or they create a new record for the same composer.

Problem n. 2

This is related to the soloist. In the example above, Irene Companez is a “Contralto”, but I wasn’t able to find a way to identify her as such. I see her credited as “Soloist”. I’ve tried to tag her as “Contralto” (as detailed in this page: https://help.roonlabs.com/portal/en/kb/articles/credit-roles), but the result is that I lose her as Soloist too.

I understand this could be done because if I look at any album featuring Maria Callas (just to pick someone famous), I see her credited as such:

I’ve extensively researched the KB and I’ve found many references to problems tagging Classical pieces in Roon, but I wasn’t able to solve this problem. I’ve also opened a support ticket, but I can understand Roon team has higher priority (I would put this as low priority for my team too!). So, I’m asking for help from the community: is there something I can do to workaround these two problems manually? I have no problem in investing time to properly tag my collection.

Thanks in advance for any help.

Antonello

[Happycy]

Hi Antonello,

As regards problem no. 1 your outcome makes little sense (by that I mean that it makes no sense for Roon to do what it is doing, not that you have done anything wrong). The easy solution is that you merge the two artists into one (do a search for Claudio Monteverdi), then highlight and select them both and click on the three dots at the top of the screen and select “Merge Artists”. Do make sure that when selecting between the two choices, you choose the Monteverdi with dates and profile. You can always “unmerge” artists in the settings under the “Library” tab.

As regrads problem no. 2 you can solve it as follows. Rather than soloist, you can use a tag called ‘Personnel” and then create two tags labelled s follows : “Irene Companez - Contralto (Vocal)” and “Irene Companez - Soloist” or keep the soloist tag and just create the Personnel tag to assign the Contralto tag. As a general rule, you can use the Personnel tag to assign the specification for most soloists whether vocal or instrumental: you often need to add “(Vocal)” after most vocal soloist specifications as some designations such as Bass will not be recognised as they could fall in either category. (I use MP3Tag too and have a Personnel field). You need to check the Roon database for the complete rules; “Soloist” may also work and allow to assign a specific role but I cannot say from memory.

Please note that assigning artist names is now a minefield since December as Roon has changed the name conventions and does not now follow any agreed or consistent naming convention (it used to follow the AMG English nomenclature used by Discogs and MusicBrainz too) which leads to the ridiculous situation whereby the “Artist” classification name is different from the one used in the biography (as those are taken from AMG). I have highlighted this in the forums but no one at Roon seems to have picked it up or care to respond. I guess classical listeners are not numerous enough!

Sorry for no images but I am travelling and do not have access to my Roon server right now.

[Antonello_Izzi]

Hello Happycy,

thanks for your reply. I applied the “Personnel” suggestion and was finally able to see the correct attribution.

However, I cannot merge the two composers because the option is available only from the “My Library”->“Composers” page and I have no other “official” Monteverdi album in my library. Soon I will be adding some Bach composition and then it would be interesting to see if they will be correctly attributed (I have J.S. Bach already). I’ll keep you posted.

BTW, a question for Roon support: what is “Zucchero” doing in the Composer section? I think it was wrongly attributed.

[Andrea_Campi1 (andregetlost)]

For the trouble with names they answered here:
https://community.roonlabs.com/

[Happycy]

Thanks Andrea. Are you sure the link is right as it sends me to the forum homepage?

[Happycy]

Found the relevant post through a search. Well at last an answer if rather a regressive one!

[RalphH]

Artist name issues are noted by Roon, and they state that they are working on it:

What happened to artist\orchestra names?

Hello, I thought someone already brought it up but it seems I can’t find it anymore. The name of orchestra and interpreters they all change for some reason recently. Now we don’t have anymore the english translation but the ‘original’ name. Is this gonna be fixed or should we fix it? e.g. [image] The original Pablo Casals it’s not an hyperlink anymore. It’s a bit redundant here and it’s annoying that this thing happened to most of the 2956 classicalrecords I have in my collection…

[Happycy]

Thanks for the link RalphH. That was topic I was referring to when I mentioned I had at last found an answer! We have already exchanged views before Christmas but I am not sure the answer from Joel goes in the direction of allowing to see names in the now imposed original language format or the one used internationally, usually in English (and the one usually used in releases and on CDs outside of one’s native market) but we shall see. In the meantime, with no time scale promised, one has to manually edit artist names (so much for turn-key) or relegate some artists to the depths of one’s library.

As far as I have noticed in my library, if in your own ripped library, you have tagged artist and composer names using the AMG/English convention, they are automatically correctly recognised although they will appear in their new “original” version name (that is spuriously referred to as the “canonical” version) unless you manually edit the artists page (which requires 2 edits, one to the name and the second to the last, first classification).

[RalphH]

I maintain my metadata in a database external to Roon, using a similar multi table setup. I only need change the ‘known’ name of a composer and all related compositions and tracks would display this change. A few clicks later and the metadata on the file is then updated. In Roon, my main issue is to edit the album artist accordingly. Roon in changing names can cause a problem - Frederick becomes Fryderyk and Album artists don’t match which puts them out of order (not too concerned about performers).
It would be useful if Roon showed a localised version of the Artist name, so depending on your language setting you would see the normative spelling of the name according to your language. There would need to be an alias index under the hood.

[WillK]

re: a “regressive” change. What is it that’s “regressive” about using native language artist names?