Sorry, Mike, I gave you the wrong stats in my first reply because I’d forgotten that one of my external SSDs wasn’t plugged in when I posted you. One of the many things I really like about Roon is the fact that it’s so easy to remove storage devices temporarily. Removing them and plugging them in again always works absolutely reliably. I do that very often. In fact, 90% of the time I only access my internal SSD (about 1,500 albums). That’s why I didn’t immediately notice that my stats were all wrong.
So this is my complete library:
Albums 7,124 (files 117,321)
Classical: 29%
61 unidentified albums
114 recordings of Beethoven’s Fifth (Yeah, I know that’s crazy… ).
All of my music is locally stored. I only use Tidal (and Qobuz Sublime) to discover new music.
I would love to have more classical-related problems so as to understand some of the issues more directly. If I were feeling them every day, it would be easier to move us towards solutions. The classical content that I do listen to seems to translate pretty well, but then again I avoid box sets like the plague.
I am a heavy user of composition/composer browsing for Jazz content. My most numerous compositions are all American Songbook or Jazz Standards with 40-60 performances.
Hi Brian maybe a word of explanation why I started this.
Please see this
and
I have issues where classical compositions are missing, wrongly ID’ed etc. Very few other people seem to share this issue
My thought was that there are not many people affected as there were very few really big Classical Libraries as per mine and Tony’s
The few results back (not statistically valid ) seem to indicate this. Being a good scientist I would like to base my thoughts on facts.
The issue I see seems to raise its head every now and then but doesn’t seem high on anyone’s agenda. As a Classical fan it is fast approaching a showstopper for Roon.
Unless I can reliably and easily navigate to a Classical Album or work I really will use Roon for Rock and general Info etc and continue with my previous JRiver system for classical . This you can imagine is not First Prize for me as I need to maintain 2 systems.
At first look Roon seemed to eliminate any manual maintenance of Composition, in my old system I have to populate Composition and Movement manually - not ideal and no mean feat to do in the first place.
I started this thread primarily to highlight the issue. You will see in the various other threads a level of frustration of classical users caused by this and several other issues. Eg the anonymous Disc 1 … Disc 112 of box sets . Sticking clear of Box Sets may be wise but in the classical music market place its simply not a going proposition. Sets like Beethoven Edition, Alfred Brendel Complete Phillips etc are very cost effective ways of building a library and indeed most classical collections I would guess are comprised of a lot of boxes , mine must be well over 200 without counting.
I am glad you responded so at least we can lodge the issue in the mind of of someone influential in Roon’s future development
Please don’t get me wrong, Roon is superb when you use it for single albums of Rock Jazz etc , but it definitely falls short for a Classical devotee. In my mind (biased of course) for Roon to succeed as a world class library management system it must offer the same level of excellence for all genres of music which ,to me, currently it doesn’t seem to.
It may well be that the users with big classical libraries out there are so few in number as not to influence the direction of feature development. Indeed it may also be that your background metadata providers do not provide good enough source to make Classical viable in the way Rock and Jazz are , I can only speculate.
One slight snag I have thought of , in terms of Roon Stats the Album count may be confusing in Box Sets . For example most Beethoven Piano Sonata sets will be 9 - 10 discs but will be ONE album, the same goes for many works in Boxes
The track count may give an indication , but I can’t see a way around this
I spotted this because my Classical Albums seemed low compared to what I thought I had
Just as you use the Composition screen to drive the Jazz experience I would like to use it to drive the Classical experience. It’s too off topic to paste a bunch of links but the purpose of this thread was to establish a link between library size and the Classical experience.
I find the problems in many ways worse with a smaller library as if you only have one performance and roon doesn’t identify at a composition level it is lost to you on a lot of screens. I am trying to maintain two libraries. A small one for travel and a large one for home, so I am seeing these effects. I don’t need a complicated box set to demonstrate the issues. I can do it with a single disc of classical guitar transcriptions of the Scarlatti piano sonatas.
After a year or so with roon, practical changes that I believe would catch the vast majority of the small classical communities concerns, revolve around enhancements to the Composition screen:
Extend the existing path browser functionality from the Tracks screen
Expose the Date, Period, Form & Instrumentation fields on the composition page to end-user tags
Add an additional layer to the Composition->Performance hierarchy (Composition->Version->Performance)
Extend the focus “pick-lists” on the composition page to support Boolian logic
Standardise composition naming conventions so that users can re-tag if necessary to ensure 100% composition identification
Generally provide a VALUE=NULL for all filtration categories so users can quickly identify and fix unidentified items or unpopulated tags
2632 albums
Classical 5% (of which I probably listen to 5% - had a classical phase which wore off)
Rest
rock/pop
Rock
Electronic
Soul
At first glance quite a lot of Jazz, which definitely can’t be right. On having a butchers, Divine Madness by Madness is an odd choice for a Jazz tag :-). But as I don’t browse by genre it really doesn’t matter to me.
).
I would like to base my thoughts on facts.