I agree with Tony above
One vital aspect is a consistent format for Composition and to make it editable either within or outside as long as you can opt for overriding Roon if the external one is better
The actual format doesn’t matter too much as long as it’s consistent b
I use
Piano Sonata No.1. In C Minor Op.2 No. 1. “Nickname Sonata”
Mike
Great idea your thread. Maybe we could also state how big in size one’s library is?
Because I think the more classical stuff you have, the bigger your library might get, wich leads to more errors too.
At least I am getting this intention, since I recently checked my local library in town, and they had SACDs, which were mainly classical recordings (e.g. Holst -The Planets), with 90% and more. So I guess there are more DSDs for these genres available.
2500 albums, I don’t do genres so the only split I have is:
2500 albums I like
0 albums I don’t like
The main steer seems to be to use whatever allmusic has used. So the basic pattern is actually different to your pattern:
Piano Sonata No. 23 in F minor “Appassionata” Op. 57
I also see the nickname frequently in brackets with the catalogue number last (after the Ous No. if there is one) , so:
Symphony No. 4 in E flat (“Romantic”), WAB 104
Another difference is that multi-part Opus No’s are usually done Op. xx/y instead of Op. xx No. y
Piano Sonata No. 14 in C sharp minor “Moonlight” Op. 27/2
e.g. see also the Kissin link above
But these are all rules of thumb that often work for me just by observation of how allmusic works. Sometimes there are small variations, like additional or absent commas which can be enough to throw roon off during the identification process.
I think in most cases I would prefer to know what roon’s composition naming rules were rather than cutting and pasting allmusic when an Identification fails.
I would love to have a dropdown menu after assigning a composer in Roon containing the works of that composer. You would then be able to assign the work without guessing the correct (Roon official) work and eliminating the need for endless merges.
Using @brian’s approach instead of doing my own math:
Btw, the Added diagram is wrong. Roon limits it to 2015 because that’s when the product came out, but I have it set to use the File Creation Date, so my earliest Added Date is 2001. Of course that computer is long gone, but the file creation date (the rip date) travels with the file.
(When I first did that, the date axis went to the turn of the century. Wait, what? Turns out, one recent album of Italian jazz was listed in All Media as 1909, I think it may be 2009. After that, the oldest original date was Kurt Weill’s Street Scene from 1949. Exploring is fun!)
VX
I do listen to other Music, too … However I removed the disc locations for other music, behause I hate the results in Roon - Messing up my composition view and limiting my ability to Identity my classical Albums I Need to work on Tag-wise due to being unidentified…
7.700 albums, 110.000 songs
Of these some 850 are Classical and probably about half of the non identified 325 albums.
Library size around 4TB (around 1.000 albums in MP3)
Oh, and i have 230 TIDAL albums added to my library.
14,604 Albums of which 1,031 are Tidal
239,974 Tracks of which 14,235 are Tidal
2,287 Albums Unidentified
Showing Years with Classical filtered out.
Composition with most Performances - Handel’s Messiah 145.
(This number is wrong because Roon is treating separate parts of the Oratorio as different versions of the Composition. I need to groom it, but I don’t think I’ll be getting any more versions of the Messiah for a while.)
Composition with most Performances (Non-Classical) - Round Midnight 40.
I am less worried about format than consistency
I used MusiCHI Tagger to do the grunt work of compositions and you can arrange the various elements as you see fit so I could rework if needs be quite easily.
If Roon constructed the Composition from the various elements , maybe extracted from All Music , then they could achieve a level of consistency. I am not sure if Roon stores the Nickname, Opus No, Key etc as separate fields , if they do it would be a piece of cake to construct.
Cheers
Mike
Hi Klaus
So far you are one iof the few users with a BIG classical content.
Are you seeing the same issues as Tony & myself with mixed and missing compositions. I assume you have multiple recordings of specific works
Mike
That is one lot of unidentified albums, I assume that is reeking havoc with your composition view in Classical stuff.
Also another High Proportion Classical library, how do you navigate to specific albums in this situation. Have you seen the issues mentioned above
The multiple parts of the Messiah is a case in point , they should all be bulked as a “Messiah” so that you can see all recordings of that work in the composition view.
I force in some cases by adding the Movement/Part tag externally which then prompted a rescan and recognition
Mike
Yes. I often do the same thing with some simple pattern matching in mp3tag. I think Klaus uses JRiver. I see Yate mentioned a lot by Mac users.
I must say, I only fix things on a case by case basis. I tried batch converts a few times but it was a mess. So I usually keep a mental note of whatever I keep going back to in JRiver or the wife’s favorites and focus on them. I would really like some easy way of “focusing” on unidentified compositions so I could be a bit more systematic. I cannot see how to do that.
@Mike_O_Neill
Hi MIke,
I do experience the same issues. Composition data is not consistent among my identified albums. I was not too much surprised by that, though. I had expected inconsistencies to happen. The fun starts when you try to correct those.
I was not very lucky in trying to merge compositions. Sometimes the compositions would just not merge, sometimes they would still show as separate compositions on the composition browser but lead to the same list of recordings when clicking on them and sometimes it worked. The problem for me is that I do not understand a bit what influences this… I plainly do not understand the logic and whether or how it could be influenced by me.
As another example: over the christmas period I played around with the prefer Roon vs prefer File settings and my experience was very mixed.
When selecting “prefer file” in the global library settings for compositions I’d expected Roon to just take my Work and Part tags. What I got was a mix of “mapped” compositions vs. “tagged” ones. It was easy to see, since I have maintained my work tags in german. So my guess is that Roon still applies logic even if the settings are to prefer file information.
I think the interaction between what is in my my file tags and what Roon does with it together with the metadata it gets from other sources should be better documented. For me it worked in 80% of the cases but not in all and mostly I have no clue what I could have done to get it right…
I just spotted one thing of interest , if you try to merge the Composer Name, Composition Start and Enmd dates must match or they wont merge
Ie Beethoven on one and Ludwig Van Beethoven on the other causes problems
Please join in the clamour for better classical coverage , I supect you are one of the biggest Classical libraries we have seen so far.
@Ludwig hasnt chipped in yet I think he has a lot of Classical
Mike
Yes. I would have thought most larger libraries have a lot of box sets. It’s the only way of doing it. For me they tend to be the bedrock of the library where most of the “reference” recordings from the 80’s are when the “superstars” of the day were recording the entire Classical repertoire to CD. I have older stuff, vinyl rips and much newer high rez stuff. But those box sets are the bedrock from which to explore the library.
I listen to a lot of other stuff as well, where I would really like better visibility at a composition level. I am not finding this to be an issue only with Classical. I forgot to mention that on my home roon I have a lot of Vocal Jazz and American Songbook and the most performances I have is 40+ “Stardust”, Hoagy Carmichael. But that is only because that song was important to me and I hunted down everything I could find in my library to populate the composer field. Unpopulated Composer fields is much more common with Pop/Jazz and I just have no idea how I would systematically go about populating all of that. So I just do it randomly on a case by case basis with songs that have a special meaning. At the end of the day I much prefer to listen to what I’ve got but if there was any way of improving hit rates with Composers/Compositions that doesn’t mean tagging hell I am all ears.
This comment by @joel is probably relevant…
I do agree that the whole process could do with some better documentation in the knowledge base, something that’s been said often in the past.
We’re probably getting a bit off-topic here, so perhaps one of the moderators can extract this discussion into a separate thread.
Agreed. Should be split out. There is a very interesting exchange going on here with experiences of “composition” or maybe it’s technically “performance” identification vs. “album” identification.
It’s very obvious with larger Classical libraries. I see every variation. Identified Albums with unidentified Compositions. I also see unidentified Albums and unidentified Compositions (expected) but also unidentified Albums and identified Compositions (surprised).
But, I also see it with a smaller Classical library where in many ways the effects are more serious. I also see it in a Vocal Jazz / American Song book library where similar to Classical it is fun to explore interpretations of the standards. I wounder if it’s common in other libraries but no one is looking? Maybe the librarians tend to gravitate to certain genres and that is why it is being noticed in certain genres first.
@Bendix_Christians. That is an interesting observation.
The mods are probably going to split out this discussion on composition identification but do you have a few screen-shots to clarify?
