How Big Is Your Library

Interesting observation @Mike_O_Neill.

Just so I understand do you mean the dates below? The ones we cannot edit or do they map to anything in our tags?

Yes, I had a Composition with 2 discrepancies

Beethoven & Ludwig van Beethoven
Date and no date

They wouldnā€™t merge

I manually adjusted the one with no dates and voila

Mike

How did you change the dates?

I have mainly problems merging compositionsā€¦

canā€™t get my Boleros to merge, but both compositions will lead to an identical looking composition pageā€¦ but neither of those pages contains the Bolero from the Dutoit recording, which is displayed in the second composition entryā€¦

clicking on the Bolero composition on the Dutoit recording leads me also to the composition page above and does not list the album Iā€™m coming from in its listingā€¦

when trying to merge those compositions I see thisā€¦

It only gets worse when I check Jriver and see that I have 35 recordings of the Bolero, not 32+2 as Roon would indicateā€¦ So I guess I also need to indentify the prodigal sonā€¦

But we are already off-topic - sorry

1 Like

Not sure how I got therebut there was a date entry box for date cosition start and another for end

There were 2 sets I highlighted the one and went edit

Mike

1 Like

I get exactly that. Very common.

Sometimes I am able to get it to work by unmerging everything and then trying to merge them back in a different order one by one. If I get to this ā€œblockingā€ point I just unmerge everything and start again. My approach is entirely random. I donā€™t have the patience to go through the permutations. Sometimes I get lucky sometimes I donā€™t and I give up and try another day. I assume roon auto-merged at least some of it so the bright-side is the perms must be less than 32 factorial :slight_smile:

I have no idea why there seems to be a dependency on the order in which you merge which of course is completely random because it depends on the order in which you imported the discs. Iā€™ve seen a few links from others.

Found it. Thatā€™s a very handy tip.

Itā€™s in the ā€œComposition Editorā€. If you highlight the composition and press the Edit box at the top you get there. This is a very good example of what @Klaus_Kammerer1 has been banging on about that the natural ā€œcockpitā€ for a much improved roon Classical experience is the composition screen. Just needs a few things fixing:

PS: As long as the composition is there in the first place that is :roll_eyes:

1 Like

Just managed to use the ā€œdateā€ trick to merge an unidentified composition into an identified one.

But I am working on a much smaller library, so on exactly the same disk I have a singleton composition I cannot merge into anything. So it remains stubbornly unidentified even after the usual tricks of tracking down the allmusic format, opus noā€™s etc.

Hi Klaus

Sounding a bit like the aggrieved classical users club :yum:

I suspect there is a set of Tags that MUST agree before a merge can happen as in my Beethoven and dates example

Worst part is we donā€™t know what the set is

Maybe switch on all the columns in the Composition View and see if any mismatches show

The worst part of all is that it takes another library software product to see if you are missing any, I certainly couldnā€™t tell at a glance if I was missing one of 35 !!, let alone the guy with 130 Beethoven 5ths

I wonder if a feature request should be to spot ā€œNear Missesā€ somehow and highlight for merging (Not sure how BUTā€¦)

In JRiver I added Composition and then looked from Composition for a selected group of Composers and then corrected. Equally you can see where 2 composition texts are slightly different and fix it easily.

I suspect Roon doesnā€™t look at any Composition tags just at the composition from its metadata source. Maybe thatā€™s a request too

Mike

Hi Tony

Have you looked at Jaikoz or Song Kong

Jaikoz analyse the song timings and lookup in MusicBrainz, the free version will do 20 tracks as a try out

Its rescued to odd outlier for me

Mike

Have you looked at Jaikoz or Song Kong

Jaikoz analyse the song timings and lookup in MusicBrainz, the free version will do 20 tracks as a try out

Its rescued to odd outlier for me

be careful when using Jaikoz and Song Kong when using the ā€œprefer tagsā€ option in Roon. It puts data in artists and performer fields that clutter Roon, because their source (Musicbrainz) often gives artists and performers with their instrument or voice in brackets. I tried to do that in the past and it made a mess out of my artist list in Roon.

I think you can control though what tag fields will be updated by Jaikoz - just be aware that it may popuate tags that Roon can read but you never thought aboutā€¦ For me it was the performer tagā€¦ Had to clean up my tags afterwards.

@joel

Hi Joel , not sure if you have been following this thread ?

A technical query,just for interest does Roon have all the elements of a Composition Text stored separately such a

Work Type ā€“ Piano Sonata
Work No ā€“ No.1
Key ā€“ F Minor
Opus No ā€“ Op2/1
Catalog ā€“ K310 (for Mozart etc)
Nickkname ā€“ ā€œMoonlight Sonataā€

Concatenating a ā€œCompositionā€ would be easy if that were the case and the consistency of the Order would be in your code and presuambly configurable

Or is it a lookup from an external DB , AllMusic etc

Cheers

Mike (MCSD hence the Techie bit)

Hi Klaus

Yes you are right , Jaikoz you can control quite easily. Song Kong you have to get your config set up before you start so as not to , there is a setting to put the Composer into the Artist Tag ā€“ definitely switched off in my case

I must admit I used it only in desperation, in which cases it did help.

I have tried all sorts of Tools over the years, I tend to stick on ones where the editing is manual. In my pre-Roon days I mainly used

  • JRiver
  • MusiCHI Tagger for compositions and movements and general text processing (well worth 20 Euro to me)
  • Tag & Rename (good for artwork and Amazon look up with manual override)

I was looking forward to Roon taking all that manual stuff away BUT , I suppose thatā€™s what we are debating

Metadata sources for classical music do tend to be wanting , thatā€™s the big advantage of MusiCHI , Phillipeā€™s DB is his own built over many years and is pretty comprehensive

Mike

I am doing much the same with CUETools and EAC except that the lookup is freeDB and GD3 instead of MusicBrainz and Discogs. But Jaikoz looks interesting. Iā€™ll give it a whirl.

Sometimes I if I get desperate I reconvert with CUETools as it is common for multiple metadata lookups to be returned from freeDB, and choosing another has worked sometimes.

This is a particularly annoying case. Itā€™s a 10CD Naxos boxset of the Great Ballets. Perfect for travel. Nice and light. Some of the ballets roon has identified are fine and it breaks them up into nicely formatted multi-part works. But some it has not. I really cannot see a pattern. So, for example, on exactly the same disc I just used the ā€œdateā€ trick for, I have 14 Coppeliaā€™s all linked to a nicely formatted Coppelia composition page. But of course I havenā€™t got 14 Coppeliaā€™s. I have one Coppelia . So I group it by WORK/PART using exactly the WORK name that roon uses for the 14 Coppeliaā€™s on the Composition page. I turn on ā€œprefer file multi-part groupingā€ and now roon groups the work properly but refuses to identify it? Iā€™m baffled at this point.

I donā€™t really have a handle on all these effects. The starting point would be to find how many performances have not been linked to a composition. But I just do not know how to do that.

Musichi uses freed as well with an option of amazon

Mike

6500 Albums with >100K Tracks. Mostly FLAC, but recently DSD (love those 4x).

about 40% Classical, but that too is now 100% of my new purchases.

I have become quite zealous about analyzing tracks as I import them. You would be surprised at how may alleged hi-def tracks are just 44/16s upsampled. Hate that.

1 Like

I finally got an id on that other ballet. The details are seriously off topic but it produces another tip. Itā€™s not obvious but sometimes there will be no identification unless TITLE exactly matches WORK/PART. Maybe it is time to split out the composition identification part of this thread. It is very useful stuff I think and should be preserved somewhere.

How do you tell that a track is 44/16 upsampled?

I would like to have one thread just about the numbers.
How and what members enjoy with Roon.
Another thread should discuss the problems related to tagging etcā€¦

The two in this instance are related , if you read the above.

The suspicion is that large classical libraries have specific issues but it would seem that there are not too many about so this thread was simply to get an idea of big classical libraries and the impact on accuracy of compositions

Cheers

Mike