My metrics: > 7500 albums, > 84K tracks > 60% classical, near 10% from TIDAL.
Why would “large ?” classical libraries change something in compositions management rules ?
From my point of view issues are probably due to Identification / Database design / External metadata quality / UI difficulties … More albums = more potential issues but nothing directly related to the library size.
Classical compositions management is a very complicated job, especially if it is “automatic”. Lot of cases and exceptions , rules and implementation are not easy to design and fix !
I hope RoonLabs will continue to progress on this difficult topic but i’m not aware of any other software successful on this.
I have both a large library at home and a smaller travel library. I am noticing the same effects in both but they manifest in different ways.
Lets say you have a larger Classical library and you have 20+ performances of favorite works. In many cases, particularly with Classical, roon will not be able to identify all your albums. But what I am seeing is roon will do its best to link your unidentified albums to your identified albums. That way you can get both an unidentified album but often with many identified performances. Roon will probably still miss an annoying few. I am seeing this and it leads to a lot of post-processing trying to tidy things up, by renaming performances, merging etc. to get better identification rates.
On the other hand, if you have a smaller library, which is my travel case, roon will be much less successful with your unidentified albums because it cannot match to anything identified in your library. I am seeing this case as well. So unidentified albums (identical copies of the ones in my larger home roon) have much fewer identified performances. This is very noticeable because I use both the larger library and the smaller one on a regular basis.
The most obvious place that comes to my mind is in Album view. There are numerous cases where an album is not identified. I then set that album to “Classical”. Further, I enter the correct composer under each track credits. Still, in particular if I do not have that certain work of that composer in my database, it is not identified. If there would be under the three little dots an option to “set composition” which would - after pressing - present you with a dropdown of the compositions of the particular composer in Roon’s database …
Ok understood. At the moment you can manually identify an album but not a composition. Maybe there is a technical reason for that but in one way or another several seem to be asking for it.
The way I see it is that there are many albums that are a bit specialist for one reason or another that are never going to be identified off incomplete public metadata. But especially with Classical those albums will often have very famous performers, composers and compositions that can be identified. It would be great if roon could extend manual identification to categories other than albums. I think that is a feature request that would be of interest to several here. Is that what you mean? I don’t know how interested roon is in going in that direction.
It may not be library size per se , but if you only have a small classical contingent you may well not have repeat recordings hence no issue.
My real issue is that if say have say 25 versions and Roon ID’s 23 , you have to have a pretty good memory to remember which one is missing. In a library your size I am sure you would agree. Then you have to find them and manually fix if you can , very laboursome.
I think you are right on incomplete , erroneous and generally dodgy metadata sources , Roon can only do what it can “see”. Classical has always been the poor relation in many arenas.
I agree Roon is unique in its approach, I have tried all sorts of software over the years but none look and feel like Roon, hence why I am persevering…
Judging from comments on many threads JRiver seems the best alternative , but of course nothing like the UI of Roon. Its big advantage is its configuration so you can fine tune what yo see whereas in Roon its a series of fixed views with searching and sorting options. Hence why I am keeping JRiver alive despite the manual intervention, until I am truly happy.
I was hoping Roon would automate it all , which it does to an extent but only within the limitations of its sources. that brings its own issues as its meant to be Automatic , Roon provides only limited ability to “edit to fix”
Still I think this thread has raised some good debate on Classical Issues
Out of interest do you see (pardon the pun) this missing composition issue , with a 60% classical library I would have thought you would and I for one would be frustrated by it (I am)
Hi Mike, i agree on most of your points.
As you, i hope RoonLabs will enhance classical management. User feedback, requests, ideas and workarounds like on this thread (and few others), might help. Thank’s for that.
You’re not alone. I have a huge classical library and Roon has huge problems identifying it. I’m convinced that eventually we’ll get there, but it will take time and I appreciate it’s much more complex than e.g. Pop/Rock. So I do a lot of manual grooming currently. A LOT.
I have thousands of classical albums, but I don’t really have the problems you guys are talking about. I’ve tagged my albums VERY carefully for years, so the metadata is ‘clean’ and I’m pretty sure search is working quite well.
That said, I don’t typically search for “works” or “compositions” - I typically listen to complete albums, and I know what I want to hear, so search is not a big part of my routine.
I use a program called MusicScope that I like very much. When looking at a file you can pretty quickly telly the ones that are just 44/16 in a hi-res container. That 21K rolloff.
But I have seen it in DSDs as well. I always contact the seller if it is a clear ripoff. But is there is any information in the higher bands I will give it a pass.
Lucky you… I also have tagged my collection very carefully over the years. The fact that you don’t use “compositions” on a regular basis might explain why you are not facing problems. On the other hand I wonder how you remember the works that you have in your collection? Even if I know what I want to hear, I would miss lots of alternate recordings I own… Especially if I come across a work I do not know very well.
I think several here having problems are also using roon to play albums through, but they are often doing that as a last resort when they cannot get roon to work as they would prefer from a composition perspective.
You don’t really need roon to scroll through albums on the albums screen. Anything will do that. Roon does it just as well as anything else. But what differentiates roon is searching and slicing and dicing on other criteria. If you haven’t tried it, Composition search is a great way to explore your library. For example, I like to group and shuffle through all versions of a single Jazz Standard or American Songbook composition, many of which are squirreled away as bonus disks or on the 97th disc in a box set you may not know or forgotten that you had. Some may prefer to to this with the more modern standards of Singer Songwriters or Pop/Rock covers. I like to do the same with Classical, comparing conductors, orchestras, period vs. non period instruments, viola vs. clarinet solo, 1890 vs. 1899 score, etc. etc. There are many other possibilities.
I don’t think those reporting issues are unique. They are just using features others perhaps are not using much and libraries large enough to increase the frequency of issues. Others may not even be aware there are general issues. For example, by coincidence both myself and @Mike_O_Neill have the same Beeethoven 32 Piano Sonatas complete by Michael Korstick. The difference is roon has identified 31 of his (1 missing) and 10 of mine (22 missing).
The reasons for this illustrate both the issues and the opportunity. My library is 10% the size of Mike’s library. Mike has 20 plus Beethoven Sonata box’s. I have one Beethoven Sonata box plus a few of the more famous Sonatas on some other box compilations. This is an unidentified album with no data on the public meta-data stores. But the composer, works and performer are famous and roon does it’s best to identify on this level. We have both tried 3 different composition naming conventions including the rovi one used by allmusic.
Roon has a far richer source of data in Mike’s library to draw on than mine so it does a better job at identifying on the composition level. But the 1 missing Sonata bugs Mike. Incredibly though roon has found Mike’s missing Sonata in my much smaller library. It is easy to see this if you do an Excel export because then you can see where roon has found the rovi keys and where it has not.
So if there was a way for Mike and myself to exchange rovi keys, maybe roon could use them and then despite having an unidentified album we could both have 100% identified compositions and each have a much better roon experience. Personally I think what the case also illustrates is that the problems are actually much worse for smaller libraries where in this particular case only 10 Sonatas are visible from the composition screen. That of course goes unnoticed from the album screen.
You are indeed lucky if you do not have this issue. I too have meticulously tagged my classical disc over the years. I have even gone to the trouble of adding a Custom Tag “Composition” as its not a standard one. That was then populated with the help of MusiCHI Tagger and a lot of hard work . I have latterly added “Movement” and started to populate that in albums where Roon fails to split a Composition into movements . This often works
So I would not say my tagging was perfect but it certainly isn’t a “Scrappy Mess”
All that said I still have issues as Tony outlined above
I am about 2 months into Roon and I am still finding issues. The number of Non ID’ed albums is now low (after a lot of manual input) but I am still coming across albums where the Composition has been missed for some reason. Hence if you use Composition View you do not get a full picture.
My album Titles added manually have a standardised format eg. Beethoven: Piano Concertos I am not sure whether this helps but certainly in Album View Filtering "Beethoven: " shows up MOST of the albums but ineviutablt not ALL
I wonder if a new thread asking “How do you Navigate To Your Desired Classical Album (Or even Work)” may throw up some more ideas for the devs to persue.
Incidently as you seem to have the answer , is there anything special about your albums. For example
do you have lots of Single albums as opposed to Box sets. (again I see Box sets more troublesome)
Are all your albums Mainstream Labels eg DG, Phillips etc (I find those identified more easily)
Honestly, I don’t have any “answers” to those who use the Compositions view - I agree it’s a mess, so I never use it. I mean, if I’m looking for Händel’s “Messiah”, I’m not looking for every time one selection is featured in a collection somewhere - I’m looking for complete recordings of “Messiah”, and the current implementation of Compositions just doesn’t do that well.
It’s really my usage pattern that makes Roon non-problematic for me; i.e., I typically start by doing a search for whatever I’m interested in that day (e.g., “Mozart piano sonata”) and then choose from the results. Sometimes I’m looking for a very specific work (e.g., “Verdi Requiem”) and, again, have no difficulty with Roon finding what I want to hear.
I would certainly welcome better functionality for classical listeners like myself, but I can say I don’t have any difficulty finding things now, so “better” is a matter of degree.
I don’t use either Composer as that gives me too much detail. I have Bach 2000, The Beethoven Edition. & Mozart Edition so I get ALL works and confusion
Composition really doesn’t seem to work - Too much clutter. I have suggested a Composer Showing Albums then filter by Genre to limit the view. By adding my own genre (which I have in JRiver) and using mine not Roon’s I could limit that view quite a bit .
Hence my comment Roon for Rock Jriver for Classical where I have control
So I guess I have to go Album View and Search or Artist view and search , its a bit limited thought
My old system I had views set up that allowed “By Click” filter Composer>Genre>Sub Genre> Album
I have a big collection, about 12000 albums, 90+% classical. about 10000 albums are rips I did of my classical vinyl and tape collection - all at 192/24, using my Pacific Microsonics Model Two and Pyramix and Izotope RX3Advanced software. Total size of collection is a bit over 50TB. I have about 600 mch hirez albums, mostly DSD64. Use HQP with Roon and a pretty powerful computer to upconvert to DSD256 which is the sweet spot for my mch NADAC.
For my record and tape collection, I scanned the front and back covers of the 10,000 albums on a large flat bed scanner, so I have very readable front covers and back cover notes. I wish Roon would allow me to zoom in on the back covers to more easily read them. My work around is using my ipad which I can hold closer to me to easily read the liner notes. I list my vinyl and tape album rips by label and catalogue number and if I need to find an album, all the albums are on excel spreadsheets which are easy to search. I tried a friend’s Aurender server and it was very good at finding albums, but I like Roon and HQP better for sound quality.
For Classical music, the Aurender server (IIRC it was the W20) was very good at searching all different drives connected in the network. I typed in Brahms Klemperer and it found all the albums with Otto Klemperer as conductor and Brahms as the composer. They didn’t have to be loaded into Aurender, like they do in Roon.
