A relatively common scenario: I add a Tidal album to my library, I find I like it and care about it so I edit the metadata (for my favorite music, Tidal rarely includes credits and Roon’s metadata ditto), a laborious process, then I find I like it so much I want to own it so I buy a download or CD, I make it Primary, but now I have edit the meatadata all over again.
And clever shortcuts?
Lightroom has a way of copying selected metadata or photo edits between photos. Would be useful here. Not just versions of one album, but between albums by the same band where Primary Artists and Credits may be the same, and label etc.
Especially since I use Tidal, I have lots of “Duplicate” Versions in my library. For instance the CD version as flac and now the Tidal MQA on top. Of course the MQA is primary. Metadata, however, is off between versions. Genres aren’t matching, the older version has different credits from my previous edits.
I just edited a ton of credits on an album that I added when it was released a few weeks ago only to find out that there is an MQA version in the meantime…
The more you curate your library yourself with edits, the more annoying it get’s with this problem.
Solution could be, as @AndersVinberg suggested, some Metadata syncing feature as in Adobe Lightroom (where it works really well).
More fundamental question: which metadata is version relevant? Version field, sure, but what else? Release info like country, barcode, etc. Artwork also. But genre and credits probably not.
Should there be a “primary set of metadata” for all versions, different from the physical version of the album? Should metadata edits be version-agnostic in those fields?
Hopefully with a little bit of discussion this could be shaped into a feature request that works for everybody.
Has this “Metadata Syncing” feature been added to Roon?
It would really help to copy, retain, duplicate, eliminate and manage metadata in an efficient way instead of editing one line at the time when you have hundreds of CD versions plus the new streaming versions.
It is not a-demand we can make on Roon.
Because the numbers are daunting.
Big streaming services have hundreds of millions of albums, and there are several, maybe tens, of versions of each albums.
Manually reconciling the metadata of these billions of albums is clearly impossible, for a company like Roon, or any other technology company.
The only hope I can see is of the publishers, the labels, publishing an authoritative set of metadata and a list of the albums to which that metadata applies. And then Roon, the technology provider, could could automate the application of metadata.
And then the next step would be for the labels to make lists of metadata variations applying to album versions.
A glorious future.
But since no labels have shown an interest in providing such information, it is clear that labels have no interest in meticulous collectors. Probably known as “nerds” inside label conference rooms.
Aside from any snarkiness, this is the issue: who owns the responsibility for publishing the comprehensive database of album metadata? The publishers.
Thanks for taking the time to go into the context of the publishers.
Just to be clear, I am not asking for Roon to maintain or publish an “authoritative” set of metadata, but to make the current metadata management more robust, with better tools to copy, merge, remove existing metadata for those of us who subscribe to streaming services and own CDs from the last 2-3 decades.
I can’t seem to find a way to reconcile the thousands of track name customizations I made to the ripped CDs and at the same time, listening to newer MQA streaming versions which are missing some details.
Yeah, Roon can align different versions of an album with a little bit of guidance, but the have to be similar.
If you have changed track names, I imagine you’re toast.
