How can we get Roon to add unidentified album meta data to their database?

In my very modest/new but fastly-growing hi-res library of 287 albums, 12 are “unidentified” and I cannot find the right match when I try to go through the Indentify Album or Re-identify process.

I would like to avoid having to enter all meta-data and album info manually and have been waiting for months for some of these albums to become identified. It hasn’t happened.

All of these albums are either from HD Tracks or NativeDSD. Is there a process by which we can notify the Roon team that these albums are not identified and perhaps provide references to the info available from the services where we purchased them?

some examples are:
The Allman Brothers Band, 2014 remaster/reissue of 1969 album, Island DefJam – not the deluxe version, 24/192
cream - wheels of fire, 2014 remaster/reissue, polydor, 24/192
Bill Evans: Some Other Time (The Lost Session from the Black Forest), 2016 release, DSD128
The Mark Colby Quartet, DSD256

Any other suggestions on how to help make sure the info for these albums is added to the database?

It’s a known problem - the database often doesn’t include hi-res downloads of albums, only versions on disc.
It’s been brought up before, I haven’t seen the Roon team say there is a way to deal with it.

Still, I like to fix the metadata of my files when I buy them. In that way I can save a lot of potential hassle in the future when Roon is just a sweet memory.

It’s not just a problem with the Roon database. High-res downloads are often missing from both the Discogs and MusicBrainz databases.

Like @Peter_G, I like to fix up the metadata in new albums right when I purchase them, even before I add them to a watched folder in Roon. It’s some work, but it’s also a way around all the metadata issues I see described around here. When you have good metadata embedded in your track files, it makes it a lot more likely that Roon will identify an album correctly. And in the worst case, when the Rovi metadata is completely fubar, you can always just unidentify the album in question, and use only the embedded metadata.

Besides all those mundane considerations, I also find I learn a lot while searching out missing metadata, mostly relating to composers and personnel.

The nice thing about our system is that it’s always improving, in a few different ways.

First off, we source metadata from a number of different sources, and then we automatically pick the best one for your album. If we don’t have a good match now, one of our sources may pick up better data later, and that information should then appear in your library automatically.

The case you’re describing is something we’ve heard in the past, and while these releases do sometimes show up later, we know that unfortunately many of the smaller labels and download sites don’t always submit their releases to any of our metadata providers. It would be great if they we’re more consistent about submitting their releases to Rovi/Tivo (feel free to tell them that :wink: ).

All of that said, we’re not going to depend on download sites and metadata providers to get this right – one of our more long-term goal is to introduce user generated content into Roon.

We know you Roon users are some of the most discriminating music fans in the world, and we want to be able to crowd-source edits and release information, so the Roon metadata cloud can get even more expansive and accurate over time. It’s a big project, but it’s worth it.

9 Likes

Part of me thinks: great! :grinning: and part of me thinks: Wikipedia wars, here we come :fearful:

3 Likes

Your post raises mixed feelings. How long is “long term”, and how long will we have to wait either for data providers to fix their metadata when Roon officials have given up on them “to get this right” ? Or for Roon to let their “very discriminating” user base input the fixes into the Roon database , when this is still qualified as a “big long-term project” ? And what in the meantime ? For example,is it still usefull to report metadata issues, except for mundane ones ? I feel more and more that this is maybe a waste of effort, if most Roon can do here is to relay to Rovi and hope for an answer, somehow, someday.To keep the hope alive, would it not be interesting to set up something like a repository of metadata issues, where the problems and changes proposed by users could be documented in a more formalized way than what is possible inside forum posts, and which could be browsed and queried by everybody to see if any progress has been made about them ? I think this would be a nice way to let your user base efficiently contribute to Roon improvement.

Regards

Can it be done by adding a Shazam button, and then populate the metadata based on that information ?


And just to go off topic, think about that you listen to an Internett radio service, Roon recognize the song, and if the song is in your database, or in Tidal, it plays hires instead of bad MP3.

One day that will happen. :grinning:

1 Like

We take time out from building new functionality nearly every day to report straightforward issues back to our metadata providers. They generally fix them within a day or two when the error is clear cut and there isn’t a lot of research involved. It then takes a few days to a few weeks for the changes to be ingested into our system, and sent down to the specific album in your collection.

When some issues are traced to our own systems (like artist equivalence, for example), we also fix those by hand, when they’re straightforward.

What we generally don’t do is take time away from building all this infrastructure in order to enter data by hand. It’s just a really poor use of our resources as a team, and we all get a lot more bang for the buck when our team is making improvements that fix hundreds (or thousands, or hundreds of thousands) of errors, as opposed to fixing them one-by-one ourselves.

There’s not much I can say with regards to timelines. In all likelihood, error submission will happen in app, not in some kind of data entry tool. For now I would recommend using all the extensive editing tools we’ve released over the last few months to fix any errors you see, report issues when you see them, and be patient as we continue building new tools, adding new metadata sources, and improving our metadata cloud and infrastructure. I expect that process to be fully complete… never :wink:

1 Like

Sure, Yeah, I’ve learned not to trust Roon timelines, it will definitely take longer than that.

.sjb

sounds great! :slight_smile:

though… I would feel less :nervous: if I could edit myself what I believe is incorrect (or a typo) and keep it to just my library. let’s put it this way: some may disagree with my edits :wink:

1 Like

I like the crowd-sourcing idea in principle, but I’m curious about what happens with stuff like language, spelling (where there are multiple accepted spellings), capitalization, numbering of parts (Roman vs. Arabic vs. none), etc. — issues on which meticulous OCD individuals can differ.

1 Like

Has this developed any further?

I have hundreds of albums I have manually identified, and I am sure many of my music loving friends have many of them too. It would be great if they didn’t have to identify them when they get Roon someday!!!

Hello everyone.

I don’t have many albums purchased from NativeDSD, but a few have this issue. While Patricia Barber’s albums were identified without any problems, 3 of Maya Fridman’s 6 albums were not recognized and were added to the library as separate releases, despite the fact that their counterparts are in Tidal and Qobuz. As a result, the metadata of these albums is much poorer than versions on streaming services.

There may be more such albums in my library, but I haven’t checked it and no releases come to mind now.

Doesn’t matter if they are in Tidal or Qobuz if they are not in musicbrainz or allmusic Roon will not identify them as that what it uses to get its metadata and identification, streaming is separate to this as it’s identified by the chosen service and Roon then will cross ref with its services to pull the additional metadata.

This topic was automatically closed 36 hours after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.