How does roon treat performer role multilingual equivalents?

roon 1.3 defines a lot of new performer roles that can be used in the PERSONNEL tag

http://kb.roonlabs.com/Credit_Roles

However many of the these roles are not unique. They are often German language equivalents. For example:

Cembelo → Harpsichord
Flote → Flute

Does roon treat them as interchangeable? That is, are they equivalents?

So for example if I want to shuffle all flute music in my library and I do a search on “flute” would roon return at least all of (no doubt there are others):

flute
flûte
flote
flöte
flojt
flöjt

On a slightly separate note none of these German / Original Language performer roles seem to use the correct extended characters (e.g. flöte) and coverage is random. There is no violine or violoncello for example. On the other hand there is also what looks like a Swedish flojt (flute I assume like flöjt).

Interesting question!

Roon 3.1 ??? I must have been under a ROCK the 24 hours and missed the update :stuck_out_tongue:

I changed the subject to include multilingual just to set the topic more accurately I hope.

I only meant multilingual as a special case. We are only scratching the surface here. There are other cases.

For example, instrument “range variations”. Roon has a lot of these. I haven’t had time to check roon behavior (I have more basic problems with roon at the moment), but it is not clear to me, for example, what would be the best strategy when dealing with something as simple as a Saxophone search? Charlie Parker became a seminal Jazz Saxophonist on the Alto Sax, not the more common Tenor Sax. Do I really want Charlie Parker’s most seminal recordings to be excluded because I did a search on Tenor Sax?

Here are a few other examples:

Historical instruments:

Fortepiano → Piano
Viola da Gamba → Cello
Spanish Vihuela → Classical Guitar

Mechanical Variations:

Fretless Banjo → Banjo
Fuzz Guitar → Electric Guitar
Bösendorfer Piano → Piano (97 or 92-key vs. standard 88-key)
12-String, 6-String, 17-String Guitar → Guitar

Common forms:

Classical Guitar → Guitar (Classical), Guitar, Spanish Guitar
Saxophone → Tenor Saxophone, Sax

Octave Ranges

Tenor, Alto Saxophone etc.

Electrically Amplified

This is perhaps the most difficult. For example, I would probably want electric instruments tuned for an acoustic sound to be treated the same as their acoustic equivalents; piano, violin come to mind.

This is not an exhaustive list. Other will have other other examples, probably reflecting their own specialist musical tastes and interests.

To answer the question directly: there is no correlation between credits.

At the moment, the credit list is simply a large list with a number of many:1 mappings between credit strings and credit types (Composer, Conductor, Ensemble, Main Performer, Performer, Production).

This could change in the future, but we have no immediate plans in this area.

Can you tell us where these PERSONNEL credits are being used in roon? I got mp3tag to work with them (and also ENSEMBLE, SOLOIST, WORK and PART) but I cannot see what to use the PERSONNEL tags for. They are not being displayed on the ALBUM screen for example. Instead of “performed by Nelson Freire” I thought, I might get “piano performed by Nelson Freire”, or “Viola da Gamba performed by Jaap ter Linden”.

Did I miss something or is this a feature request? It would Make a big difference in all Genres, not just classical.

The PERSONNEL credits appear in the track credits (accessible via a track’s 3 dots menu) and also roll up to the album credits (album credits tab).

Ah Joel! I see what the disconnect is.

It’s obviously not possible to put these long credit lists on the front ALBUM screen but is it possible to be selective about a few performers? For example. If the performer is a primary artist and the performer has a role attached then display performed by . e.g. “Horn performed by Annu Salminen”. There are also cases of double and triple concertos where you might want to add a few more.

Other genres probably follow a similar logic. For example I can imagine going to the trouble of tagging an Album like Kind of Blue so I can easily see on which tracks Bell Evans performed the piano and on which Wynton Kelly performed the piano. This famous album is an example where at the moment the only place I can see that is by bringing up the pdf. In my roon, at least the track level credits are very incomplete but that is another story. I would prefer the front screen to be a little bit more complete if I go to the trouble of tagging PERSONNEL.

Is this feasible? I can raaise a feature request. I know roon has a lot on it’s plate and a ton of priorities and in principle what I am asking for can be found by clicking the right options. But on the face of it, it seems like all the piece parts are already in place and it’s a relatively small change for what many may consider a large perceived benefit

Same sort of “fuzzy” question as in the other thread, I think. My answer would be, “Sure. If you search for ‘tenor sax,’ you’re not going to pick up much Parker, just as if you search for ‘alto sax,’ you’re not going to get a lot of Lester Young hits.” The various saxes are related but different instruments, so if you want a search that picks up players of all shapes and sizes, just use “sax” (which of course begs the clarinet question). This approach applies to most of your other examples … and to searching generally, doesn’t it?

To my way of thinking, this is different from the “multilingual equivalents” issue.

To my way of thinking, this is different from the “multilingual equivalents” issue.

It turns out this is a red herring as roon does no equivalence matching, multilingual or otherwise. Neither are there any plans to do so. There is still a point to the thread but maybe it needs to go somewhere else?

I have configured mp3tag and yate has been configured on another thread to take advantage of several new custom tags in roon 1.3. These are ENSEMBLE, SOLOIST, WORK, PART, PERSONNEL. If anyone is interested I can write a howto for mp3tag.

As David points out my general preference is for a fuzzy search but what may not be so clear is my general preference is also for a precise display and this thread was really started to understand the consequences to this preference of exploiting the new PERSONNEL tag. This is a real step change in roon 1.3. It supports 6,000 plus roles. In principle for example there are now 19 different Saxophones and no less than 123 different guitars. For display purposes I find this feature very useful. For example, it is a simple matter to send roon the strings “Lester Young - Tenor Saxophone” or “Lester Young - Clarinet” on a track by track basis.

I had hoped that this would mean that I could force roon to display my choice of:

Saxophone performed by Lester Young
Tenor Saxophone performed by Lester Young
Clarinet performed by Lester Young

rather than the roon default of:

performed by Lester Young

It turns out I am wrong. You can only see this detail on the credits screen as the new roon tags have limited impacts on the other screens. This probably addresses my concern of what are the unintended consequences of re-tagging this way on my normal search habits. The answer is probably none but it is a genuine concern as many of us are experiencing a lot of issues we had not anticipated in the way our local libraries are currently interacting with roon and do not want to make matters worse.

I can raise a feature request, especially if others think this is a useful capability. I may be wrong but it seems to me that most of the piece parts are in place already, but then everything is usually more complicated under the covers.

Aha! I understand better what you’re looking for now. Thanks for the clarification. Personally, I’m most interested in knowing exactly what instruments are played by what personnel on a track-by-track basis, to the extent this information is available either from Roon’s sources or from my embedded metadata. For me, this info doesn’t need to be on a “now playing” screen but I’d like it to be one or two touches/clicks away and presented in a nice way — IOW, the credits screen is good for me (except it’s not track by track, is it?).

I’m looking forward to seeing the Roon panel in the next update of Yate and figuring out what its implications are for what displays where. So effectively, I’m going to let @Barry_2MR2 do the hard work for me.

Yate v3.16 is out to preview. It has a new Combined Credits Manager which fully supports Roon’s 6000+ credits. It has an alias system whereby you can save other credits your files may have and alias them to a known Roon credit. It also has numerous Audio settings to adjust some field mappings to what Roon expects. An application preset is available.

Sample Custom Field mappings for VERSION, ENSEMBLE, SOLOIST, WORK, WORKID and PART are available. Also, a sample edit panel displaying these mappings is available. No mapping is necessary for PERSONNEL as the settings maintain it transparently in the Involved People and Musician Credits fields. The Combined Credits Manager can sanitize credits to be Roon acceptable.

Any registered Yate user can request to be placed on the preview list.

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Hi Barry, good to see you here, how do I request access to the v3.16 preview? My two fav apps working together, what a treat.

My experience is that messaging Barry here (click on his avatar and then click on “Message”) works well. Just ask to be added to the preview list and provide your Yate registration email. (Haven’t had a chance to delve too deeply yet, but the Roon-specific panel looks very cool.)