How to "colapse" tracks into one single title ? (Classical music)

Roon Software Discussion
1

Roon as a very nice feature to display several movements of the same classical work - say a concerto - under the same work title . But sometimes this feature dosn´t work and I have some movements as a unique concerto displayed as separate tracks. How can I fix this ? I want to colapse the tracks of the same work under a unique title.

Some examples : here I have the “Suite 4” displayed as expected but the 5th one appears as separate tracks

cello.png703×733 46.6 KB

In this one I would like to see all the tracks of concerto BWV 1046 groupped.

harp1.png630×510 39.3 KB

Thank you for your help .

Vasco Vaz

1 Like
2

Hi there

Lots of issues in your question.

Your first album - a big seller - is in Rovi here:

so you really need to use the “Identify Album” tool in Roon to find that. Then you will get wonderful perfect metadata including the cover, review, pages about each work, pages about the artist, etc! Have you seen this level of metadata in identified albums up to now?

What is the second album? If it had Rovi metadata too you need to do that there. Then problem solved!

Bearing that in mind, what you are seeing for the first album is kind of irrelevant, but I will explain it anyway:

What is displayed currently is the file tags. I can see that a basic rule of dealing with unidentified albums has been invoked, and that is that tracks are only clumped into works when they have a composer file tag. You can see that the first work has Bach listed as composer, and so clumps, but there is no composer showing for the second work. So if you changed the track metadata (using an external editor) to include the composer for those tracks also, they would suddenly clump in Roon.

As for the second album, I can’t see what it is (let me know, it might help) but the same applies. There is apparently no composer file tag. So adding one (using an external editor) should get you at least basic clumping.

In the case of both I brought up editing in an external editor. Roon 1.1 can edit album details to some degree (thanks guys!) but track metadata is still not editable yet. So you need to do that outside Roon in an external metadata editor. (I use Metadatics on the Mac, which has loads of cool automation features.)

What you need to get clumping is:

  1. A composer tag entry for the tracks in question.
  2. Consistent titles. Most commonly:

Workname: 1.
Workname: 2.
Workname: 3.

This will display as (roughly)

Workname:
1.
2.
3.

That gets you only so far. In order to connect manually edited tracks to the rich metadata within Roon, you need to use precisely the ROVI work titles, composer names and artist names. Then your manually edited album will be presented alongside the albums with rich metadata: i.e. in the artist pages, composer pages, work pages etc. But this is quite involved and hopefully your second album is anyway also one with ROVI metadata, which is much simpler!

Questions? :smile:

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This is one of my favourite features in Roon, but there are a few works that don’t get grouped correctly, despite the metadata looking OK. For example, this version of Górecki’s Symphony No.3. Have you any idea what the problem could be here @Ludwig?

Roon.png772×637 133 KB

Metadata:-

Metadatics.png934×245 47.4 KB

4

I believe you’re seeing a bug of one kind or another. There are two possibilities:

  1. Sometimes Roon finds the album but one track duration differs slightly and it doesn’t display that track properly. Previously it either decided it couldn’t confidently identify the album, or it accepts all tracks. But now (particularly with Tidal releases) it seems to get confused.

That one you can check by going to “Identify Album” and seeing what it says, i.e. whether you have a red message that one track doesn’t match.

  1. Even when it has 100% matching track lengths it sometimes fails to clump the work(s) together properly. This you can’t do anything about.

I’ve seen both of these recently. (@jeremiah, if I haven’t done a ticket yet I will shortly. Or have you already seen these? @mike and @kevin maybe get a support package from this user?..)

Just as an aside, you appear to be using the metadata for exactly your album:

This is the same recording, I believe, but has fuller credits:

You could use the second and then change the cover and album details to the release that you own, to get the fuller credits. (This might have a side effect of fixing the clumping, if you’re lucky…)

5

Thanks @Ludwig that’s great - using the second album details did fix the track grouping. I’ll check Allmusic for the few others I’m havng trouble with.

6

Cool. Just as an experiment, can you temporarily change the metadata back to the first album details and see what happens to the clumping as a result?

7

Interesting - I changed back but the tracks are still grouped correctly.

8

…which makes the fact you saw a bug pretty clear.

(@jeremiah @mike)

9

Unless you’re color-blind… :wink: