I am new to Roon and in my trial period, and have already read a lot of useful information on this forum. For background, I have a fair collection mainly of classical piano music ripped from my shelves to my NAS and want to figure out how I need to improve their file tags to make my music work best with Roon (note: I have read the various posts expressing frustration of Roon’s spotty performance in recognizing classical music, and my experience with having Roon analyze my entire collection as is was not satisfactory. However, I am amazed by the control Roon allows me over my endpoints, and want to improve the tagging of my local classical music collection so that the library experience is good, too).
My question pertains to identical performances appearing in different albums and collections: For example, the pianist Alexis Weissenberg recorded Rachmaninov’s 3rd piano concerto at least twice. The earlier recording of 27-28 November 1967 with the Chicago Symphony conducted by Georges Prêtre has originally been issued by RCA, and been reissued on CD as part of the “Alexis Weissenberg Complete RCA Album Collection” (this is not a box-set issue, I treat this RCA album as separate album titled “Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 3”). This very same recording of 27-28 November 1667 has also been included in EMI’s Alexis Weissenberg box-set “Les Introuvables de Alexis Weissenberg”. Same performance, appearing in two different albums. The file tags are, except for the name of the album, title and CD number, the same.
Now, when I go in Roon to the Rachmaninov’s 3rd piano concerto (via the Compositions browser), I see this performance twice, once as part of the RCA album (“Appears on Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 3”), once as part of the EMI box-set (“Appears on Les Introuvables d’Alexis Weissenberg”).
What I would rather like is to see this one performance of 26-27 Nov 1967 only once, but have below in the line “Appears on” a list of all the albums on which this performance is included, i.e. both a link to the RCA album and a link to the EMI box-set.
If that is possible, what do I need to do to achieve this?
I don’t believe this can be done either but I would be interested if someone knows how. I have an absolute ton of these. Very common for popular performances to be duplicated on all sorts of re-issues, re-masters, compilations and box-sets.
Thank you, @u_gee, for that information. It reads like bad news for @Tony_Casey and myself at first glance.
However, @support, is the quoted information on Roon’s metadata model in the referenced KB article still current? I am asking because the KB article was last edited in June 2017, and it says for instance that Recording Start Date and Recording End Date are properties of the Album object. However, in Roon 1.7 in the Import Settings, Performance Start Date and Performance End Date (which I read elsewhere are synonymous with Recording Start and End Date) are properties of the individual Track object - which makes much more sense that being a properties of the entire Album.
It would be great if Roon recognized a concept of “performance” which is more than “a link between a composition and one or more tracks on the album”. This current concept seems like the tail wagging the dog. Rather, the performance of a composition is the very music we are enjoying. A track is but a reproduction of said performance.
As @Tony_Casey pointed out, some important performances are reproduced endlessly in various forms. When I look for music, I look for performances of a composition, often by a particular artist. Currently Roon only tells me that I have 10 recordings of work X by artist Y. It would be great if Roon was so smart to tell me that there are 3 performances of work X by artist Y in my library, and I will find performance 1 on albums A, B, C, performance 2 on albums D and E, and the famous seminal performance 3 on albums F, G, H, I and J.
To get there, I guess Roon should consider a concept of PERFORMANCE which is characterized by essentially
ARTIST or PRIMARY ARTIST (but not: ALBUMARTIST),
COMPOSITION/WORK and, if available, MOVEMENT,
LOCATION, and
RECORDINGDATE or RECORDINGSTARTDATE AND RECORDINGENDDATE.
Therefore, for each track (or tracks pertaining to a multi-part compositions) where those attributes are the same, it seems fair to assume they pertain to the same unique PERFORMANCE. If there are cases where an artist performs the same work at the same location and at the same date twice, maybe the concept of WORKID could be leveraged (say: PERFORMANCEID).
Is this something that the Roon team would consider? Should I post this as feature request?
