I’ve tagged all my classical music and made sure to always tag the Composer field, however Roon does not list the albums by composers when I go directly to My Library-> Composers. I expected to see the albums from my selected composer there but instead, I have to click on the three dots icon next to the composer’s name and select “View albums in library” in order for the albums to appear.
What am I doing wrong here? Is there a way to have Roon show me the composer album’s when I click on the relevant composer from the Composers link?
Thanks to all that replied. Let me show you what I see in my collection. Let’s take for example Beethoven. This is what I see when I click on Ludwig van Beethoven from the My Library->Composers link
If I click on the three dots button, located on Beethoven’s picture on top and select “View Albums in Library” from the pop up menu however, like below…
Am I doing something wrong with my tagging? I am including screenshots from my tagging app (Meta), from a random album from my Beethoven collection, to give you an idea how I have tagged my entire classical library
Yes, there are a couple of things here. First, I don’t think you subscribe to either Qobuz or Tidal (or if you do, you haven’t integrated them into Roon via Settings > Services). That’s because your screenshot of Ludwig’s Composer page does not have the Discography tab showing.
But more importantly, you should not be assigning Beethoven to either the Artist or Album Artist tags; you should use the Composer tag instead. This is what is confusing Roon. Have a read of this help article and correct your tags:
Thank you Geoff, I can confirm that changing the “Artist” tag to essentially the performer of the CD fixes the issue. However I think this is a major flaw in the way Roon understand and categories classical music. This is not contemporary pop music. Having to flag ,say, Beethoven’s Symphonies to the conductor’s name as the artist, in order for Roon to properly categorise the work as Beethoven’s is sacrilegious!
Even if this is some kind of internal requirement for Roon’s internal workings, surely provisions could be made when the Composer tag is already properly tagged, that Roon reads that information and present it as intended! Such a pity…
I think you may be misunderstanding semantics here. Why do you think that a conductor is not a performing artist in this context? Beethoven definitely isn’t the artist in these recordings.
There are cases where composers are also artists - e.g. Bernstein conducting a performance of his opera Candide and Roon recognises these situations as well.
That word is the key. As they both look like they are artists. Thanks Geoff.
In the past I had real hard time to understand the semantics, I was thinking performing artist=player and composer=artist.
Yes, of course there are cases where composers are also the artists since they conduct their own works but I am sure we can agree that this is the exception to the rule in classical music.
I hope we can agree that when the files are properly tagged (“Composer” tag included), the fact that Roon does not take it into consideration and does not present those albums in the Composer view is problematic and something that should be addressed in a future release.
But Roon does take the Composer tag into consideration - why do you think it doesn’t?
I’m curious to know how many albums Roon has not identified in your collection. Can you go to your Album browser and use Focus > Identified, then click on the Identified criterion to turn it into its negative, i.e. Unidentified, like this…
They are identified; none of these albums are in the “not identified” view. They just don’t appear in the Composer view, pretty much like a posted in my screenshots and I have to go through the Album view.
When I change the “Artist” tag to the perfomer and rescan the album, it appears on the Composer view as well.
I am just saying that when the “Composer” tag is filled, it should be used by Roon to correctly classify the album instead of searching for the “Artist” one. Whether the composer or the conductor is the “Artist” is a widely debated subject in the Classical music world; some might think it’s the conductor; others will think its the composer; but I think that’s besides the point.
The fact is that my tags were perfectly populated, composer included, and Roon disregarded that field and will only present the album in the composer view when you input the performer in the artist field. This is nuts.
You have helped me tremendously with my problem and now when I click on the respective Composer, the albums are there, so thank you for that.
I think you there have a point. Your ‘Composer’ tag was not missing and Roon really should base its Composers view on this tag, irrespective of what information there is in the Artist fields.
With this I can’t agree. As has been stated before in the thread, ‘Artist’ should be semantically understood as ‘Performer’, and rarely are the composers of classical works performers on a given sound recording. On each track, the ‘Artist’ should be given as the performing artist—the orchestra, the soloist, the ensemble, the conductor even, but not the composer. And about this I don’t think the ‘classical music world’ holds any relevant discussions.
