I have Roon with Qobuz on a Windows10 laptop all up to date. When I search for “Beethoven Piano Concerto 3” Roon finds the composition, and tells me there are 1493 versions in Qobuz. When I look at the Qobuz possibilities in descending date order the first 600 or so are for the same single movement in a what seems to be an almost infinite variety of non-existstant albums such as “Cookout Music: Classical Music Dreams” and many varieties of similar titles in many languages, such as “Musik fur das Innere Kind”. So there are three issues here, 1) only an extract of the composition is returned as an instance of it, 2) there are genuinely hundreds of spam entries (which would be avoidable if it wasn’t for 1), 3) there is no way of filtering usefully.
The better question is why these are in Qobuz’s catalog at all…most streaming services filter this junk early in the process. People using TIDAL in Roon are not seeing this junk.
These nuisance albums have been massively increasing in volume over the past 2-3 months. They are releasing ~1000 per day. It’s all about the royalties for the people repackaging this stuff.
It is bad enough that we are considering solving it on our end–we have never before had to consider excluding albums from a streaming service catalog (and it’s not technically simple to do so), but we are getting pretty close to making that decision here. This has other downsides because it creates inconsistency between what people can see/access via the native streaming service app vs Roon, but the havoc these are wreaking in multiple places may justify it.
This is not even a particularly bad example. You’re 12 pages deep in a non-default sort on the composition page. I’m guessing that if you sort by popular (like most people visiting this page will) the results are reasonable. On some popular Jazz artists these are overwhelming the list of Main Albums at the top of the artist page.
Did you discuss this with Qobuz? Can’t you ‘help’ them to solve the problem at the source.
I am afraid that if Roon needs to solve this, it will become very quickly a big pain in the … and food for lots of discussions.
My subscription at Qobuz has recently be renewed, but if they do not take the necessarry steps it will most probably be the last time.
I have informed them about my point of view, but probably they think I have more to loose than they themselves.
Dirk
The problem of being swamped by spam would not exist if Roon actually offered its users the choice of having only instances of the complete composition instead of single movements/aria/songs. The spam issue just makes it worse, but it is already very frustrating to use. Supposing the spam didn’t exist, how do you suggest I find instances of the complete composition and avoid just excerpts?
I briefly subscribed to IDAGIO and was very impressed with the way they sorted particular compositions and composers. I was less impressed by the lack of high-resolution streaming and no integration Roon of course. How does IDAGIO handle things from a filtering/search standpoint? Is there something that Roon could change in their search/filtering process so that it could return results that resemble IDAGIO for classical music?
Sure, that’s a consequence of the products working differently when it comes to compositions. Roon has a more expansive and general implementation of compositions that is not only for classical music, so we are doing far more flexible matching. This leads to larger composition catalogs + useful features like being able to meaningfully browse american songbook composers and cover recordings of nirvana.
But also, we are not thinking about this primarily as a problem with compositions. The most acute damage is when these come up in our recommendation systems. After that, when they show up in the first screen or two of the artist pages. On page 12 of a composition screen with a non-default sort option selected, this is a lower priority case. Still important, but it would be a mistake to view this whole problem from this one place and miss the larger problem.
Whatever we do will fix all of it at once, of course, just wanted to provide the right perspective.
What bit of your implementation is responsible for returning a two minute chorale as an instance of the Bach Mathew Passion, a work which lasts for three hours? Do you actually intend to do this? Why? Do you understand that people might not want this behaviour? Do you think it is reasonable to want just instances of the whole composition? Why do you say in the text at the top of the Composition screen that Beethoven’s Piano Concerto 3 has three parts, an Allegro, a Largo and a Rondo, and then retrieve many results for only one of those parts? Why can’t you provide a facility for separating complete works from extracts?
@brian, Please excuse my obviously complete ignorance, but I do not get this statement at all. Roon has a “more expansive and general implementation” for doing what? Returning bits and pieces rather than complete classical compositions? Makes zero sense to me. Much rather this is probably the core reason for the many problems we are facing with the way classical compositions are being handling.
Qobuz does not just have classical stuff in their library, so they must have spend a thought or two on how they handle compositions in classical as opposed to other genres. And by the look of it, their way of handling this is far superior to Roon’s.
First thing I did is acknowledge that this is wrong. It’s a complex problem that goes beyond this one use case or the classical view so there are tradeoffs involved. We are going to fix it. Not sure what else I can say.
If you went to a concert that was advertised as Bach Mathew Passion and all you got was a two minute aria would you be happy with being told “It’s a complex problem… not sure what else I can say.”? If you are stuck for something else to say, how about a timescale for a solution? Putting in a simple time filter to exclude the excerpts? That can’t be much work, and would give you time for you to address the underlying complex problem.
