I have well over a thousand classical music albums. My needs are simple: access by Composer and see Genres and then Albums by that Composer AND access by Genre and see Composers and then Albums by that Composer. See JRiver for an example that works.
To do this I would have to be able to enter Composer on my metadata. You have a place to say whether or not the album is bootleg - this is obviously important to some people. But where in hell can I enter composer on an album. I am forced to use the Artist field which I don’t want to do.
If I go in on the Genre ‘Cello Concerto’ it brings back Artists not Composers. And it brings back Albums but no way of sorting by Composer. So again I am forced to put the Composers into the Artist field. WTF?
Right now if I go in by Composer I get Works which if an album has 10 pieces by that composer will bring up that album 10 times. And if an album is not recognized by your source will not be brought up at all. USELESS and FRUSTRATING.
I end up typing the name of the Composer into the Search field and then trying to pick through the results which are different by each of the sub categories in the result. Blah.
And why do I need to see everything in graphic mode? I would mostly prefer lists of Composers and Genres that I can rapidly scan through not pictures that takes me three times as long to find what I want.
More user freedom is required. I am passed my boiling point on this software. You said that Classical was getting a remake - it still needs another.
These are valid points and I’ll flag down @mike to provide a response about what can be done now for the issues you raise and what the aim is for Classical going forward.
I’ve unlisted this thread for the moment, as I think Mike’s response is likely to be more helpful than other users input at this stage. We can open it up again for public discussion after that.
Hi @Gary_Aigen – sorry for the slow response here. I understand the frustration, and I can assure you we’re still working on the changes you mentioned. Our goal is to provide exactly that kind of freedom, but it’s a big complex project that is still underway.
In most other apps, the metadata you’re seeing is just snips of text stored in your files. In Roon, artists and composers go much further, fleshed out as detailed entities with all sorts of rich information attached to them. That’s how Roon is able to give all sorts of special handing to composers that isn’t possible in other apps. It also means Roon can accurately track multiple people with the same name, or recognize all 14 different spellings of Tchaikovsky.
For a while now we’ve allowed for editing of most “display” information in Roon – things like album and track titles, or spelling of artist or composer names. But what you’re looking for is editing of links – the albums and tracks attached to performers, and the works and performances associated with composers. Editing of these links is coming.
For now, if you’re interested in seeing albums on which a composer’s works were performed, I would recommend using the Focus feature, which should give you the album-level visibility you’re looking for, even if you can’t edit the rich metadata quite yet.