I was wondering if there was a way to make albums by a band/artist apply their applies Genre tags to their albums.
Example:
Acacia Strain is tagged as Death Metal, Heavy Metal, Pop/Rock and (by me) Sludge Metal.
When I look at their albums, I either DON’T see all those tags, or I see those tags and more. Examples: Death is The Only Mortal also has Alternative Metal, Indie Rock and Grunge for some reason. Their newest album is ONLY tagged with Pop/Rock.
I understand why it wouldnt have extra genres, but shouldn’t it basically automatically apply Death Metal and Heavy Metal as well since it’s by the same band?
I don’t think it should do that automatically. I have artists who recorded, say, Indie Rock albums and Alt-Country albums, so the artist is tagged with both. But that doesn’t mean that their Alt-Country albums should be auto-tagged as Indie Rock or their Indie Rock albums as Alt-Country.
Edit: Or to stay in the genre I don’t want Carcass‘s Grindcore albums tagged Death Metal and their Death Metal albums tagged Grindcore just because the artist has both tags.
But it’s true that genres are very inconsistent. As to your problem, are you aware that you can multi-select albums and edit all of them at once, like select all albums by an artist and add/remove a genre to/from them?
Edit: I detailed multi-selection here for playlists but it applies everywhere:
I am, yes. What im doing atm is going through a playlist I pulled from Spotify (Just moved to Qobuz and Roon) and a lot of the bands I have from that playlist are not tagged properly when I add the appropriate album. Would be nice if I could just sort by artist and grab everything. Its been kind of a pain in the butt having to go through all of these bands and add Deathcore tags or Brutal Metal, or Synthwave or Post-Hardcore or whatever, even when its literally in the description in Roon.
Yeah maybe there should be a button to “copy artist genres to albums”. It wouldn’t be perfect but one could clean up later. You can look if there is an existing thread in Feedback > Feature Suggestions and vote for it, or add one.
I can see why there would be cases where you WOULDNT want that all to copy over, but you’re right that would be nice. I was also a little surprised how many tags didnt exist. You mentioned Grindcore, I’m not sure if that was an existing tag. I know I had to add Brutal Death Metal, Downtempo Deathcore Darksynth and a couple others. I also had to figure out that in order to access the bands in various genres I had to drill down, so If I want to find Downtempo Deathcore, I have to click Pop/Rock, then Heavy Metal, then Deathcore, then Downtempo Deathcore.
Please tell me I won’t have to redo this when I move my Roon core off the current PC and onto a virtual machine or pick up a Nucleus lmao, lmao.
But yes, genres are simply generally a mess but not just in Roon:
Especially in metal and electronics, everyone and their dog makes up their own genres
Nobody agrees on them and their proper hierarchy
There is not even agreement if genres are like a formal taxonomy like in biology or should more loosely apply to music one might find sufficiently related to be in one playlist or something
The genre hierarchy in Roon (as adopted from Allmusic/TiVo) is additionally very US-centric
Taking genres too seriously is the road to madness IMO.
You can also search for genres in the global search (top right magnification glass, then scroll down on the full results page):
Going to veer the question a little but I promise its relevant.
So, given the fact that the tags are generally a mess, how does Roon Radio (Valence I guess) know what I want to hear?
Here’s a metal example: Extermination Dismemberment is Slam Death Metal (Or brutal slamming death metal, whatever). if I set a Roon Radio to ED, it pulls Abominable Putridity and then Analepsy, which are both Slam Death Metal, but neither of them are tagged as Slam Death Metal so does it not use actual genres? Cause thats why I was so worried about Genres in the first place, since if I want to hit the gym and listen to Slam, I dont want Megadeth because its technically “Metal”.
I checked out the Allmusic page for Analepsy and its tagged as pop/rock, btw. thats kinda funny.
Genres are hierarchical, and Heavy Metal is a subgenre of Pop/Rock by default. So an album that is tagged HM is considered Pop/Rock even if it’s not explicitly tagged Pop/Rock. (IOW, if you do a shuffle on all P/R albums, it will include HM).
Whether one likes this is IMO a philosophical question I alluded to previously: If genres are a taxonomy, then it’s probably correct to do that. Historically, HM clearly developed from Rock (and it’s not classical, Jazz, Folk or Hip Hop ).
If one sees genres as a tool for playlist composition, then maybe it’s not so great. In this case, or if one considers HM separate from P/R on philosophical grounds, you can always change the genre hierarchy in Roon and, e.g., make HM its own separate top level genre.
As for Valence, I doubt that it sticks to genres exclusively. I think it also takes other things into account, like what Roon users who listened to album X listened to next, and this kind of thing. If you skip tracks in Roon Radio, it asks you why, for instance.
It’s explained here in quite some detail:
Beware: Valence / Roon Radio works better for some users and worse (or not at all) for others. There are a lot of complaints on the forum about poor choices, lots of repetition, etc. It looks like if you let it play for a long time, it tends to get itself into a rut and keeps repeating the same tracks over and over - at least for some users. On the other hand, it works pretty well for me personally, but I don’t let it run for 5 or 10 hours. For my needs, most of the time it seems to strike a nice balance between sticking to the topic and straying far enough to keep it interesting. It never chose absolutely crazy things, either. I don’t require it to strictly stick to a sub-sub–sub-sub-genre, though.
If you are strict about this, you may be better off adding all tracks from a genre to a playlist/queue and play it on shuffle.
I don’t want Carcass‘s Grindcore albums tagged Death Metal and their Death Metal albums tagged Grindcore just because the artist has both tags.
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