I have used iTunes to record my CDs and save purchased music. I find that iTunes typically doesn’t get the metadata “right”. I usually need to correct the “artist” and “album artist” and always uncheck the box saying it’s a “compilation”, as that messes up the organization of the album. I do that just after downloading and importing, or recording a new CD.
Roon seems to figure out all the stuff that iTunes messes up, at least most of it.
I find that iTunes does this with all sorts of music, including classical.
Hi Tony
I agree wholeheartedly, as it happens I don’t use it, I use a mix of JRiver, Tag&Rename and MusiCHI Tagger as I see fit
I find one size rarely fits all
Mike
I’m reluctant to bulk edit the tags with an external tag editor because as things stand all the music is stored in my iTunes library. If I change the tags there, then it will mess up my carefully organized iTunes library, which is synced with my iPhone so I can listen to when I’m on the road.
I’ve found that if I ask Roon to identify each work, it’s able to do so even for those I’ve split out from individual albums. So that’s the route I’ve been pursuing today. Are there any major downsides to this I should be aware of?
The worst thing is that when I come to, say, my boxed set of Beethoven sonatas and bagatelles played by Stephen Kovacevich, which comprises nine disks. To get the bagatelles aligned opposite the right slots means clicking the downward arrows in the “Let’s make sure everything is in order” window so many times I’m going to lose the will to live. Or incur RSI. There really should be a way to highlight and drag the tracks to be moved but I can’t spot it. Is there a better way of doing this?
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It is for me, even though I have had frustrations. My on hard drive collection is about 208,000 files at this point, about 80% classical. I want to have program note booklets available while listening, so while I am adding new albums, I add all the jpgs or pngs to the same folder as the music files. That works fine.
I am working on a 33 CD album of the complete music of Debussy, and that might be a challenge. But that means putting the 90 page booklet and 600 or so music files in one folder. I hope that works. If not, I will get back to the forum.
Is there a Roon applied limit to the number of files in a folder, or just the OS limit? With a 64 bit OS (I use Windows 10) there should be no problem if the latter is the case (right?).
The most wonderful feature of Roon that I have found in the 2 weeks I have had it is the Parametric Equalizer. Classical recordings, in my experience, have far more not-as-good-as-Lp sounding files than do Rock and Jazz. I created an equalizer file that boosts at the low end and cuts at the upper midrange and treble range, and, voilá!, I am getting the best digital sound I have ever heard from classical recordings. Many nonclassical, like the Norah Jones/Green Day guy FOR EVERLY album (for example), are best with the equalizer out of the system (as are many modern classical recordings). EMI recordings from the 1950’s and early 1960’s, which have never been pleasant in their digital form before, now sound much more like my original UK, French and Electrola Lps did.
So my questions:
- Limitations on file quantity within a single folder (not talking about subfolders here, the addressing would be separate,no?)
- I use the MP3tag tagging program also. In the Artist tag I separate multiple artists by comma, and put the instrument or voice in parentheses after the artist name and before the comma. Is this seen as viable within the current or probable future framework of Roon? Or will Sol Gabetta and Sol Gabetta(cello) always be considered as separate people?
- Does Roon’s database system have alias tables, so “Beecham” can be listed as equivalent to “Sir Thomas Beecham” or “Sir Thomas Beecham,BART”, etc., etc.
I find Roon totally unequipped for classical music. Especially (official) collections (multiple discs) are being messed up badly. As my music is mostly classical music, for me it is reason enough to leave Roon.
may I ask which alternative you find better?
With all of its flaws, I still think that Roon manages classical with the right ideas and approach. Whether they could be further advanced is another matter.
In the end classical music lovers are not necessarily the biggest user-group anyway…
Even apps like Plex and Kodi are better. In Roon you cannot search within collections properly, mainly because the way of tagging in Roon is inconsequent. If you tag these collections precisely with tag&rename, mp3tag, or whatever, still Roon is able to mess things up, even if you choose to use not the Roon tagging system, but the original file tags. Furthermore, I find it irrelevant to state that classical music users are a minority. Roonlabs says its app is excellent for classical music. Above this, music collections other than classical are being messed up as well. The main cause of these problems is the stubborness of Roon regarding a folder view option. I still don’t understand why they are thinking that Roon will not be Roon anymore with a folder view option. Such an option would solve many problems and would make a lot of users very happy. And those who hate folder view, well I’d say: “there is no obligation to use it”.
Hear, hear. I asked about a folder view a year ago and it was like I had asked for the moon. Not sure why such pushback on a very useful function that is present in almost all other players… As I mentioned earlier in this thread, classical music is very painful in Roon.
Roon is quite intelegent when uploading , if you split each CD to its own folder , as CD1 , CD2 etc and put those folders into a main folder. For digital downloads I often split them into CD worth bits as well even if they are not. You will normally find the track listing on DG, Amazon etc
Put the art work in a separate folder “Artwork”
Roon will sort it all out
Avoid suffixing CD names eg CD1 - Suites Bergamasque etc as Roon will see that as a NEW album and split it off , you’ll then have to Merge it backj
Good Luck , I have managed the 114 Brendel set with onlya bit of effort
There are a number of us plugging away at Classical Stuff, Klaus (above) being one of them.
My view is hang in there and join the forum , you cannot influence something you are not an active part of
Give it a fair trial , I did the small trials and finally decided a year would be a better trial so I subscribed. I am to review that year comer Xmas and decide whether there is something better. At present there isn’t IMHO
Mike
I know it occupies hard drive but I keep an iTunes library as a copy in ALAC to feed my iPad and iPods (Yes I still have 2 am 80G and a 160G classic)
That way I can optimize the tags on my main collection for the best purpose.
Just the way I manage it
Mike
The worst case scenario is that, in transitioning to Roon, you might decide to prefer all your metadata to that of Roon. This may mean that Roon may not “identify” your albums and provide supplementary information. However, as you know how your collection is organised, and can readily find what you want to listen to, it may not be a great issue. However, some of the “discovery” features in Roon may not work as well.
When I transitioned, I retained the album title from my own files, but left the rest to Roon. Roon generally correctly identifies the individual compositions within each album and generally supplies correct track names (often better than the ones in my own files). Since I now use Roon almost entirely, I have merged in Roon, a lot of multi box sets (such as operas, complete piano sonatas etc) which I had previously separatel identified by disc number. One of the great things with Roon is that you can load the booklet and store it along with the album - a great boon for opera listening.
However, in saying this are a very small number of cases where Roon gets it horribly wrong and I have had to do some adjustments to fix these.
You can get the free trial, import your music and see what it looks like in Roon. Roon will not change your file metadata.
It took me a while to adjust. I still retain my own album titles (generally in the format composer, major composition, minor composition(s) - and if necessary add artist and year if needed). It took me quite a while to tweek the Roon metadata and hunting down digital booklets, but then it something I did while relaxing.
While, I was sceptical about Roon to start with - mainly due to the metadata issues - I am now a convert.
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I’ve done the splitting in CD1, CD2, etc as Mike_O_Neill and many others in this forum suggested. But this works good at one time, at another time it makes no difference. I didn’t try iTunes, for it supports only formats which Apple finds okay. Of course you can convert your music files, but with a large library it will be a lot of work to do without the guarantee that Roon responds better to an iTunes library.
In addition, a disadvantage of iTunes is that, in order to play music, you’ll need to have a PC or Mac running. My music library resides on a NAS, which is running 24/7 anyway.
The problem, too, with Roon is that it deals very peculiar with composer names. I tagged all of my classical music with the composer’s last name, nevertheless Roon use either this last name but also first names. And without any consistence. That makes searching more difficult than necessary. As I’ve setup Roon to use my own file tags only, I cannot understand why Roon messes up these tags just as well.
I don’t get this. I type .”Dvorak 9” into the search and I get all my Dvorak New World Symphony recordings - even if they’re unidentified. When they’re identified, even if it’s sometimes untidy, I can see all my recordings of works, jump to other works by composer etc. And see links to other, related works.
Now, Rovi (or whoever the metadata source is) might have several entries per artist - but typing (say) “Kanawa” will bring back all appearances, albums etc. By Kiri Te Kanawa. It even spots her 1971 cameo as the Contessa di Ceprano in the Sutherland/Pavarotti Rigoletto.
I think if you relax and (for the most part) let Roon do its stuff it works great. You may run into issues where you want to proactively curate the collection, or you want to have everything in neat and tidy rows (one entry per artist etc.) as Rovi will fight you/. For me, though, I’ve never not been able to find the music i want to listen to - for me that means Roon works.
Gotta say it does amuse me when people anounce their intention to flounce out in disgust as something doesn’t do exactly what they want. 
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First of all, a big thank you to everyone who’s weighed in on this discussion. I’m so impressed by the knowledge and helpfulness of the Roon community.
So, I’ve played with Roon over the weekend. I’ve tried to make it work with my iTunes library in which I’ve split albums into separate compositions and transposed the contents of the artist and composer metadata fields. Here’s what I’ve discovered:
- In spite of its downsides in terms of the way it handles classical music, Roon is a massive improvement over iTunes, especially when combined with my recently purchased microRendu. It provides an attractive user interface, which will make finding and listening to music much, much more enjoyable.
- I will probably take out a subscription to Roon. It’s painfully expensive but music is important to me and this seems like a good investment.
- I think it’s going to be just too difficult to reconfigure my iTunes library to work with Roon, so I’m considering ditching it and starting from scratch.
With that in mind, my plan is to create the following structure from my music files:
- A single folder containing my entire music library – eg Roon music
- Within that folder, separate folders for each composer – eg Bach JS
- Within each composer folder, separate folders for each recording (album or boxed set) – eg Bach Violin Sonatas and Partitas Ibragimova
- For boxed sets, use the CD1, CD2, etc convention suggested by Mike
- A separate folder for compilations – eg Various.
- Where necessary, I will use Roon’s Identify Album to manually identify discs and downloads.
Does the above make sense? In the light of your own experience, is that what you would do if you were starting from scratch? And if at some stage in the future I decide to move my music library, for example onto a NAS, will it create problems or will I be able to point Roon at it and have all the work I’ve put in restored automatically?
And what Mac app/workflow/tagging architecture would you use?
This is going to be a huge project so I want to get the architecture right at the outset. But I’m very excited about it.
I must add that I do feel for the OP who has - presumably - spent a lot of time and effort creating a tagging scheme to organise his music in a logical way for him. Sadly, in doing so he’s destroyed the very information that Roon needs to identify and sort the collection - that is the CD’s original TOC giving the track times and numbers etc. that ultimately this is all based on. Without re-ripping or re-tagging the whole thing from scratch, I’d suggest Roon may be a bad fir for him.
Well, in my case re-ripping is not an option. But re-tagging? You are saying yourself that a tagging scheme destroys the CD’s original TOC. I guess re-tagging won’t repair this TOC. And if it can be done, how should I accomplish that?
This looks fine to me. At the most basic level, the best structure to help Roon make successful identifications of the content of your library seems to be to ensure that each CD has its own folder - and that is what you are proposing.
If I look at the structure of my own collection, that is the basic form, although most CD folders are grouped under primary artists, rather than under composers. Either approach should work, as will a mixture of the two (which is the case for my collection). The reason it is a mixture is that I no longer bother to rigorously curate the structure - nowadays when I rip a CD, I just accept the folder name assigned by the ripper (dbPoweramp) and copy the folder across to the top level folder of my music library. Roon does the work of automatically identifying the release in the majority of cases.
For box-sets, I’ve found that the convention of having a toplevel folder for the box set, with subfolders CD1, CD2,… CDn for the individual CDs works best.
Maybe destroy is a big word - but I’d say how is Roon to identify that a number of tracks come form an album if the album name, artist name, track number etc. have been changed for different tracks.
Let’s say you have a CD of Beethoven first and third symphonies. You take tracks 1-4 and rename the album “Beethoven: Symphony No.1”, then change the artist to “Ludwig van Beethoven” and other changes. Then you take tracks 5-8 and rename the album “Beethoven: Symphony No. 3 ‘Eroica’” and change the artist name, You may then (to make it neat and tidy) renumber tracks 5-8 to 1-4 to match the movements. As the new “album” only has one symphony in it, you may edit the track titles to remove the “Beethoven: Symphony No.3 in …” leaving only the names of the movements. Leaves a lovely tidy result in iTunes and on the iPhone or iPod. The changes here have been so extensive that I don’t think Roon could piece that back together - without undoing all those edits to the ID3 tags.
Outside of the classical world, Roon has occasionally been able to identify where I have split a “2LPs on 1CD” set into the original albums - but here I still have the original track numbers, so it has track number, time, track title and artist to go on from the original metadata (I don’t know how much of this it may use). Roon’s ability to reconstruct this depends (surely) on how thoroughly the albums were “deconstructed” during curation of the library. Were track numbers changed? Were tracks renamed? That’s what I was trying to get at.
It could be easier (probably not quicker, though) to re-rip rather than undertake the reconstruction.