For periods, Roon (also) has it’s own category / field. Periods as genre aren’t really a perfect description. Unluckily it’s hit and miss if period values are actually provided as metadata – and you can only focus on periods within the composition browser.
So Roon was up to a good start here but didn’t reach the finish line yet. It may improve over time if Roon finds clever ways to extract this kind of information from its data set, too. Currently, I think Roon solely relies on what rovi delivers. But when a composer is known, it’s usually not that hard to deduce a fitting period for compositions by that composer (biographical details are often at hand, like place of birth, places of work, dates and such which would help a machine to make a good guess).
Its one of those areas where Roon is an almost complete fail. As an example, I have almost all compositions by Dietrich Buxtehude (born 1637) showing up as belonging to the „Romantic“ period, when it should clearly be Baroque.
Even most of Beethoven is catalogued as „Romantic“ - which you could agree to for some of his late compositons. The early / mid period Piano sonatas, string quartets, symphonies etc are most definitely belonging to the „Vienna Classic“ period.
I am not aware that you can edit or force the Period data , however wrong it is , I can’t see where it displays, my guess is its set by the 3rd party metadata source. Highlight errors to @Support so they can get them changed …
@anon47919701:
Sorry, I don’t see any Period field such as Romantic, Baroque, …, under Classical genre. They’re grouped mainly into types of music like Chamber, Orchestral, Keyboards, …, etc., except Avant-Garde which can be also be a Period sub-genre.
@bbrip
I agree, Roon’s handling of Classical sub-genre metadata is a big fail.
I’ve noticed many mis-classifications under Classical as well; e.g. Maurizio Pollini, a classical pianist’s “20th Century” solo piano album is grouped under Electronic/Computer Music, what ???
Also why is “Band Music” a sub-genre of Classical music? Shouldn’t big band music be under Jazz? There are 2 of my albums grouped under Classical/Band Music: Charles Mingus’s complete RCA and Columbus Collection & the other one is Gershwin’s Rapsody in Blue.
You can also Focus on Periods in the Composers browser as well.
@DN28 - as u_gee says: Periods is another field in Roon - it is not “in” the Genres field. Have a look at Focus in either the Composers or Compositions browsers and you’ll see it. The issue is that populating this field is done sparsely by Roon (probably because the metadata providers rarely provide Period information), that’s why some of us take the trouble to do it for ourselves.
By default, Roon uses the genre definitions defined by the classification used by AllMusic . This is a hierarchal classification with genres and subgenres (and sub-subgenres in some cases).
@Geoff_Coupe I think there is a much easer way fixing this for 90+% of the user-cases: You just keep some kind of lookup-table (or whatever its called in your programming language) and link each composer to a period.
Bach, Buxtehude, Vivaldi, Couperin, Rameau etc -> Baroque
Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, CPE Bach etc -> Classic
Schubert, Mendelssohn etc -> Erly Romantic
Schumann., Liszt, --> Late romantic
…and so on
That leaves substantially less issues that may need fixing manually. Examples: Schönberg started out as a Late-Romantic before he turned to Modernism/Twelve-Tone-Music
Penderecki as an example the other way round: He was a major figure in Avantgarde in the 60s and 70s and turned to Neo-Romaticism later in live.
Somethig like this should be doable and would be extremely helpful. Thanks
Not on my ROCK NUC Core it doesn’t. Just selected all 175 Debussy compositions and assigned the Romantic period to them. Roon took less than a second to do it.
Er - I don’t work for Roon Labs. App development is not within my purview…
And: what do you mean by 'a proper MacOS App out then? And not just a glorified “web-browser-interface” ’ The MacOS app is a full-blown application, just like the PC version as far as I am aware…
ya, it’s not that bad. Off-topic anyway but you got me there…
But as we are at it: Tell me how I select multiple compositions in that Mac App. The usual ways of doing this kind of stuff (shift-hold etc…) dont seem to work.
NB: Figured it out: Its using Windows-style multi-key-press-combinations (control+option+shift) - So back to what I said before: Not very Appleish…
What really gets me about Roon is they’ve known about these shortcomings from the outset yet choose to do nothing whilst marketing like these issues don’t exist. The very least they could do is enable file based tags to be imported to enable users to address the shortcomings in Roon’s metadata. Unfortunately it seems even that is too much to ask. Glad I’m on annual subscription because I won’t be renewing unless they make clear strides in improving classical and box set handling, even if it means users can get to the right answer by adding/editing tags outside of Roon and inside the app for streamed content.
