I have recently started tabula rasa with Roon after some technical issues with my core machine. My current setup uses Roon Server on Arch Linux and it runs without issue.
After listening for about five hours yesterday I have noticed that my listening history genre chart only shows a limited number of genres – two from the top of Roon’s genre tree (Alternative/Indie Rock and Heavy Metal) and one of my own (Melodic Death Metal). My albums are all tagged with genres further down the tree.
Roon was told to use my local genre tags as well as its own when my library was imported and I have mapped my local genres to Roon’s where appropriate.
It transpires that my genre screen fails to show many of the local tags mapped to Roon’s genre database.
I guess if they’re not shown on the genre page they’re unlikely to show in my listening history.
Has the genre page ever shown subgenres? I remember them being there. Has the listening history chart ever shown them? I’m not sure any more and I’m not sure that this is even a support request.
I think what is confusing me is that my custom genres are actually subgenres but as they don’t exist in Roon’s genre hierarchy they can’t be mapped so are treated as top level genres. This means that specific custom subgenres show as genres on Roon’s genre page and on my listening chart.
Roon is using the allmusic genre hierarchy. It goes 3 layers deep. I don’t know how regularly roon updates its internal version or how faithfully it follows it.
You will find a very extensive list of metal sub-genres at a 3rd level. Genres → Pop/Rock → Heavy Metal
I personally found that editing my genre mappings to match the allmusic hierarchy subjectively seemed to improve roon features like radio and discovery. But it could just as well have been placebo and that there are no real benefits. Doing the mapping is very awkward as there is no integrated environment.
First thing I did was map all my genres to a roon genre in settings → library → genre mapping
Next thing I did was map the hierarchies. This is awkward as I couldn’t see any other way of doing it except one genre at a time. This includes custom “non-roon” genres. My tastes are different than yours so:
I mapped custom “French Mélodie” as a sub-genre of custom “Art Song” (so I can distinguish custom genres of German Lieder, American Art Song, English Art song etc.).
I used the Allmusic genre tree when tagging my files but because of the way delimiter characters are read in certain situations I had to map things like ‘Alternative & Indie Rock’ to ‘Alternative/Indie Rock’ in Roon. I think this is the intent of the genre mapping function in Roon.
All of my albums are tagged properly so reading and mapping local tags let me fill in the gaps in the Roon database.
Your post was very useful and I’ve now given my custom sub-genres the correct parent. I was actually looking to do this on the genre mapping screen which was the wrong place.
