Localized Metadata in Early Access

[mike (Mike Fass)]

Hello everyone!

The Roon user interface has been localized by our volunteer translators for quite a while, but much of the data displayed in-app has remained in English.

This means Roon users who don’t speak English have faced an experience that’s only partially translated to a language they understand. This has been particularly unfortunate for users who speak languages that don’t use the Roman alphabet, such as Russia, Chinese, or Korean.

To address this, we are happy to announce that we’ll be delivering localized metadata to Roon, starting in Early Access today!

Getting Started

To check out localized metadata, please make sure that you’re running Early Access build 1228 on both your Core and Remote. If you need help installing Early Access, please consult our Help Center.

On ARC, you’ll also need to run Early Access, using build 1228.

Once you’re fully updated to the latest Early Access build on all platforms, you can restart your Core and Remote twice to ensure our servers are enabling the change for you.

To confirm the functionality is turned on, you should have an additional option in Settings > General allowing you to customize your language preferences for artist and album names:

How It Works

Credit Roles

Across Roon, you should see credit roles localized to the language you run Roon in. If different people in your home speak different languages, each person’s device can be set to the language they prefer:

Other Musical Terms

Lots of music-related terminology in Roon has exclusively been delivered in English. This includes:

• Genre names
• Classical terms like “Symphony” “Movement” “Sonata” etc

These terms will now be delivered in your language, with some terms being translated and others remaining in English based on feedback from users like you!

If you see any translations that seem wrong, please see the “Submitting Feedback” section below for more details about how you can help improve your language!

Artist and album names

Artist and album names introduce some additional complexity. If you speak French, you wouldn’t expect to see “Les Beatles” or a french translation of “Guns N’ Roses”, but you might be happy to see “Orchestre de Paris”.

Things are a bit different for languages that don’t use Roman characters. For example, one user who speaks Japanese might be comfortable with “Orchestre de Paris” or “The Doors”, while someone else might prefer to see パリ管弦楽団 or ザドアーズ, respectively.

This same flexibility applies to Japanese artists, where a user can now choose whether Roon displays 浜崎あゆみ or Ayumi Hamasaki.

By using the new “Languages For Artist and Album Names” setting, you can enable and prioritize all the languages and scripts according to what you would prefer to see in Roon.

Feedback

We are ready to start accepting improved translations for localized metadata!

Roon users can contribute or correct translations for the following data:

• Genre names

• Credit roles

• Classical terms like “symphony” and “movement”

Note that this does include artist or album name translations. We’ll be publishing additional documentation on that soon.

If you’d like access to our metadata translation system, please signup here and we’ll be in touch soon. Thanks!

Roon Localized Metadata - Translator Signup

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@mike

using build XXX.

XXX? When will that be in the Play Store?
Edit: So it worked with ROCK & macOS B1228 after the double restart

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@mike

Across Roon, you should see credit roles localized to the language you run Roon in. If different people in your home speak different languages, each person’s device can be set to the language they prefer:

@mike

Lots of music-related terminology in Roon has exclusively been delivered in English. This includes:

• Genre names
• Classical terms like “Symphony” “Movement” “Sonata” etc

These terms will now be delivered in your language,

Well that’s more or less the opposite of what I suggested should be done and was repeatedly hearted by others:

Help us test localized metadata!

Speaking as someone who is in Germany (and with native German language) but runs software in English: Please keep this configurable independently from the region and from display language as well. Qobuz in Germany insists on showing German reviews and bios and it’s jarring having to read about the Beatles or whatever in German, at usually worse quality. Even if I ran my UI in German I would want English content for music and surely there are many like that

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

Playing around with this, finding it a bit confusing so far. Is it expected that with English as the only enabled language, the title shows Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at the top (with the German name smaller below) but the album artists show Berliner Philharmoniker?

And with English prioritized over German,

is it expected that I get the German orchestra name? I’m a bit confused by what the rules are and how enabled languages, the preference order, and the artist names interact. I guess if I enable German, then German-language orchestras get always German names regardless of the order in the preference?

But now with German preferred over English,

I still get The Philadelphia Orchestra and not some German translation (same for Boston Philharmonic, for instance)

In summary for me, first of all congratulations, I am sure it will do nice things for many people
For myself, English preferred and German second seems to do what I like, German/Austrian orchestras have German names and everything else seems to have been left alone, I like that.

However, if I was running my software in my native German and now would be forced to have all German credit roles in Jazz, Rock, Pop in German language, I would be very unhappy like I had written the first time you announced this. But as it does not affect me (I run software in English) maybe I am overly sensitive and I defer to others’ opinions

Edit: One more thing, you forgot to mention the separate setting for localized Genre names, apparently it’s only in the album editor. Might be a bit difficult to find? Why not in the general settings? And if set to yes, they are localized according to what? I have English UI, currently artist and album names to 1. German and 2. English (still playing around, so different to what I wrote above), localized genres to yes, but the genres show in English. Is this expected and if yes, what does “localized” mean then?

When I turn the setting off, the save button is inactive and I cannot save, seems like changing the switch did not register?

[vova]

It meant to say 1228

[brian2 (Brian Degman)]

@Suedkiez

Well that’s more or less the opposite of what I suggested should be done and was repeatedly hearted by others:

We’ve only done the opposite of your suggestion for genres and credit roles. For artist and album names, they are configured independently from the UI language.

@Suedkiez

Is it expected that with English as the only enabled language, the title shows Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra at the top (with the German name smaller below) but the album artists show Berliner Philharmoniker

Yes this is expected. Unfortunately our current data source for localizations has much less complete data for album artists. So it’s possible you’ll have a localized artist name, but a non-localized album artist.

@Suedkiez

I guess if I enable German, then German-language orchestras get always German names regardless of the order in the preference

Yeah this is correct. We really never want to display a localized version of an artist name if the user can understand the native name. The type of cases where the preference order would come into play would be if there was a Japanese artist that had a different German and English localization. If you have German at the top you’ll get the German localization and vice versa for English.

@Suedkiez

the genres show in English. Is this expected and if yes, what does “localized” mean then?

Genres are localized to the UI language. Since you’re running in English you aren’t going to be seeing any of the localizations. For what it’s worth, our current localizations for Jazz, Rock, and Pop in German are just Jazz, Rock, and Pop

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

Thanks, all clear! Oh, except turning off the Genre switch not making the dialog save button dirty, but I don’t need it anyway

[brian2 (Brian Degman)]

@Suedkiez

except turning off the Genre switch not making the dialog save button dirty

Oh right, missed that. This is just a bug, that switch is only for displaying the localized names in the edit window. It doesn’t effect what you’ll see on the actual album page. Having it trigger the “Save” state makes that very unclear. I’ll get this fixed.