I know this has been addressed before but all threads seem to have been closed. If you have the same person tagged as lyricist AND librettist they show up as composer. Very annoying for opera and musicals.
For example, these two tracks from a recording of ‘Brigadoon’. In the first track ‘Alan Jay Lerner’ is credited (correctly) twice, once as lyricist and once as librettist. However this makes him show up as composer as well even though he is not tagged as one. In the second, he is not tagged as librettist and does not show up as composer. But I’d like to see him there as librettist! Surely it can’t be that hard to fix this? Or have I missed something?
Roon only supports the behaviour you want if you assign a “Classical” tag. The distinction you want between librettist and lyricist is relatively recent in the last several years and has been designed for Classical Operas not Broadway Musicals.
Roon treats a “Classical” tag in numerous ways specific to Classical music. Assigning a Classical tag to a Broadway Musical may not be a realistic workaround as it will affect all sorts of other functionality, particularly discovery, recommendations and radio.
There are other oddities as well about the way roon treats “Text”, “Poetry” and many other written forms to which music is commonly set across all genres. Roon has never been very consistent or all-encompassing of multiple use cases it considers “edge”. There are several change requests going back 10 years but I don’t remember one exactly like your requirement so you may want to raise one. There is the added complication that the “lyricist” who writes the words to the songs is usually different to the librettist who adapts the screenplay or writes the words to the dialogue.
Thanks for the reply. I had already assigned a ‘Classical’ tag before posting and the behaviour remains the same.
Regardless of whether the lyricist is different from the librettist or not (I work in opera and musical theatre so I am very clear as to their roles) neither should show up as the composer in any situation (unless they are both composer and lyricist, e.g. Stephen Sondheim). Any person who is lyricist and/or librettist, is tagged as such, and is not tagged as composer should surely not be showing up as a composer. This is just basic, surely?
This is a community forum. I am a user just like you. There is no solution to what you want, just workaounds that may get you closer to what you want. Otherwise, you will have to raise a change request.
I am not near my roon instance at the moment. From memory, the workaround is if you add a Classical tag you cannot have both a librettist and lyricist if you don’t want one showing as a composer. I am pretty sure if you have one or the other then it won’t show as a composer, but for example “Text” will and “Poetry” doesn’t show either as a composer, lyricist, or librettist; that shows as production. To get exactly what you want you need to raise a change request or add your vote to an existing one that looks similar.
PS. I have just checked on my roon and, indeed, your use case appears not to be covered. Lerner was both librettist and lyricist, but if you tag Brigadoon as Classical and tag Lerner as both librettist and lyricist, then Lerner gets a composer credit, but if you tag Lerner as either librettist or lyricist, then he doesn’t. Almost certainly, this is because the distinction isn’t common with Opera, so it was never tested. There are a lot of 80/20 loose ends like this in roon I’m afraid where all use cases are not accounted for.
