In my effort to clean up metadata, I’m taking a closer look at the Steve Reich’s Collected Works issued earlier this year. I first imported it with minimal metadata analysis. Upon closer review of the extensive liner notes (Essays @ 59 pages and Credits @ 128 pages), I am now adding musician credits as Roon didn’t pull most in during the initial and subsequent scans.
Here are a few examples where my metadata cleaning didn’t present itself uniformely in Roon. Note- I set all my metadata preferences to “prefer file” over "prefer Roon” in Settings => Library = > Import setting.
Here is an example from disc 21 with Reich’s compostion WTC 9/11:
Credits:
Observations- the musician credits perfectly match up. It is curious that the production credits, which I didn’t enter, do show up. I’m not complaining, but it is curious. How does that happen when I’ve selected “prefer file”?
Here is another example, Dance Patterns, on the same disc:
Credits:
Observations- here the musicians are all listed, but it is only Edmund Niemann, one of the two pianists, who is listed with his instrument. Of course, the difference between the two is that there is not a primary artist for Dance Patterns where the Kronos Quartet is the primary artist for WTC 9/11. But still Niemann is split out as the pianist where the other musicians are not identified with their instruments.
Of course, life goes on, as does my immense enjoyment of this box set, whether this is resolved or not. It is curious to me why there is a difference and most of the musicians are not associated with their instruments. Any speculations?
It’s also interesting to note that Steve Reich is listed as a performer in Roon ("Performed by Steve Reich…”) which he is not on these tracks and is listed as the composer (“Composed by Steve Reich”) which he is. Maybe Steve Reich shows as a performer since he is listed as the album artist.
mjw
(Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Call that job satisfaction? I don't.)
3
Because you have specified a preference. Roon will take this into account when displaying release information, but data displayed are not restricted to file tags.
Moreover, the general format of the PERSONNEL tag is “name - credit_role” and the credit role in the tag must match one of the recognized Roon credit roles. For example, PERSONNEL=Vibraphones - James Preiss.
The Yate developer is very responsive, and may have a script to add the Roon tags to your files.
I’ve been to the File Tag Best Practice page before, but never dug down as deep as I did here. I found the "You can now add credits using file tags!” and the Credit Roles really helpful.
It appears to me that the cited examples (i.e., Wolfgang Schulz - Flute, Daniel Gaede - Violin, etc.) following the “PERSONNEL tag is 'name - credit_role’” guidance is done exclusively by a tag editor. Can you confirm that?
If that is the case, the I believe I’m doing so properly. For example, in Steve Reich’s Dance Pattens above and below, I entered the credits from the box set documentation and then verified it with MP3Tag (the latter app where I have limited knowledge)
It’s interesting to note that in MP3Tag, Edmund Niemann is split out under “Personnel" while the other musicians are under "Musician Credits”- and that is how Roon is displaying it. So now, I understand why. The underlying question is what happened between Yate where I entered the data and Mp3Tag on the way to Roon? BTW, I have worked with Barry, the Yate developer. He is always very helpful!!
One additional question- I was not able to find this page for the work under discussion that is posted in File Tag Best Practice:
mjw
(Here I am with a brain the size of a planet and they ask me to pick up a piece of paper. Call that job satisfaction? I don't.)
6
A gotcha I came across a couple of years ago is that some tagging software incorrectly adds ID3 tags to FLAC files, and these can contain different data for the same FLAC (Vorbis) tag.
@Mike_O_Neill - I’ve been to that page for many tracks. I was asking about the (presumably obsolete page) as it contained more metadata than the current one. No big deal either way.
And @mjw - what a rabbit hole I went down… Even though I’ve been doing this for years, a real newbie question has emerged. What are ID3 tags (yes, I see they’re flagged everywhere) and how do you remove them? What do you put in its place? Maybe doing so, if it can be done in bulk, may solve the transposition issue I’ve had between Yate to MP3Tag to Roon.
“What are ID3 tags?” that’s a great question since up until about 5 minutes ago I just assumed FLAC used ID3 tags. A quick search says that ID3 tags are used in mp3 while FLAC uses Vorbis, which @mjw alluded to up above. Presumably the existence of ID3 tags in a FLAC file could cause issues.
