Is this content from local files, TIDAL, or Qobuz?
Qobuz
Screenshot of import settings
I could make plenty of screenshots about this
Description of the issue
It seems to get more and more common, that with Jazz releases the musicians are not listed. If listed they are very often just listed as “primary artist”. As well the genre is always just Jazz, no matter if it Bebop, Swing, Electric Jazz… Going through all “New releases for you” I mostly see only about 10-20% where this essential metadata is present. This makes one of my key features of Roon pretty useless. Not seeing who is playing on the record, as well Focus on musicians, subgenres are not possible.
I dont know if this is better with Tidal as I only have Qobuz. I neither dont know if this metadata is lacking from Roon, Qobuz or the record label. However, it makes Roon more like iTunes and Spotify which is really a pitty.
Yes, that’s a growing problem, labels (even ECM!) are doing less and less to provide good metadata. Very few labels upload quality metadata to any of the metadata services. At some point I was doing quite a few additions to Musicbrainz (mainly for Bandcamp-hosted releases), which Roon eventually ingests, but I fell way behind. The basic metadata from Qobuz is really bad, as you say, not only for jazz but also increasingly for classical (lack of grouping of tracks into works, for instance). My hunch is that streaming is so low margin (arguably negative margin) that labels and distributors like Qobuz just don’t want to put any effort into it, since anyway only a few oddballs like the two of us care at all, others just listen to auto-generated streams.
I think you are totally right! I just hopped that it will get better with time not worse.
While listening to new albums I like to read the credits like in the record store some time ago
Luckily it is such bad mainly with “New releases for you” but much better with those albums I finally add to my library. I wonder if in the future there will be an option with Valence for Metadata, this does work quite well with the pics. I will try to add data to Allmusic next time it concerns.
Yup. It’s best when I get the CD and I do the real work of entering all the info in Musicbrainz (via the Picard app). But I get more (mainly digital download) albums every month than I have time to do the metadata dance, including digging around the Web to find details about artists and less prominent labels.
Musicbrainz is community-supported, non-commercial. AllMusic is a business. Picard is an app that facilitates contributing to Musicbrainz. Roon draws from AllMusic, Musicbrainz, and maybe other metadata sources.Here’s an example I added (great album, BTW), the metadata is now flowing into Roon.
That’s a bit of a long debate, but Roon does add additional metadata that the streaming services don’t have. However, if none of their sources have it, what shall they do? A few people at Roon can’t edit the 20K releases that are published every day.
Apart from this, there are of course many features in Roon that none if the streaming services have, but you knew that
About your link to Musicbrainz, I cannot see there the attending musicians and which instruments they play, I cant see that on the other record either although they show up in Roon as you can see on my screenshot. Do I miss something? Or this information in Roon is maybe coming from another source?
I’ll look at this more carefully later, but one common situation is that Qobuz has some metadata that is not in the other sources, but contractually Roon cannot use that metadata for anything but streaming from Qobuz.
As the OP correctly stated the lack of usable metadata is not really a Roon problem at all but a very big problem with all the music streaming services and the record labels.
If this problem persists, which I believe it will and it will only grow worse, then team Roon should consider incorporating new and less cumbersome ways of adding and editing metadata, especially for albums in one’s library from the music streaming services.
I think you are right. At least the streaming services did now add pictures of the (main) artists in the last time, but now with valence Roon did max out them even more. I did contribute a lot of pictures so easy it is, while my library did fill up with all this contributions from other users too.
So yes, Valence for metadata would be a promising solution i believe.
There should be an easier way to have Roon not override the rich metadata contained in one’s own file tags with the poor metadata from an “identified” recording. What I mean is something like this (note: not a real recording):
Album: Playing
Artist: John Doe Quintet
My metadata shows all five members of the quintet
Roon’s metadata shows only “John Doe Quintet” and once the recording is identified by Roon, Roon replaces my detailed metadata, contained in the file tags under “Artist” with the much less detailed metadata.
At present there is no easy way to fix this since to “fix” the metadata one has to edit each individual track. Very time consuming and rather difficult, especially because the correct data is already present in the file tags.
By the way, your profile picture did look familiar, looked in my vinyl cupboard, and there it is, Conference of the Birds. I did not buy it 1972 when I was 10, I bought it 1980 then
I believe that I bought my copy sometime in 1974, which is not too long after it was first released (1973). That’s not so much bragging as it is just revealing how old I am.
I think I heard it first in 1973 on a late-night FM radio show in Lisbon, then bought it in London, can’t remember if in 1973 or 1975 (I still have it, but at a different location so I can’t check if I wrote down the date on the sleeve as I used to).
