Music File Management

[brian (Brian Luczkiewicz)]

Brian, I think you made a pretty good case for folder browsing there. Just sayin’.

Not seeing it, and…never gonna happen. It would ruin the product.

But whatever. The problem, as you note, is inadequate metadata for less-common genres (and, surely, less common music generally). Roon is working on improving metadata–they say that often, an I trust them–but they also insist that there is no adequate source, and that they are not in a position to create one, either through crowdsourcing or directly. Lots of people saying it can’t be done.

We will of course keep making incremental improvements…the “can’t be done” isn’t the same as admitting that it’s impossible to move forward. Just that some of the obvious paths aren’t the clear-cut winners that they are made out to be.

Think about where we were with regards to metadata/editing/classical/file management 2.5 years ago:

• No Library/Import settings
• No file paths in the tracks browser
• No “prefer local metadata”
• Composer catalog system that was so dumb that it did more harm than good
• No awareness of “classical” or filtering of “classical” content in the compositions/composer browsers
• No “browse this composition on TIDAL” links
• No editing in Roon, at all. If Roon got it wrong, you were out of luck.
• Metadata pulled from file tags was extremely limited. No LIVE LABEL RECORDINGDATE LOCATION WORK PART COMPOSITION CREDITS PART MOVEMENT CONDUCTOR or dozens of others.
• No support for using user-provided genres
• No support for merging albums
• No support for disabling/controlling work/part grouping
• No support for custom delimiters in file tags

I’m sure I’m missing a lot…this is just what came to mind quickly. The point is–while there are still pain points, we are consistently shrinking them. The feedback we were hearing on these topics a couple of years ago was far noisier and more concerning than the issues we are dealing with today (and back then, our user base was a small fraction of the size that it is today).

The fundamental problems with classical are:

• The music is published poorly
• The people who listen to it have different opinions about how to organize it
• There is a big gap between how the music is published/sold and how it is consumed when compared to other genres.

For example, in this thread, someone was complaining about composer names in the album artist field. The problem is–record labels often put composer names into the artist field. I understand why people groom those away, but it’s really not a clear-cut call whether we should do that in cases where it is actually the most accurate artist name according to the publisher.

The most acute improvements we will likely make for Classical are probably less about data and more about navigation/presentation. There are obvious missing navigational links from Composers -> Albums/Performances. There are also some faults in how we order/present data on the Composer/Composition screens–they do not do a good job of pushing the most important stuff towards the top of the list. This is being worked on as well.