My Box Set Solution

Roon Software Discussion
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I suspect we can shout as much as we want. It is now clear where the developer effort went since the release of 1.8 and now a further major release will be many months away. How much further effort will go into refining ARC we can only speculate.

Personally I don’t use Apple and our local mobile data costs mean I am unlikely to use ARC, albeit I don’t spend much time mobile being retired.So v 2.0 holds little excitement for me. I also have concerns over the “always on” internet requirements.

It’s clear that Mobile was being driven by many users , so now it’s done maybe Roon can revisit some of the outstanding feature requests.

I will not hold my breath .

My advice remains. A box set , especially classical ones, rarely comprise of a collection of previously released albums so splitting and applying individual artwork is often not appropriate. SO import the box as is and use the current tools to navigate.

Not ideal and certainly not what people want to hear , but until Roon defines a concrete box set object it’s at least a solution with little or no metadata effort to achieve it

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Yes, hopefully now that that Roon mobile/Arc is done, some attention can be brought back to the core app functionality. As an aside, I think that Arc is an excellent development that allows access to (and some manipulation of) your music library away from the home.

Regarding your advice, in my experience there are many box sets that comprise a collection of previously released albums. Just last night for example I was sorting out the Pink Floyd Discovery box set - which comprises all their standard studio albums, just remastered.

Even if the albums haven’t previously been released, they often have associated artwork. Artwork that tends to be lost if you just import as a box set, with the artwork then being the cover of the box set, or equivalent.

My current solution is to tag all box set items with the box set name :smile: That way I can at least find the box sets but more importantly, they’re ready for editing when Roon comes up with the proper solution.

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Yep rock sets are often a collection of the bands albums , the Pink Floyd is a typical example.

classical on the other hand are often old vinyl LPs then padded with extra tracks to give value for money

Hence a disc often doesn’t match an album release. DG / Philips / Universal are prime candidates at releasing the “complete recordings on DG” of XXX by dredging up their back catalogue and having a conscience about a 35-40 min CD :smiling_imp:. These give Roon problems in matching to ID.

I can’t comment on jazz

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WHAT?

https://www.amazon.com/Karl-Bohm-Complete-Orchestral-Blu-ray/dp/B0979P5RSQ

https://www.amazon.com/Karl-Complete-Opera-Vocal-Recordings/dp/B077PRXPG6

And I could go on - There are MANY MANY boxes like this, like the wonderful cheap ones form Warner Classics for example, all original jackets, previously released; obviously a different jacket with the original art per each disc. You want that associated with each disc and the box art with everything.

And you want them together - you want them as a box set as per example the orchestral recordings of Karl Bohm are MANY - of course, you could have them as 68 separate discs but, well, I DO HAVE THE BOXSET and want to store like that and I want the boxset to appear in my library as such…

[ I jus saw your later comment re: boxes like this and it is true, they MAY not be exactly the original release but guess what, very often they also are, like with the recent Sony cheapo boxes or their monster Complete recordings for Columbia from Walter, Ormandy, Szell, Bernstein, Mitropoulous; in fact, those very often are a combo. Some of the discs are exactly the same as the original release, some are not.

I do not even know how Qobuz or Tidal or the metadata services handle this kind of box, nor do I care - I buy my Classical megaboxes, rip them and meticulously tag them with full info and more than one artwork jpeg per disc, the one for the individual jacket and the general one with the box art work also in the hopes that one day the problem will be solved and I will be able to exploit that.

I don’t care how much Roon struggles to ID - That’s the reason I tag them myself. I want them to handle the box sets no matter what. No matter all the tricks I try to pull with my own tagging, I still have to fight and lose against Roon’s natural inclination to break everything up. And when it doesn’t it is still a very awkward library item ]
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2 Likes
47

Each to his own , sorry if you disagree with my comments .

What I did say was that if they will split then split them but mostly they won’t ALL split nicely Roon depends on ID’ing the album to correctly attribute Work/Part (Composition/Movement) . If you don’t search your library on Composition that’s fine , if you depend on the Composition or Local/Tidal Composition counts its not fine.

What it means if you meticulously tag everything then you have to go into each album and “Prefer my Tags” , globally preferring “Mine” is often a recipe for disaster. Some box sets require this anyway due to the poor and incomplete metadata.

It’s well known that the Big Boxes often come with minimal metadata so much depends on devotees populating MusicBrainz to get a decent match.

I was merely stating from my experience. I have recently imported some of my big boxes that I have deliberately excluded from Roon specifically for ID reasons . Importing them as Individual albums with individual artwork works a lot of the time but in my experience not always . I keep all my big boxes duplicated in JRMC so that I can attribute individual disc names and artwork . (Incidentally I gave up and removed them from Roon and navigate them in JRMC where I can define what they look like)

This is missing in Roon and has long been a feature request

At least importing the box as the full box Roon can (hopefully) ID it and all the navigation tools in Roon will work. If its not ID’ed often the focus tools, Composition , Composer view etc will fail. Normally missing compositions because Roon doesn’t know them

Some good examples

  • Glenn Gould Original jackets Split fine
  • Sviatoslav Richter Philips DG doesn’t it leaves many stranded
  • Alfred Brendel Philips - many discs have extra tracks like Brahms PC 1 has the Ballades Op.10 added which prevents ID. The Beethoven Sonata cycles re in a different order than the original releases.

I could go on. I have around 300 box sets in my library many are of the Complete Recordings Of type because as you point out they are great value for money and an easy way to get all recordings of X.

I am not commenting off the cuff, many do work many don’t

Many CD releases of back catalogue are old vinyls at say 45 mins packed to 70 mins on the CD to give “Value for Money”. Many would moan if the CD’s were only part filled just to match the Vinyl releases

I would just love to have a Tag style Box Set view with each disc separate and individual artwork but I am working with what I have not what I want . Focus at album level made this a reality but it too is not too good if the box is say 100 discs it slows down too much.

Each to his own …Nuff Said

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I hadn’t realised it was so much. I am curious. With so much in JRMC What proportion of your library is actually in roon?

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Most , where I can split a box I do , anything that doesn’t ID stays in its Box in JRMC and not in Roon . I had a big clean up of duplicates and separated out “Non Core” stuff . I have about 200 not ID’ed out of around 7000 in Roon that way

So Roon is 130 K 3Tb, JRMC is the same 130 k plus another 1Tb of “odds & sods”.

My logic is if I can’t ID it its going to cause problems so I take it out and use Tidal. Come the day Tidal dies its all still in JRMC

I am getting old and cranky :rofl: :rofl:

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I think what I really meant is that 300 box sets averaging 25 CD’s per box is 7,500 CD’s. Obviously box sets can vary from 2CD’s to hundreds but still, just guessing, the vast majority of your local library of 7,000 disks must therefore be box sets. So are you saying that because of the GUI customizations with JRMC that in practical terms you end up mostly using JRMC to navigate your library rather than roon?

I personally find that once a box set gets beyond about 12/15 CD’s I usually use windows explorer to navigate as it is too much manual editing to make them navigable in roon. So large boxes I generally do not split even if they are original jackets.

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No there are masses of duplication, maybe my maths is wrong. I count box sets as anything over 3 discs so say Beethoven sonatas are 10 CDs, Kempff Schumann 4CD’S etc . Roon will count each one as an album , so it’s an album count not a disc count.

I have lots of Duo’s Double Deccas etc I count as boxes.

In terms of listening, when I built the NUC I couldn’t source an 8 Tb SSD so I went 4Tb . That prompted me to move duplicates. Unlistened stuff into a separate drive. So my main library was smaller and then supplemented by Tidal.

In terms of listening I use Roon 99% . JRMC just has the big boxes where the odd disc lives. If I couldn’t ID I left in in its big box. JRMC is there for video, even less now with Netflix usage

I am contemplating bringing the big boxes into Roon but it’s massive duplication for probably little gain

So really my Roon library is not far off single albums with nothing > 10 (Beethoven sonatas etc) CD at a guess. It reduces clutter and speeds things up to have no biggies

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Craig, I think this is the solution I am looking for with my GD box sets, but I am having one problem - how do I find the “work name” field in Roon. Here is what I have: I started with the GD May 1977: Get Shown the Light box. It includes four concerts. I adjusted the data using Tag editor - making all the album tags "May 1977: Get Shown The Light. Then I added a field called Work which listed the individual concert dates i.e. Cornell University, Ithaca NY 5-8-77.

The good news is that all four concerts showed up under a single album cover in Roon. However, It doesn’t show the name of the concert. It shows Disc 1, 2, 3, 4 and each concert is contained under a disc. How do I get the workname field to show up in Roon?

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Been a bit since I tackled this so had to go back and look at my tags. But if I remember correctly it is the “Roon Work” and “Roon Part” tags that are critical to make this work in Roon. I set both “Work” and “Roon Work” tags to the same info (because other places I might load the same file would likely use Work). And I set “Title” and “Roon Part” the same info (which is the track name) again for the same reason. But without the Roon tags set properly this won’t work.

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Are any Roon devs reading this? Really useful further perspectives on the need for improved box set management.

2 Likes
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Maybe, but probably not.

grafik

Note: The #feedback category is the one that also contains #feedback:feature-suggestions. There are many related suggestions to be found that can be discussed and voted for (Search results for '#feedback:feature-suggestions box set' - Roon Labs Community) while this is a thread created by a user to demonstrate how he works around Roon’s current limitations.