It turns out that most of the effects I am seeing like duplicates, missing links and odd groupings are caused by the interactions of equivalents and credits with my library tags. I can see that it is often possible to achieve a cleaner result by editing combinations of primary artists / album artists and credits. “Merging artists” is probably not the way to go. But there are a lot of limitations to this solution approach. The scale of the mismatches makes it impractical and in any case there is not a lot of point in me perpetuating what I consider bad metadata by aligning my tags with roon in every case.
Going forward it will be better if I post my equivalence mismatches here as there appears to be a procedure for contacting the metadata suppliers.:
But there is still a case for a more free-form “classical library issues” thread to collect together topics that are currently scattered around the KB. Is that possible? my list of topics would include:
Tagging best practice
There are no standards out there but iTunes guidelines to its suppliers is the closest to one that has emerged. roon seems to roughly adhere to it. Probably many of us unconsciously already do as well. But there are misunderstandings and inconsistencies of approach and it would be nice to have somewhere to more systematically treat this topic, especially as it impacts classical libraries. For example I would like to find ways of improving the grouping of classical compositions in my library. I don’t see this discussed but I rather suspect that incompatable choices of “delimiters” in track titles effects the consistency with which classical compositions are parsed and grouped
Delimiters
The parsing of “comma” delimiters in artist lists causes a different kind of havoc but at the end of the day they are widespread in public databases and legacy local libraries particularly where artist lists are very long in choral and operatic works. What to do? How to batch groom to overcome “lastname, firstname” cases, for example?
Equivalents
This is going to be an uphill struggle with the metatdata suppliers that may never have a totally satisfactory resolution. It has very widespread impacts on search, grouping, links, reachability. I think it is time to consider the provision of manually configurable equivalence matching and I can raise a feature request but I do not know how realistic this is in the short term. Are there are other workarounds that can be used to improve the roon classical music experience in the meantime?
Composer Hierarchy
In several of the most important parts of the roon GUI, search is still prioritisng the “performance” or “production” contribution of composers rather than “compositions”. This leads to very bizare, confsing results with even the simplest searches. Long term, this sort of interface handling for classical music needs a re-think. But as a quick fix it would be nice simply to have the option of switching off performance/production screens for classical or at least ensuring that the default is that composition screens always come up first. Also, a simple list of albums where the composers main contribution is composition should be much easier to find as for many of us this would be a starting point on a search. Again I can raise a feature request(s) but I do not know how realistic that is and I would like to have somewhere to systematically explore the work-arounds particularly as they effect local classical libraries.
Reviews
Very large numbers of missing classical album reviews. Why is that?
Local metadata control
This is obviously the elephant in the room. There appear to have been great strides in 1.3 but many are still experiencing recurring interaction effects between local library tags and roon metadata. It would be nice to have somewhere to more systematically explore these effects on local classical libraries and have a way of influencing their resolution on the roon roadmap…