One suggestion for Organising a Classical Music Collection in Roon

[JOHN_COULSON]

I’ve now been at this editing chore of the music collection for over 10 years, first with Meridian, now with Roon so thought to pass on the limited wisdom accrued in that time after having made some mistakes which have taken hours of work to rectify.

There are many ways of cataloguing the music to make access using Roon easier so what I’ve done could be improved upon but I’m putting it forward to stimulate ideas and possibly help. There is limited consistency with how classical album data is presented so that makes organising and editing it a veritable PIA. But that does give the basic clue, whatever you decide upon, BE CONSISTENT. So here is the way I’ve attempted to organise –

1. COMPOSERS. If an album is the music of one composer only, I put the surname (only) first so all such albums look like e.g. Beethoven: detail of the works; Handel: detail of the works
   Many albums feature more than one composer so I use the header Various: Copy the Album Title and follow with a list of the composers involved (surnames only).
   With some composers like Bach, there are more than one with thar surname but if JS is the composer, I do not add anything but do for CPE & others. Similarly with Williams, I use V.Williams for Vaughan – use whatever you prefer but be consistent.

The advantage of this is when the albums in Roon are displayed under ”Album Title” it puts all composer albums together , making them easier to find. That does leave the “Various” albums needing discovery using the search function, something that is improving as time goes on with updates.

2. ARTISTS, I use full names for these but observe the following self imposed “rules”
   (i) The conductor always appears before the Orchestra (I had not been careful enough about this so many albums were “buried” and not seen - correcting it has taken hours).
   (ii) If there is an additional artist as in a concerto, he/she goes first, then the conductor and finally the orchestra
   (iii) Operas and choral works pose a challenge as often there is more than one leading artist so it is most likely best to put the conductor first. Against that you might prefer to list a few like Joan Sutherland, Maria Callas first so you can quickly locate them but that is not really necessary as often these artists are associated with the one conductor.

The obvious advantage of this is that all albums of a particular artist are displayed together in Roon under “Artist” display.

3. TAGS If you are dissatisfied with the universal tags categorisation, Roon offers the opportunity for you to create your own simpler system. The one I originally created is not the best but I’ve been stuck with it and if I was starting again I would allocate one or more of each of the following tags to each album:
   Chamber
   Baroque & Early
   Choral – chorus
   Choral – small group
   Choral – song
   Concerto
   Folk & Ethnic
   Instrumental – brass
   Instrumental – cello
   Instrumental – guitar, lute etc
   Instrumental – harp
   Instrumental – harpsichord
   Instrumental – organ
   Instrumental – piano
   incremental – Violin & viola
   Instrumental – woodwind
   Instrumental – Z Other
   Mood
   Oddball & Avante Garde
   Opera – arias etc
   Opera – complete
   Oratorio
   Orchestral

4. ADDING MORE INFORMATION Roon has developed a lot in recent years so most albums link to more info but there is the chance to add more if desired, particularly to those unidentified. I concoct items (reviews, more pictures etc) using copy and paste in WORD, convert to PDF then add the item into the Windows Explorer folder. It then appears in Roon to be opened up from there.

5. Alternate cover graphic display. I design things using Publisher, convert to a jpg format, so it can then be inserted into the album when editing. At one stage I altered album display in sets so each one had a unique number or something else obvious in the graphics but am not doing this as much now because the Roon structure for the header allows more to be displayed there to identify particular albums in a set. But the option is there if you have the time and inspiration.

Bottom line in all this is that editing is a time consuming chore but doing it carefully and with consistency will ultimately pay dividends by making accessibility to music in your library easier.

[jhwalker (John Walker)]

I use #1 and a variant of #2 - I always put the orchestra FIRST, followed by the conductor. Just my preference.

[Neil_Small]

@JOHN_COULSON thanks. Shared elsewhere (with a link back to this post) so other classical listeners can benefit from your comprehensive guide.

[Paul_Williams]

I follow similar rules and always amend the metadata to conform to these rules whether on my own digital downloads (or less strictly) for any streaming content that I save (of course this is one thing that Roon facilitates).

Composer first and I will also list second composer and third composer if significant with the names of the works

If I have multiple versions (eg Beethoven symphonies) I will append conductor’s name and year (if necessary) in the title, or sometimes major artist such as singer or soloist and year or version (if necessary)

Artist order: Soloists/Orchestra/Conductor

Album Artist: Usually conductor except for concertos, recitals etc

Recitals - if mostly of one composer, usually go with the composer, with artist name appended otherwise artist’s surname with album title.

It is annoying that even major classical record labels are still totally inconsistent about their metadata. Even major labels will still omit the composer’s name in the digital metadata.

I would have thought by now something similar to these schemes could have been sorted out by the major classical record labels.

[Mike_O_Neill]

I do all of John’s rules except Genre , but i use a a std 01 - Orchestral, 02 - Concertos etc then I add a Sub Genre say 05 - Keyboard - Piano Sonata , this is a throwback to my JRiver library . I t does nothing in Roon as I accept Roon Genres as is

Its a bit “Gramophonish” order

Navigation in Roon is probably more important , I tend to go Artist> Discography>album these days

[Norman_Spector]

I, too, go back all the way to Meridian Sooloos and now have about 700,000 tracks in my library and one of the things I love about Roon is that its data base and search are so good that I have no need to do all this work!

[JOHN_COULSON]

Neil, I have a couple of problems which I would appreciate attention to

2 Issues – “fun” & games with Roon/Windows 10 duplicate file deletion & Tag deletion

This PC: DESKTOP-G22G84B, AMD Ryzen 9 3900X 12-Core Processor 3.79 GHz, installed RAM 64GB Over 30,000 music albums on 3 HDDS, Roon1 (8TB), Roon 2 (8TB) & Roon 3 (6TB) . Problem 1 – deleting duplicate files (and this is despite a clean up of the library via settings) There seems no rhyme or reason to what is going on. I check both albums before deciding which one to delete – usually choosing the latest entry which is usually on the currently recording HDD Roon 3. Sometimes no problem, other t…

[Geoff_Coupe]

Providing that Roon has successfully identified an album or boxset, then I simply use Roon’s Focus. I don’t bother messing about with metadata any further.

It’s true that I usually need to help Roon identify ripped boxsets, but that’s usually the extent of it…

[woodford]

as is apparent from my moniker, I work for a company that has been involved with music metadata for nearly 30 years. around 2004, the music critic and composer Greg Sandow wrote an article for the WSJ bemoaning the state of classical music metadata, and the effect this would have on the visibility of classical music in the digital domain.

Largely in response, Gracenote launched an internal project we called the Classical Music Initiative (CMI), which in 2005 resulted in a set of metadata standards called the Three Line Solution (TLS):

The centerpiece of the Classical Standard is the Three-Line Solution (TLS). The single most vexing problem in providing classical music data has been the equivalent of making a square set of data components fit into an existing triangular set of data fields (the pop paradigm mentioned above). To provide an informed listening experience for classical fans, a media player must list four basic data components: Composer, Recording Artist, Album Title and Track Title. At the moment, the vast majority of media players provide only three fields. The problem is complicated by the need to devise a system in which existing data is not corrupted and one that will be elastic enough in its design to accommodate future innovations in the form of tools, forms, programs and end products. TLS addresses all these and resolves them.

The concept of putting the composers name in the Album Name and Track Name fields, delineated by a colon, was part of the TLS standard. Gracenote provided these standards to the labels (and in many cases worked directly with the labels to define the standards), who in turn used them when they submitted recordings to digital services.

Roon does not use Gracenote metadata, but in time, this concept found its way into other databases via this submit process, so when you see an album in Roon such as Beethoven: Symphony #3 in E Flat, Op. 55, “Eroica”, that format originated with the Gracenote CMI.

But the CMI went much deeper:

and deeper still. There is a 20 page Classical Standards white paper that I won’t post here, from which the above quote is drawn, but would be happy to share via DM (it’s been made public elsewhere).

So if deep, rich, consistently formatted classical metadata standards have been available for nearly 20 years, why is most classical metadata still so poor? Because the labels, by and large, have not bothered to implement the standards many of them helped develop. A “media player,” such as Roon or Spotify, or Apple Music, can correct for some of this after the fact, but there is still the problem of correctly identifying a recording. Roon’s ability to identify classical recordings is…imprecise.

So we all develop hacks to navigate our own collections. @JOHN_COULSON’s is a good one, and I’ve read many others here. The Box Set problem is real, and something I know Roon has tried to address. Gracenote does not have a good solution for this either. But it’s not the only classical metadata problem that needs addressing.

…and don’t get me started on classical music and Roon Radio, which I’ve referred to elsewhere as the Mahler 3rd Problem.

[woodford]

here’s another old article, which popped up in my Facebook memories today. imo, nothing has really changed since 2015:

Why Can't Streaming Services Get Classical Music Right?

[Mike_O_Neill]

A fascinating read, as you say very little has changed

Attempts like Primephonic and IDAGIO barely scratch the surface , I have a whim to support IDAGIO just for the hell of it.

Apple seem to have bastardised Primephonic sadly . The content is OK but the presentation is a bit iffy. The suggestions are obscure to say the least , that said some of Roon’s top suggestions confuse me

ALAS

[joel]

This is an interesting thread, albeit one I’ve come to late.

IMO Sooloos has a lot to answer for in terms of almost encouraging a metadata grooming paradigm (there was even a Sooloos document written on how to groom) – at Roon we have always strived for a non-grooming experience out-of-the-box and feel that the activity of grooming is somewhat “unfortunate” – but I fully get it for Classical music; to date, our vision of a grooming-free solution has not been realized.

I’ve got two questions for this audience:

1. To those of you who groom the orchestra before the conductor, why is that? As a casual Classical listener, I feel that that the conductor is usually of more interest to me. For example, I’m less interested in the Berliner Philharmoniker or the Minnesota Symphony Orchestra per se, and more interested that Simon Rattle and Eiji Oue were at the helm respectively. [On the composer Discography pages, both Conductor and Ensemble focus are available of course.]

2. How useful would it be to you to be able to focus on Instrumentation, Form, and Period – currently only focusable on the Compositions page – on a composer’s Discography page? i.e. We roll-up that information at an album level, so that you could pick e.g. Concerto + Violin in Beethoven’s Discography and that would focus all of the albums that a Violin Concerto appears on, even if neither word appears in the album title?

[BlackJack]

While it may be clear what a (classical) compositions was written for, that doesn’t mean this translates well to each and any performance. I would like to see a performance instrumentation in such a case too/additionally.

And please let’s not forget that those screens (composer, composition, performances), while probably designed mainly for classical users, are available for all other material too. I especially think about possibilities to find instrumental, acapella, unplugged performances for example when thinking about instrumentation. IIRC there also exist all kinds of (unexpected, non-classical) performances of the most popular classical tunes too – which for some reason or the other may have found it’s way into a users library. Ways to quickly identify (focus on) “special” performances of tracks/albums for in- or exclusion would be great.

[joel]

@BlackJack

I would like to see a performance instrumentation in such a case too/additionally.

Subject to available metadata and a practicable use of such metadata, that makes sense.

[BlackJack]

Roon already parses track tiltes for instrumentation information. I think the current implementation is just too short-sighted and the ability to have and add to performance instrumentation is currently missing. Instrumental, acapella and unplugged special performances often carry that information in the track tile. Sadly though Roon ignored that information completely in the past and additionally also often decided to not display such and other track/performance related data (given in parenthesis mostly).

For other cases, example: a classical composition for keys where a given performance has decent credit coverage but nobody credited for playing “keys”, you may be able to figure this out. (Performance) Credits on a track are probably the best you can get online here but needs serious (AI) parsing to make sense of – but isn’t that exactly what Roon Labs is aiming for with Valence?

[tripleCrotchet (Tony)]

@joel

To those of you who groom the orchestra before the conductor, why is that? As a casual Classical listener, I feel that that the conductor is usually of more interest to me.

I may have misunderstood what you mean but the reason I like the conductor ordered after the orchestra on may screens has absolutely nothing to do with the relative importance of conductors vs. orchestras. That’s really missing the point I’m afraid.

There is often a third artist, in a concerto for example and it can be non-obvious who is the soloist and who is the conductor. So a convention “soloist / orchestra / conductor” has grown up on album art to make that clear and I like to take that over to roon. It can be particularly problematic where performers like Daniel Barenboim can just as likely be a pianist as a conductor.

And of course there are many examples of pianists like Barenboim conducting from the piano. So ordered like this, I know at a glance what is going on.

Also, once you get past a “casual” knowledge of world-famous soloists, orchestras and conductors, there are simply countless recordings where I for one have absolutely no idea who is the conductor and who is the soloist. Some orchestras in their native language forms I would have no idea whether that is an ensemble, orchestra, choir or even a soloist. This has just become much more evident and problematic since having virtually unlimited access to the obscurist and most minority repertoire with a streaming service like Qobuz. So I was certainly not a fan of the move by roon to default to native language artist forms over the last year or so. That triggered a several man-months grooming exercise for me, otherwise my library had been rendered unnavigable by this change.

By default, room seems to order soloist / orchestra / conductor alphabetically, so that creates a navigation jumble from my perspective. So unless I am lucky and the alphabetic ordering follows convention out of the box, this is a grooming step I take pretty much every time I upload an album or add to library from qobuz.

@joel

We roll-up that information at an album level, so that you could pick e.g. Concerto + Violin in Beethoven’s Discography and that would focus all of the albums that a Violin Concerto appears on, even if neither word appears in the album title?

After 7 years using roon I never knew that. Instead I laboriously add “Concerto” and “Classical/Violin” . . . “Classical/Clarinet” etc. tags so I can find my favourite instrumentation forms in focus.

This is a very good example of the solution hiding in plain sight but because the logic is very much from an IT developers way of thinking rather than a (Classical) listeners perspective the feature may as well not be there for someone like myself. I have no idea why roon would assume this is intuitive or obvious? Maybe some have discovered this trick. It never occurred to me, not for a moment as I simply do not think that way.

I am not even sure I understand what you are saying. Is that putting Concerto + Violin in the filter? It doesn’t work for me. I get this:

On your final point, for sure I would like to navigate by instrumentation, period, form etc. But I would say two things:

1. These tags are extremely patchy and unsystematic in the roon meta-data. So even in the existing Composition view, this feature never full-filled its promise. There were lengthy posts on this topic years ago and feature requests (maybe as much as 5 years a go). Nothing ever happened and roon never revisited the topic, so I am surprised to see it coming up now. Personally I never use this feature in the composition view because of the manual grooming effort involved to make it useful and just evolved the system of tags above to do the same thing.

2. Personally I don’t think adding extra instrumentation / form sections to album view adds anything, especially if the underlying patchy meta-data issue is not addressed. Navigating album view with a lot of sections is already hard work, too much scrolling, so personally, I never bother. Adding even more sections, especially when I know there will be many gaps in instrumentation / form / period wouldn’t encourage me to use a feature I have already largely abandoned.

[Mike_O_Neill]

Classical metadata is normally a mess unless you do something about it.

DG still insist on putting Artist = Composer often not even putting the actual Artist anywhere. Until that stops and ALL record labels use tags for Conductors, Orchestras, Choirs etc , heaven forbid Composition/Movement . Pigs May Fly

I have groomed mine already and add very little new stuff except Tidal which I can’t influence. If in doubt I can still use JRiver where I can control things with the tags I have corrected.

We struggle on.

I must admit my preferred rite these days is Artist> Album rather than Composition for that very reason

ALAS

[BlackJack]

@tripleCrotchet

After 7 years using roon I never knew that.

Don’t worry, it’s because it doesn’t exist. He asked about feedback if such a feature should be implemented in the future.

@tripleCrotchet

Personally I don’t think adding extra instrumentation / form sections to album view adds anything

I totally agree on that. Additional information should got to performance / track instead. Albums just don’t cut it. I admit that I’m not a classical lover but I own some classical albums (that I like) but none of them has a single composer IIRC (never used period, form and instrumentation as their current implementation and use is a joke). IMO the album approach only works for bulk-buys (a.k.a. box-sets and those have their own well known shortfalls in Roon) mostly and single work releases (where users probably don’t need the additional steps involved). Everything else (probably the big mass of a users library) is then what? Edge cases that can’t be handled properly?

[Andreas_Philipp1]

@BlackJack

Additional information should got to performance / track instead

They should really go independently to both ‘composition/work’ and ‘performance of a given composition/work’. Data like instrumentation and solo instrument may very well be different for a work as published by a composer and a given performance of such a work. E.g.: works with a solo violin part performed by recorder; works for lute performed on guitar, etc. For works I don’t know well, I’d love to see what was the instrumentation or solo instrument proposed by the composer and, of course, what’s the instrument used for a given performance.

I’ve never really invested real thought about how to comprehensively model concepts and data relevant to classical music, but I do think that the Roon team should revisit the modeling board and come up with some improvements.

Two aspects immediately come up in my mind. First, the concepts of ‘composition/work’ vs. ‘part of composition/work’ vs. ‘performance of composition’ vs ‘performance of part of composition’ should clearly be distinguished. Classical music is all about performances of published works/compositions or parts of a work/composition. Right now it is impossible to heart a given performance of a work or a work part… heart the performance, and it really means you hearted the work or work part, and that makes no sense. In addition, far too often parts of a work are represented as a work/composition in their own right.

Another aspect which in my mind illustrates semantic shortcomings is this:

‘Concerto Italiano’ is an ensemble which performs works or work parts of classical composers. They don’t do original music, they’re not a Pop/Rock/Jazz act with original compositions that could be covered by other artists. I see this on my Roon home all the time for all types of classical performers, and to me it doesn’t make sense.

What does make sense is looking at the performances section of works/compositions, to see what other performers have releases their interpretation of a given work.

[joel]

@tripleCrotchet

That’s really missing the point I’m afraid

As we see it, for a variety of reasons, Roon doesn’t work for you or many other Classical listeners in the way we wanted it to work – i.e. random-access focus, not a hierarchy of albums – and it seems that many of you have tried to fix your experience, grooming your metadata within the constraints of Roon functionality and often – unfortunately – outside the design intent of that functionality. I’m not blaming you or others here; I’m getting involved, because we want to fix the experience and reduce the additional effort that you are putting in here.

@tripleCrotchet

By default, room seems to order soloist / orchestra / conductor alphabetically

No, it’s typically how the labels provide the artist information and/or how the information on album covers is interpreted by those who enter data into metadata databases.

@tripleCrotchet

I was certainly not a fan of the move by roon to default to native language artist forms over the last year or so. That triggered a several man-months grooming exercise for me, otherwise my library had been rendered unnavigable by this change.

I’m sorry that you had to do this, but we needed to make Roon a less Anglo-centric product. And the (mainly TiVo) “English” metadata which was used previously was thoroughly inconsistent. e.g. Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra and Wiener Philharmoniker.

We do try to minimize disruption where we can – you seem to have been hit particularly hard by the Fluency change – but Classical grooming is holding us back in some ways. For example, for a long time, we’ve wanted to move away from TiVo (Classical) composition names to something better and more structured, but we’re well aware of how this might affect Roon customers who spent ages grooming their file tags with exact composition titles from allmusic. What do we do?

@tripleCrotchet

[We roll-up that information at an album level] After 7 years using roon I never knew that

You misread the context of that sentence: I was suggesting what we could do.

@tripleCrotchet

Is that putting Concerto + Violin in the filter?

No (see my previous comment).