I think that’s how we’d roll it up. i.e. differently for compositions and performances of compositions.
4 Likes
I think this is “just” a bug. This is the 2nd time I’ve seen this now. (The previous one was performing the music of Claudio Abbado.)
Edit: I have raised this within the team.
3 Likes
We are. But some fixes and improvements can be delivered without an entirely new data model.
You’re actually touching on quite a bit there, but I’ll make this subtle but important point:
Performances in Roon are essentially groupings of tracks on an album, not Performances On Earth.
So favouriting a performance isn’t a global thing: the “performances” of the 1965 du Pré/Barbirolli/LSO Elgar Cello Concerto on different albums are different performances in Roon.
This is one reason why we’ve never been keen to expose performance editing/merging functionality; trying to unpick user edits in the future could be very very difficult. We’ve talked within the team about creating Performances On Earth for a very long time; I think we may now be in a position to do it, having both the resources and technical understanding of how to go about it. It won’t be easy though and I hope that I won’t have to eat my words.
2 Likes
Not to interfere with fixing the issues for classical users, but this caught my attention,
because I always wondered (and complained) about the inability for users to fix the common issue of tracks not having the composition property for unknown reasons - and hence not being included in the list of performances. Maybe this is related to the same fundamental issues.
This is quite common and affects both classical and non-classical. It would be awesome if you could have this on the radar as well. You may have seen it, I have summarized what I and others (shout out to @tripleCrotchet) managed to find out about it in this thread, and the various other threads linked from the posts there:
4 Likes
I would find Instrumentation, form, period as part of focus on the discography page useful when I am searching.
But as others have pointed out the available metadata would still be a limiting factor. AllMusic, MusicBrainz and the data supplied by the label are a mess. I hope that some thought is put into a solution. Woodford and others have posted better on this topic than I could. But it is a rabbit hole for the classical music lover if they decide to groom their own experience in Roon. I gave up years ago and find workarounds in Roon that don’t take much time investment and make edits in my own local collection or the streaming add-ons to my library only when absolutely necessary. As things stand now it can be difficult to find a recording in some cases that is actually in the Qobuz or Tidal or even personal data base.
As for the other question, It would be helpful if all the classical releases in Roon followed the same convention, regardless of the order of orchestra/conductor/soloist settled on.
2 Likes
Could live with that, but…
it really is, and that was my point… I’ll try to illustrate with some screenshots to make it clear:
I just now added this album with du Pré/Barbirolli/LSO Elgar Cello Concerto to my library, and immediately hearted what I understand is the du Pré’s performance on this given album; it even tells me ‘Performed by Jacqueline du Pré’:
I now click on the icon representing the 9 known performances of this work in my library, then select any given other performance, by another artist on another album. All perfomances of the Elgar concert are now hearted, as Roon apparently cannot distinguish between the work itself and a given performance:
You must trust me on that I didn’t have any other performance of the Elgar concert hearted, as in fact I don’t ever heart any performance of any work in my library, because of the problem I intend to illustrate here…
1 Like
Gotcha (I was talking about a different concept). Thanks for flagging this.
Yes, favouriting a Roon performance is, I think, favouriting its composition. I agree with you 100% that they are not the same thing.
Yes, I think it would be desirable to be able to favourite a composition and favourite a Performance On Earth independently. The latter does not of course exist yet.
This is one case where we may have a problem with existing user favourites (I don’t know if the current “performance” favourite is recorded against the Roon performance or the composition). If the latter, we haven’t captured the user intent (assuming they wanted to favourite the specific performance i.e. the du Pré in your example). But we also have to consider that non-Classical performances can be favourited too.
2 Likes
I would be happy to be able to favourite a performance as on a given album. Makes sense to me, as different albums may correspond to different masterings, etc.
I imagine the semantics of favouriting a Roon performance could be rather easily changed… let the given gouping of tracks on that given album be favourited, not the composition… Let me on the perfomance list of a given composition find or focus in onto my favourited performances…
I think I would only rarely like to favourite a composition per se… it’s all about the performance of a composition, and I really miss very much not being able to select favourite performances, other than by favouriting entire albums…
By the way, I appreciate the renewed effort by the Roon team to get into meaningful conversations with users. Have noticed in the last weeks several such efforts, which is good.
1 Like
This is another difficult issue for us.
Some people might prefer one version in their library over another and use favourites for that purpose, even though we consider the musical content the same (yes there are semantics over whether or not a remaster renders the musical content different if the mix is the same). The same applies to track favourites: the musical content might be identical, but you want to favourite your DSD128 version and ban another version of the track.
And yet many others want a favourite of a track to mark it as a favourite for all tracks which are musically equivalent. They would also like favourites and play history persist for musically equivalent content if they have to replace a removed streaming release with another – equivalent – one.
Ok, but you explained that for Roon a performance is a grouping of tracks (one or more) on a given album. And I feel that this would work well, if Roon would allow me to favourite such a performance, rather than a composition per se. I understand that the same performance on another edition of the album or on a collection album would then not be automatically show as favourited, as the tracks on another album would be considered by Roon as another performance.
This, until you may be able to implement the concept.of ‘performance on Earth’…
Right. This now becomes a couple of product questions:
-
Do we change the favouriting of a Roon performance to make that specific performance on the album a favourite. (And what are the implications of doing so?)
-
Do we automatically transfer that performance-on-an-album favourite over to other performances-on-albums which represent the same Performance On Earth (if and when we’re able to deliver that concept)?
1 Like
Just so. If in the short term the implementation of Roon performance favourites were feasible, that would be great.
At a later point in time and with the concept of ‘performance on Earth’ a thing in Roon, all other same performance instances on other album editions could be automatically marked as favourite…
I should add, in case it’s not obvious, but the concept of Performance On Earth would result in better recommendations of performances of compositions, because all play of performance tracks representing the same actual recording (1965 du Pré etc.) would be rolled up rather than scattered over many different albums (as the '65 du Pré is). The popularity of the performance would be that much better an indicator of actual performance popularity amongst Roon users.
3 Likes
Yes, I would be one of those. I hazard a guess. No one was doing this before they signed up to roon? I certainly wasn’t. I never even heard of allmusic/TiVo. But if you want to get roon working at anywhere close to its potential and differentiated from other players then you quickly learn that baked in roon meta-data conventions like TiVo are going to have to be complied with.
Isn’t the vast majority of the grooming you are observing just to get roon working? Failed album and composition identifications, broken composition hierarchies. That sort of thing. I never did any of this with previous players because they don’t work that way and simple text based sorting and searching was enough. So I would say that in genres where it matters to me, grooming effort is exponentially increased with roon. Far from a grooming-free experience.
There are genres where I do almost no grooming, But this is not because I see no issues, I just don’t care.
It’s beginning to look like roon is being held back by defacto standards and conventions of its own making and change is now difficult if not impossible. It wouldn’t be a bad thing to move on with an entirely new architecture but I cannot see Harman being up for that so a complete break maybe?
1 Like
I can’t promise anything, but as I said, we’re sensitive to this. A “legacy” composition title would seem possible, but it’s an annoying complication in code which I didn’t write. We’ll cross that bridge…
I’m not sure. Having good metadata has always helped search in these text-based apps, but it was necessitated (in Roon) due to Roon’s local (i.e. on your own Roon Server) composition equivalencing. i.e. Matching up different compositions where compositions – from Roon metadata and/or local track titles + composer credit – match. I believe that a degree of textual normalization is performed on track and composition titles, but Classical composition titles are typically a lot longer and have more variation. With Roon’s Classical composition names being those from TiVo, that’s why editing composition names to those from allmusic yielded the best results.
I can’t say whether or not the majority of (Classical) grooming is to get Roon “working” or not. As I wrote earlier, many Sooloos users were simply accustomed to grooming and launched into it with Roon, and many other users came to Roon with a variety of metadata schemes which, often, were more suited to a filesystem-based navigational approach.
Yes, we’re aware of these issues… and we have solid ideas on how to fix them. You are right in that they can have knock-on effects.
Do you mean failures to group tracks?
Sure. Being object-id-based rather than text-based, Roon is a lot more complex, more powerful, but the requirement to get everything into the right object id is paramount.
Difficult perhaps, but not impossible. 
I have certainly not given up, nor have I lost my hunger for Roon to be not only best-in-class, but truly World Class. I am more optimistic than ever that the Harman acquisition can make this happen.
4 Likes
That’s great to hear!
I’d think that yes, the failure to correctly group tracks and make composition parts (single tracks) appear as compositions in their own right… without any possibility to address the problem for streaming content…
Thinking that work is being done on these and other aspects of the difficult field of classical music gives me back some faith… Thank you…
1 Like
Hi Joel,
-
I agree with you. While the orchestra is very important, when I’m searching for an album of orchestral music, my first thought is which conductor’s take I’m interested in, at the moment? Do I want to listen to Karajan or Harnoncourt, for example, in Beethoven’s 3rd.
-
Something like that would be cool. I’d love to be able do something like Piano - Concerto - 20th Century or Romantic Period - Lieder - German…etc.
1 Like
I’m thrilled to here this. I love Roon, but I feel like it can be even better.
Typically if you put 10 classical users in a room you will get 11 opinions 
Would a good start be to get a comprehensive view of how classical users go about finding “That Piece” to listen to. “Top ten tips and techniques each” .There are many ways to skin the Roon Cat 
No offence to Roon but sometime it is difficult to (Classical) navigate and we no doubt have all developed our own workarounds . If Roon Dev’s knew those would it help to model the information .
As in all things KISS helps.
For example , I listen mainly my local files and have a fair (Not Encyclopedic) knowledge of what I have and by which artist . So my first stab is Artist>Local Albums , if that fails then Discography to include Tidal as well.
- I almost never use search, it simply doesn’t work on complex strings and there are better, quicker ways (this debate rages elsewhere)
- I rarely use the Composition view. If all else fails I WILL use it.
- Composer>Discography is very useful especially when you add the Filter
- I have a Tag of my sorta top ‘20’ Artists - I use Filter + 3 letters etc then Discography
- I have a second Tag of new artists of interest etc
- As my main first step I use the Artist view then Filter a few letters to get to an artist. This works equally well on Rock etc too
- I add one album (at least) of an Artist to my library so that the Artist will be in he Artist view and findable quickly with the Filter technique.
In the good old (pre Roon) days I would go Composer>Artist>Album , I had to modify my techniques although the revised Composer view now make that possible.
Inevitably Box Sets raise their ugly heads in a discussion like this . (The revised V1.8) Focus helps but I have to admit I have pulled most of my biggies (Brendel 114 etc) out of Roon and added back “Split Off” albums where possible. I manage big boxes in JRiver still where I can define a View that will display each disc as a Disc (Not album which they often aren’t). Big boxes in Roon cause sluggish response in Focus , there was a thread about the Mozart 225 box some time back. I would make a stab at < 50 CD is OK.
This still a shortcoming in Roon that has been on the feature request list for many years.
Just a few ramblings …
2 Likes
I think Roon should be for all.
Does not exist for users of solely local libraries. There is only Overview and Compositions.
For me personally, if I use the Composer browser at all, if for classical or non-classical content, my first interest is not in Albums (or Discography for that matter) but compositions. If I’m interested in a given compostion, click on it and from the performances screen you can get further information (Albums, Performers, …) or just play them.
1 Like