Geoff, thanks for the kind help (I helped others with my previous player project).
It’s very early here and I need more sleep. I’ll read your linked articles later. I was looking for the minimum tags I need for classical and some pop, as I’ll have to programmatically add them before importing. I believe I only used these before, and to good effect:
Artist
Title
Album
Track
and I put composer in the artist which I’ve now been informed is not a good practice. But at the time, it worked well for my needs, as I didn’t need genre-based querying.
There are limits on path lengths. Software that is designed to work on different operating systems and with a variety of storage configurations often has to chose the lowest common denominator.
It seems to me to be very likely that your approach in combination with classical data may lead to issues (tracks, albums not shown in Roon) here – you wouldn’t be the first. Please keep an eye on path lengths.
The post you are referring to is about composition identification, not searching.
I find that roon regularly misidentifies compositions and gave the example of Debussy because I thought it was easy to understand. I regularly use the the composition viewer you have posted to manually fix these misidentifications.
In the case of Debussy, it is happening because Tivo uses two catalogue numbers in the composition titles. Roon will often mix them up if there is only one in the metadata. But there are regular misidentifications of other composers work as well for other reasons. For example, Telemann catalogue numbers are case sensitive but roon treats them as if they are not leading to composition mix-ups.
I came in to this thread late and without realizing it I was responding to some conversations about search dating back to the January 6 timeframe in this discussion. I apologize for the confusion.
Roon as other music players tend to ignore your paths other than to store them to locate the file later. To split them to release usable metadata would require a degree of standardization that simply doesn’t exist.
Roon will attempt to ID an album and from there looks up it’s own metadata . Roon does NOT alter your files , it stores the metadata in it’s database.
as @Geoff_Coupe says any additional tags improve the chance of Roon ID ing the album correctly. In essence the accurate ID of the album is the first stage in Roon’s Magic. If an album fails to ID the interlinks , compositions etc may be less than optimal.
Hence my comment about extracting pseudo albums from Box Sets , the Box may ID the individual discs may not
As an example in a very large library I have less than 70 albums that are not ID’ed and most of these are split pseudo albums. It is a low number to strive for.
I have been manually tagging my classical (about 50% of my collection) albums for many years.
I am facing two challenges in making the next step to more consistent metadata:
A long time ago I took the decision to use [lastname, firstname] for all people names, mainly to have alphabetic lastname sort in Windows file manager. The folder structure is Albumartist\Album\disc#-track# - trackname. I am low looking into using firstname lastname for people and set the sort variants of the people tags as lastname, firstname. The folder name will then simply equate to albumartistsort to give the correct windows sorting.
The question is how do I go about this. I have given songkong a go, but I am currently ending up with close to 20% unidentified albums, which is around 15’000 tracks of my 165k total tracks. That’s a lot to manually tag, even if I use some of the sophisticated scripting functionality of jRiver.
I am in an ongoing conversation with @paultaylor of songkong about the unidentified albums and one of the issues seems to be that also the MusicBrainz metadata is far from perfect, which sometimes leads to non-matches.
Does anyone have a suggestion how I best tackle this issue? At the moment I am considering to use jRiver to do the population of the people tags sort fields (easy, just copy) and then do a regedit replacement process turning lastname, firstname into firstname lastname by parsing for the comma. This should significantly increase the identification rate of Songkong and allow me to retrieve metadata for a higher percentage of my albums.
From where I stand currently, it looks like I will need to use a combination of methods.
In order not create a mix-up of issues, I will describe my second issue in a separate post.
I think it is great that Roon evaluates WORK and PART fields to identify compositions. But
where do I get the correct WORK and PART names from and
it is a major effort to manually add these fields once I have found the correct names
Roon obviously knows the correct names, otherwise it would not be able to to a match. I have asked several times for a work chooser functionality. I would like to be able to mark a number of tracks and then use a wizard to identify that these form parts of i.e. Mahler’s first symphony. Roon would then identify the composition and populate the WORK and PART fields and adjust the display names of the tracks. This would be similar to force linking an album to a MusicBrainz release in SongKong.
Tags could by written through by exporting the files from Roon.
I use MusiCHI tagger. It has MusiClean which does a lookup of Composition then using the Text Processing feature to split off Movement
Unfortunately MusiCHI seems to have fallen off the map i think you can still buy it if you Google. I have the install files but you would need a license it was 20 Euro
Musicbrainz can be a bit hit and miss and automating iz is not perfect. I have tried SongKong but finish up manual
Its a very manual hit and miss process
Of late i have just let Roon do its thing and manually correct in JRiver. The expression language is great i correct Compositio then Movement then construct the track name wiyh Rename Move function
There are no standards that is a big issue even Musicbrainz and AllMusic can differ. At least doing it manually YOU decide the standard
Hi, now do you mean unidentified by SongKong or unidentified by Roon. if an album is identified by SongKong it is much more likely to then be identified by Roon, and even if not identified it will have better metadata so that artists ectera can be identified in Roon even if album is not known, additionally there are going to be albums that SongKong could not identify but Roon can.
You sent me a run of SongKong in preview mode and of 20,516 tracks it matched 15,765 to MusicBrainz albums and another 2,728 to a MusicBrainz song only. These are all Classical which are harder to match than Pop/Rock because not as well represented in online databases and more variation in how users tag classical music.
But have you tried running with preview disabled and then refresh Roon so it is aware of the new metadata.
The issue is specific to Classical Music on MusicBrainz and only affects a few albums, and no database is perfect but I expect to add an improvement to resolve this in next release of SongKong
I did mention this but that was before i discovered the other issue, I dont think fixing that manually is going to make much difference.
Thanks @paultaylor for the heads up. Looks like Songkong is the most promising way to go. You continuously improving the product makes a big difference, thank you! Hope the percentage of matches can be improved. I will continue sending you the analysis material over on the jthink forum.
Users may not always follow the guidelines correctly, although the voting system generally allow incorrect edits to get fixed quickly.
The guidelines are defining how information is entered into the MusicBrainz database, this is different to defining how metadata is added to your own music files, although of course related
When adding metadata to your music files some tag formats have limitations that make it difficult to use exactly same approach over different music formats.
Dont know about AllMusic
When tagging music files there are intended use for most fields usually derived form the ID3 format (even if not using ID3 eg Flac) that were either clearly defined at the time or have become defacto standards and it is best to stick to these when tagging for best comptatbility with music applications.
Some common things that can often cause issues are:
Storing composer in the AlbumArtist or Artist field, should just go in Composer field
Storing sort names (e.g lastname, firstname) in the name fields e.g in Artist instead of Sort Artist
Variation in the value of Album or AlbumArtist fields within one album
Thanks @tripleCrotchet Tony. I am aware that allmusic.com holds the master composition data that Roon uses. I have copy pasted that data into a text file in the past and then written it to tags with mp3Tag using Convert / Text File - Tag. But it is a significant amount of work. Now if allmusic had a way to export this existing data to a text file, it would be a big help. But I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.
I would be interested in a quicker way to do this via parsing. Can you elaborate, please?
If you are already using mp3tag and its too much work then you are left with autotagers like songkong. Personally I usually find it much quicker to cut and paste allmusic directly into mp3tag just enough for roon to make an identification and let roon do the rest of the work. I have never used the mp3tag text file import option.
Try the text file import option. I copy the work title into the text file x times (as needed) and then add the movement number and the movement titles behind.
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 - 1. Un poco sostenuto - Allegro
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 - 2. Andante sostenuto
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 - 3. Un poco allegretto e grazioso
Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68 - 4. Finale. Adagio - Più andante - Allegro non troppo, ma con brio
Then import the whole thing into the tags in one go. I find this quite efficient.
It would be even easier if allmusic had an export option to generate the text file that I populate manually. But I’m not holding my breath for that to happen.
Was in a similar situation a few years ago and found it useful to understand WHY these albums are not identified despite from having a set of metadata in either TiVo or MusicBrainz. According to what I have learned, there is usually a repeating reason for roon refusing to identify a lot of albums.
Typical examples are contradictive album artist, primary artist, album title, track durations or disc number in the file tags. In some cases misleading folder names, duplicated albums in MusicBrainz/Tivo or alike.
Try to manually identify a bunch of examples and check if roon is making a reasonable suggestion for the album match. Usually you get a feeling of what is the most common issue of non-identification. In my case it was mainly track durations and disc numbers.
I would subsequently use a tagging tool to correct only these issues and hope for roon identifying more albums automatically. Some you anyways have to bring to manual identification.
