Organising 78 and 45 rpm records

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi,
I have a large library of recordings released in 78s and 45s. It’s all mp3 and I have them organised in separate folders within each artist’s folder. On an ID3 level, I have all 78s or 45s grouped in albums, eg ‘this artist’s 78 records’. This works perfectly on Winamp where I can select an artist, go to the ‘album’ for 78 or 45, and have them all listed in chronological order.

Now, when I try to open them in Roon, I get a list of separate ‘albums’ that are based on the folder system, rather than on the ID3. And it’s not useful at all.

So the question is, does Roon have any kind of way for categorising 44s and 78s? In they marketing video, they said that ‘album’ categorisations make no sense for Classical Music composers. And I agree. But I feel the same is true for artists who recorded before albums were a thing.

Thanks
John

2

I still group mine into artist e.g., “Walter Huston” and then album folders, giving albums the best name that I can such as “September Song (Single)”

This works well enough, even though the TiVo and other metadata can’t make matches in a lot of cases.

3

I see. Do you have many singles? I have nearly 200 singles for some artists and I’d find it terribly inconvenient browsing them this way.

4

Roon is built around releases, so a single or album are both individual entities. If you are creating an album of singles, apart from Roon not identifying it, you would have to make sure internal tags include track (and disk) orders plus the invented album title.

However, it may work better with individual releases, and either tag as 45 or 78, and then filter (Focus) on this and the artist. You can bookmark this dynamic view.

5

I probably have 100 or so “singles” of old content and many of them are not identifiable because TiVo and MusicBrainz don’t have them in their metadata collections. But they still fall within the appropriate artist sections just like releases that are identifiable.

6

I have only some days worth of experience with it, but it looks like it’s rather built around folders. It just shows the files based on the folder they’re in and disregards album title for structuring the library.
An example of my folder structure is:

Artist – 78s – year – catalogue number – files

The way that I manipulate this through winamp via id3 is:

Album artist – album (78s) – files (where in the file list, among other info, under “artist” I see all the contributing artists)

In roon I get:

Artist – catalogue number folder (but named after the id3 tag as “78s”)

I believe that the way that I have it structured in winamp is pretty straightforward. Sure, it’s a workaround, and I’m not looking for the same thing in Roon, but I was hoping for a way to structure music without using the LP based structure (similarly to what they have for classical music).

But thank you both for your help @mjw & @DDPS

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