Maybe this is a recent bug, because I seem to remember that I could add personnel to an already identified album by way of file tags. But anyway, it’s not possible at this moment (build 537). Why is this?
I’d like the name of the lyricist to be shown underneath each song. And although I have filled all of the LYRICIST file tags with the appropriate names, they are not shown here. Note that this album is Identified by Roon.
Well, I thought, maybe Roon does not read the LYRICIST file tag and so I tried and added PERSONNEL file tags containing for instance “Christian Fürchtegott Gellert - Lyricist”. But Roon does not read or show the lyricist’s name in this form either.
My next idea was to un-identify the album, although I really don’t want to do without the extras that come with an identification such as the album review, but anyway, so I did.
Imagine my surprise when I saw this:
Do you suggest to set “Track’s Composer Credits” to “Merge Roon and File” so the Lyricist is shown?
And “Track’s Other Performer Credits” for the PERSONNEL tags to be shown?
I have stayed far away from changing these import settings for most of the time since starting with Roon last December, because it takes days for Roon to implement a new setting. I have over 200,000 tracks, so…
I would expect that this would show your file tag values in addition to what Roon has. I’d try it with one setting first, even so I believe it will work. I’m using “merge” for all credits except “Production” - this I did set to “file”.
What should work as well: adding the lyricist credit in Roon via the track editor.
BTW before making any library settings change it’s a good idea to trigger a manual backup of your database. Just in case …
Thanks for your quick reaction, @anon47919701
Do you perhaps also have an answer to my second question, about the PERSONNEL tags?
Brrr. I’ve tried that but I much prefer securing all knowledge I have of a track inside the track itself, just in case my Roon database suddenly gets corrupted, or the company goes belly up…
I like to see the Lyricists as well. So I have set all of the track credit settings except production to “merge”. So Personnel tags work for me. But this leads to another problem mostly with Classical as far as I can see.
If you set these switches to “merge” you will see a lot of duplicates. The “Lyricist” will often appear both as a composer and a lyricist.
The reason seems to be that roon must process a lot of credit roles similar to “Lyricist”. Roles like, “Words By”, “Written By”, “Text”, “Librettist” etc. etc. There are dozens of them.
With Classical albums the roon metadata often has multiple roles for the Lyricist. “Text” is very common for example, as Goethe or Shakespeare is not normally considered a Lyricist like Ozzy Osbourne. If you “merge” and you also have a personnel tag set to Lyricist, roon will often pick up a “Text” or similar credit from its own metadata but interpret that as a composer, so you will get a duplicate on the display page.
This is very common. There are several support tickets that have picked up on this. I don’t know if it is being addressed.
Again, it works for me with the “merge” setting. If it’s the best way to do it I honestly don’t know. The Import Settings KB article hasn’t much to say about merge - I just checked.
I think that’s because a lyricist is a composer in the metadata model. I think there was some discussion going on to tackle this but I’m not sure how far it has progressed. I still have Friedrich Schiller coming up as a composer …
Herr Von Schiller seems to be the librettist of the entire ninth, and when the singing actually starts after five minutes into the fourth movement (track no. 7), he suddenly co-wrote the music as well!
Yes. Lyricist is a composer. You can see it in the credit roles model I posted above. But a few releases ago roon started treating “Lyricist”, “Librettist”, “Arranger” and a few others as special cases of composers and puts them on their own line below the composer.
The problem is that roon is not using this kind of exception handling for all the other composer roles. There are dozens and dozens of them. I am finding it is very common that Classical “Lyricists” get both a “Lyrics” and “Text” credit. When this happens, there will be a duplicate as roon will put the writer on both the Lyricist and Composer line.
Right, I seem to remember this now. And obviously it is still a work in progress like for the text credit. I have checked for a few files in my library: it had nothing to do with the merge setting. The tracks with Schiller (and Goethe) as composer and lyricist didn’t have any file tags for lyricist (or text). So it looks to me it’s in the Roon data where things need to get improved further.
Yes. I was surprised to see this. I don’t know what the sources are where roon gets both a “Lyricst” tag and a “Text” tag. I think it more likely that roon is combining two data sources. Hope they work on this for a future release. There will be other problems as well, just less noticeable. The distinction between Arranger and Orchestrator not quite right either.
But the OP’s original point was LYRICIST and PERSONNEL tags are being ignored when he has set track import to “prefer file”. Many seem to have a similar issue in that in different scenarios setting album or track preferences to “prefer file” is not being respected and they get roon metadata anyway. I certainly assume that “prefer file” means “file only”, but maybe it doesn’t. So maybe it should say what it means on the tin?
I do not really see this effect myself (or have looked hard enough) as most of my preferences are set to either "prefer roon"or “merge roon and file”. But I can see why that would be frustrating and it should really be looked at more closely as it seems to keep on coming up one way or another.
Not exactly. My setting for this particular preference was “Prefer Roon”, as you can see in the screenshot I posted some 11 hours ago.
Yesterday evening, just before turning in, I changed that to “Merge” (after having made a backup, thank you @anon47919701) and this morning I found that the Beethoven Songs album by Matthias Goerne does show the Lyricists as stored within my file tags, even when I have it Identified by Roon. So the merge works! (at least here…)
What remains a great pity is that the Lyricist is now stored and shown as information pertaining only to this particular performance on this particular album. In an ideal situation this information would be stored along with the composer, period, composition start and end dates in the Composition data. When, for instance, I click on the “4” in a square icon at the right of the Gellert Songs, Op. 48, Roon navigates to its Composition page. When I go from there to one of the other three performances that I own of this work, I find (as is only logical, I know) that the Lyricist is shown in one case and isn’t shown in another. I fully understand that this is the result of the way Roon currently organizes compositions, but still… disappointing.
The data model is simply wrong here. Lyricist is a property of a Composition and not of a Performance! Compositions do not suddenly change Lyricists when they are performed by somebody else, now do they?
Well, maybe after all, this was just a case of me not having fully understood the possibilities of the Import settings. I apologise.
On the other hand, I’m glad I did start this post because I like the ensuing discussion and have learned quite a bit from it.
You mean all of the six settings where “merge” is an option, don’t you?
And what option did you choose for “Production”? Roon or File? I myself would never fill my own file tags with information about which three writers wrote the booklet essays in the various languages. I would never search for “all albums where the German booklet text is writen by so-and-so”. It suffices to read that sort of information in the booklet.
Another interesting, though slightly puzzling remark of yours. Do you imply that “Words by”, “Written by”, “Text” and others contain information supplied by TiVo or by the user’s file tags? I for one have never used such file tags. Mostly because of the fact that MediaMonkey does not provide those tags.
By the way, I thought that “Text” was meant for the text in the booklet, but apparently I was wrong.
Because “Text” is in the Production category, could this not be the reason that you see so many duplicates of “lyricists” that are credited both as composer and as lyricist? I have the “Production” preference set to “Roon” also, just because I nver changed it and it’s the default. But now that I am investigating all of this a bit deeper, I might just change it. See if I can live without te sometimes idiotically overcomplete listing of everone who served tea in the studio…
I think we both agree that “Text” is there for booklet essays / liner notes only and is abused on a rather big scale to credit poets and other writers who have seen their work set to music.
My advise to Roon / TiVo would be to stop doing that.
Let me give you an example of the album credits of Volume 12 in Hyperion’s complete Schubert Songs series:
Save for the poet Friedrich de la Motte-Fouqué (and of course the poor man lost the accent aigu on the final ‘e’ of his name, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_de_la_Motte_Fouqué) all of the poets are shown both as a lyricist and a “text” writer.
Now it’s interesting to note that the three songs based on his poems (tracks 8-10) are the ones that have no duplicates in the album view:
So I think we can safely conclude that it is the “Text” credit that creates the redundant Composer.
Track 7, by the way, concerns a song based on the poem by an unknown poet, as stated in the accompanying booklet. So it’s more or less correct to leave out the Lyricist credit for this track. Although one could also argue that the Lyricist credit should read “unknown” in such a case.
Perhaps one of these days I’ll try out the “production” preference set to “File” as a next step in my ongoing quest trying to tame the beast called Roon and make it do what I want…
