Poor support for Dance EDM

I’m finding that Roon has poor support for Dance, EDM and Electronic music. Many of my albums from ministry of sound, Chicane, Clubland etc don’t have any Tagging at all. This was unexpected for a premium service.

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I’m sure the problem lies with the labels, not Roon.

Hi @mark_perrin,

Whether or not we have data for an album will depend on the data available from our metadata providers. You can check places like MusicBrainz and AllMusic — If they don’t have data for an album it is likely that we will not as well. We are always getting new data, though, so albums that aren’t identified now may have new data in the future.

allmusic and musicbrainz are both free meta data resources I believe. I thought the high cost of roon was due to the high cost of metadata providers?

free for personal use not as a service to an application provider.

What about the possibility of adding the album reviews ourselves?

then we’re paying twice

I’m not sure what you mean @mark_perrin.

Roon uses providers which works for the vast majority of albums. There are some albums, perhaps more obscure, which are not on the provider databases. In these cases it would be useful to paste in a review from elsewhere, rather than leaving the review field blank. Also in some cases it would be nice to add an extra review of your choosing.

it just feels like doing the work you paid someone else (a lot of money) to do.

I’m not saying you have to do it. I’m saying that the option should be there for those of us that want to.

I agree but

  1. isn’t that why we buy roon? so we don’t have to?
  2. Updating the likes of musicbrainz is slow and very laborious. I think Roon needs some additional metadata providers to cater for those not listening to diana krall all day.
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Agree - the problem however starts with publishing metadata and I would guess is way outside of Roon’s influence never mind control.

The best I can see them managing is to use the best quality services, but if the original publishers make no effort, then there is nothing they can do really. Manual after the fact tagging is a massive time pit. Back when I used to DJ I tried to fully tag just the regular plays part of my own library in traktor and in the end just gave up, partly because so many tracks could easily fit the common attributes of several sub-genres. In the end my tags were about the time/place/mood/energy level of the sets I played them in - ie enough to job my memory, but useless to anyone else.

I think the methods Roon are using for radio association is probably as good as we will get short of expert consensus tagging by DJs, but of course it probably gets badly skewed by some of the more popular tracks that have high fan cross over into mainstream pop.

In the end - maybe the problem is the sub-genres themselves - they were I guess a means to identify a flavour of music in a way that would attract the right fans, but in the end either the DJ/label/group (like defekted for eg) has a compatible taste in music or he/she doesn’t. Once DJ’s idea of deep house (for eg) aint the same as another which doesn’t help at all.

If there was something I wish the metadata could track was ever been played in the same published/streamed set as something else. Be great if for eg Roon could track association through some of the streamed defekted and similar sets for eg. I am not sure how DI.FM do sub genre classification as in general I find them to be very good (but they are not dealing with millions of records). I suspect some DJs had a hand in it making it a manual after the fact process that just cant scale in a useful way.

  1. It is one of the reasons why we buy Roon. And for the majority of albums, it works. I’m talking about an option for the few that don’t. Saying it should be automatic is fine, but that ain’t gonna happen for all albums. That’s just the nature of the databases used. And anyway, users would want to add particular reviews they want, not always one chosen by the database provider.

There are plenty of DJ and Dance music Metadata sources out there that could be incorporated. There are even fairly commercial offerings from ministry of sound missing metadata which just seems a shame. I’m coming to the end of my trial and I’d like to commit long term to roon but I need to see that there is motivation to improve this for the price they charge. if I’m going to have to sort things myself then I may as well use another platform. multiroom features hold very little interest for me as I don’t see the point in multiroom and believe its just a gimmick.

Then I suggest listing some specific ones for the benefit of the Roon folks - then the ball is in their court to choose what if anything they can do.

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@Adam_Goodfellow

Then I suggest listing some specific ones for the benefit of the Roon folks - then the ball is in their court to choose what if anything they can do.

Excellent & most practical suggestion; that would assist many with large electronic collections (inc DJ & Dance).

@mark_perrin

There are plenty of DJ and Dance music Metadata sources out there that could be incorporated

Please do share your knowledge here, I’d be very interested to know of metadata sources specifically relating to electronic music (yup, I say this very broadly as sub-genres here, I find to be ever changing).

Cheers.

heres some i found with a quick google.



MixesDB.com
The identification of music group
Soundcloud & Mixcloud
The usual sources that people check for album art such as Amazon , Spotify, etc
Discogs.com

I am coming around to the cost of Roon but id like to know im being catered for not just being asked to wait until musicbrainz is updated by someone else to doing it myself.

@mark_perrin

Thanks Mark - appreciated.

I really like beatport & MixesDB & subscribed. I’m not sure they provide much in terms of metadata, but a great source for mixes for sure!

In my short time here it’s clear Roon is far from perfect in terms of metadata collection, but I was under no illusion that it would be perfect - for those who have libraries that contain smaller label releases (of any genre), bootlegs & as you’ve pointed out DJ mixes.

Perhaps bandcamp is a better starting place to obtain additional metadata (surely that must have been spoken about over the years), along with artist’s pictures for smaller label material including electronic music. Still in a quandary about DJ mixes so much not tagged in any way - you’re lucky to even get a set list in text.

I am not sure how large your collection is of unfound music. I have no issues tagging myself - well I do as a matter of course anyway. Yup, it’s time-consuming, but I’ve been doing it for years & just ensures your files are consistent, so that any player can use them, read the metadata & have album art. I get that’s not for everybody & I assume for most the expectation is Roon should find the bulk.

On that basis, it may help you decide whether Roon is what you want & caters for your needs.

Good luck & enjoy!

I am working through adding metadata to the files. Is there any way to have roon auto tag the actual files it does find? having that data embedded I to the file itself would also be good for those who use other players alongside roon. I just want to know they are on it and I will be catered for. Rock, Pop, middle of the road all seems to work fine but this is an enthusiast product with enthusiast users so we need a bit more creativity when it comes to edge case music IMO. this isn’t cheap software, it’s about 500% more expensive than the competition.

I have a fair collection of ‘EDM’ (a phase I hate just for the record) and have some fairly obscure early commercial releases. I am a longtime clubber/hobby DJ (25 years or so) so have a fair amount of lesser known releases.

I haven’t found anything that doesn’t get auto-tagged when I rip it and use one of the many metadata services however Roon doesn’t always pull in the extra album info etc although it does in probably about 50% of the time.

I also have a massive collection of live DJ mixes going back to 1992.

My workflow is to rip the cd using dbPowerAmp and let it do the tagging which as per the above it does 99.9% of the time and then copy the rip into the folder Roon points at. No untagged tracks exist.

It of course has no chance of tagging the live DJ mixes regardless of how well known they are but even then it does a fair job of categorising them and pulls them in to artist / genre searches (the genre searches of course, as mentioned above, are open to interpretation but it does an ok job in this respect).

@mark_perrin - what is it missing for you? Is it the basic track listings or something else and are the tracks tagged in your local music library or are you ripping via Roon?