I have a big classical music collection and I populated composer metadata per tracks. I setup JRiver so when selecting a classical genre (solo piano for example), I see groups of albums sorted by composer, so then I could select a composer and then an album and a track. If an album has tracks of different genres (for example solo piano and piano concerto), then only the solo piano tracks are displayed. This is a very convenient and intuitive selection.
I tried to find an intuitive way to work in Roon but no success:
If I view all albums and focus on solo piano genre and on a composer, I see that composer albums (but including all the album tracks, including those which are not solo piano genre). Another issue is that the composers in focus are sorted by number of albums and not alphabetically which makes it difficult to find the one you want.
I tried to view all composers and focus on solo piano genre, but there is a problem and I see only some of the composers and not all.
Is it better if you try using the Compositions browser instead of Composers? You can add a number of colums that you can filter to find the kind of music you’re looking for.
If I use Compositions then I only have Composer under Focus and cannot select by Genre or Subgenre even though I have this information in my metadata. So for Mozart I have 400 compositions to scroll through with no album or performer info and this is not useful.
I setup the roon import setup so all info is only from my files but something is definitely wrong:
Roon still attaches its subgenres on top of my genres. This is a problem because some roon subgenres belong under different genres than mine and this is confusing my search.
Roon adds composers also from the file Artist metadata (instead of only from the Composer metadata). This is incorrect and most classical artists are not composers at all. For instance I get the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra as a composer…
Roon added “Pyotr I’lyich Tchaikovsky” as a composer even tough I have him only under “Pyotr I. Tchaikovsky” in my files. The problem is that they appear as 2 different composers with partially overlapping albums. Roon changed my “Wolfgang A. Mozart” to the full name. In this case it is not a problem because it appears once but why change the names from the file metadata at all ?
Roon ignores/hides some albums. I see that in some cases they are the same albums but with a different quality or different release date so I had a good reason to keep both. I selected Yes for “Show hidden files and albums” but with no apparent effect.
In the Composer focus, they are listed by no. of albums instead of alphabetically. This is not useful for selecting a desired composer.
I hope you could find a solution for these problems.
Hi Dylan,
I’ve played a bit with the options.
I changed all the import fields to Roon metadata and configured the compositions view as you suggested. This seems to make the data more coherent so no composer duplicates.
However some compositions are split. For instance “Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 1” and “Piano Sonata No. 1” appear separately under Beethoven.
Hi Dylan,
Actually I used merge to correct this
The bigger problem is classical compositions like symphonies that contain a few parts or movements. In some cases roon identifies them as parts of the same composition and in some cases splits them. Merge dies not solve this because they still are separate. Any solution for this ?