as we all know common music player applications are (euphemistically spoken) somewhat behind the richness of real world’s object-relations, especially in the field of classical music. The usual scheme of metadata presentation (on the GUI) comprises an artist and an album artist field, but not the composer field nor a performer. That is why most of us used to tag some attributes of their musical collection metadata in an illogical manner regarding real world’s roles.
In classical music the role of “composer” is often tagged in the “artist” field, - some people prefer to tag the “performer” role in this field. While some of us more “problem aware” people additionally tagged the right real-world roles in the corresponding tag attributes performer and composer, but many of us leave these fields blank.
Now there is a problem of Roon’s method to fill the “rich” roon object model. If, e.g. the tags “artist” and “composer” are filled in Roon will poulate the roles “performer” PLUS “composer” - which is definitely not right nor clever.
IMO, Roon’s metadata rules should match the artist field vs. the composer and the perforrmer fields and make a clever decision: if artist and composer have same content (or rather composer field contains artist), the role is obviously only “composer” - and not composer PLUS performer as roon’s decision mechanism is working now.
In the case of artist and performer it should be same: if performer field contains artist obviously the “performer” role (or even more precisely the “main performer”) is meant.
What is roonlab’s view on this? Do I miss something here?
But, please, do not answer by suggesting to re-tag our musical collections, because, regrettably the world is not Roon (at least not by now - but hopefully you will persuade some hardware manufacturers like KORG to produce a roon-ready mobile device…)
Well, spend a little more brains and you’ll get the point I wanted to make
If the artist (role) is the composer (role) and the performer (role) at the same time then I would have easily tagged it in the tag field “artist” AND “composer” AND “performer”. In that case (and in ONLY in that case) Roon would be right to bind the roles performer PLUS composer to the object. This is exactly your example: If I have a record with tunes composed by Gershwin (tag:artist AND tag:composer -> role:composer) AND performed by Gershwin, e.g. the famous Piano Rolls album (tag:artist AND tag:performer -> role:performer).
That’s easy, isn’t it?
The point I want to make is (again) that Roon’s rules are too simple in this field as they will associate tag:artist with role:performer by default - this is not correct and could be improved easily. It is elegant, too, because nobody would have to re-tag the artist tag (see my first posting). If you want to get a more correct role-mapping in Roon you could easily achieve this by populating the tag fields composer and/or performer. This could easily be done by an individual batch process because in classical genres tag:artist will be identical with role:composer XOR role:performer (see my first posting) while in non-classical genres tag:artist will in almost 100% of cases be identical with role:performer.
Personally, I think the tone of your posts is a bit offensive. Could you perhaps have chosen another way of saying things? Most of us (as is @Geoff_Coupe) are music lovers and users just like you, trying to help each other. This is a forum for Roon users where Roon staff also participates. I also have some issues, but I am confident they will be resolved. I wonder what you expect threatening to “escalate” in your third post on a topic might bring you. I find it rather intimidating.
It was not and never my intention to be offensive to anybody here. I am no native english speaker but I have a background in computer science and am working for a big research organization. In my environment the term “escalation” means to bring a problem forward to the right person who is potentially able to solve it.
Now that I know that my “denglish” tech babble might be misinterpreted by native speakers I will try to be more careful.
