In brief, I often have a need to quick edit tags of the currently playing song, for example, if you want to change the rating/stars or fix some tags etc.
As Roon doesn’t offer any editing capabilities and relies on external editors, I’m wondering if everyone in the community has ever come across or developed a methodology to quickly open the editor of choice (I’m on the Mac specifically)
Currently to edit the current song without you have to open your music editor, scroll, and find the actual file, and then edit ( I know, first world problems… :))
i know now i can do the three dots → view file info → show in windows explorer → right click into tag editor of choice but that is very cumbersomne
Would love to hear the communities thoughts on this
Can you edit the tags of a track that is currently in use? It won’t let me do it on Windows. It either stops playback, or give an In-use message on the editing software.
Not sure. I never use MacOS so cannot comment. But, from a quick web search this might be a place to start further investigation…
In Linux, you can safely write certain types of metadata to a file while it is open in another program by using extended file attributes (xattrs) or by using specialized metadata editing tools that are designed to handle concurrent access, such as ExifTool.
the main issue im struggeling with is how to script and make my music tag editor be aware of what to open (ie whats playing in roon and supply the full path)
Would it be even possible, in a general case? Roon server might be running on an entirely different computer (or even on a NAS or something) and files may not even be accessible from whatever client device one is running Roon client on. I.e. in my case some music file would be (as far as the Roon server is concerned) a local file at /var/packages/RoonServer/target/roonmnt/Public/Music/some_file.flac but that path is not accessible from any client I have, which would need to use something like \\\\roon\\Public\\Music\\some_file.flac instead, and Roon server has no idea about it (yes, my DiskStation is called Roon ). And that’s even assuming that the user logged in on the computer can access that path in the first place.
Yes, you are right that this can be complex and in fact my server is on a Mac Mini while I usually connect from my Mac Studio So yes, this is an issue.
But I’m looking for a simple way even via SSH to just provide the path on the server for the file so I can maybe script it to open via SSH or via SMB. I’m really looking for something simple.
Kind of perplexed that these issues don’t come up more often in Roon as a lot of people, I assume like myself, like to keep their local system nice, tagged and tidy. And currently there’s a lot of friction to do so since Roon doesn’t allow to edit the files.
Hmm, SMB wouldn’t necessarily work, as there would not be a clear mapping between local path that the server sees and however it is shared over the network. SSH could work, since you’d be running on the server, but that implies that the server can even be SSH’d to (not necessarily the case), Roon client knows what SSH client is installed on a local machine and how to start it etc.
I like my metadata clean as much as the next person, but personally, I’ve never had an urge to immediately open a track right from the Roon interface; I’d just navigate to the share and edit whatever I need…
yeah its more TBH about ratings. ive been collecting music close to 30 years bow digitally and have rated each single song i own (close to 40k tracks), but often things change with songs, i listen to new songs i want to rate etc etc (this happens daily) and thus i often miss other apps (like jriver, foobar etc) where i can easily rate/tag quickly.…and yes im aware its a classic 1st world whiney issue..hehe but im old so im allowed to
Ah, ratings are something I have never used or cared for. I guess this would be a valid use case but I am not seeing how to make it happen easily and still stay with Roon’s philosophy of never touching the music files and insulating the user from having to care where they are.
Set a RoonAlbumTag filed in the music file filled with your rating (or whatever else you want to add a Tag for). Roon will automatically pick it up and add a Tag for it.
The process could be batched. If you are adding Tags it should always be done in the file since they will be picked up again should you ever have to reset your database from scratch; like I’ve had to do several times over the years and lost hundreds of data curating hours.
yet what i want is ie i listen to a song with rating of 2/5 (ie in roon **) and decide it has “grown on me” and want to tag it as a 4, currently i need to go to a tagger (lets say yate or jriver), search for the artist/song open the view tag it, rsync etc..its quite annoying (again i know not that annoying but still :)).
what i would love is to have a bash script i can bing to a key to either chnage the id3 tag for rating or at least quick open the current playing (or marked in roon) song
hope that makes sense and thx to all you guys, its really helpful!
