As a Roon newbie I’m trying to find my way around the more complicated aspects of this software.
Perhaps you could answer these two questions that I have and that I think are related to the topic of this thread:
Whenever I make a change to one or more of the radio buttons in the ‘Metadata Preference’ tab within the Album Editor or Track Editor, click on the ‘Save’ button, close and then re-open the Album Editor (or Track Editor), none of my changes appear to have been saved to the database! (In other words: alle settings are gone). Is this normal behaviour and if so, why?
I have been using MediaMonkey (MM4) for some ten years now and it has always proven to be a trusty workhorse for precise (mass-) tagging. I have even written a number of scripts to make life easier, so you could well and truly say that I’m all but married to MediaMonkey. However, now that I’ve recently started working with Roon (and I’m very enthusiastic about it!) I am very sad to see that MediaMonkey does not support either WORK/COMPOSITION or PART tags. And what’s worse, when I add WORK and PART tags using dBpoweramp first, and after that do some additional tag editing in MM4, MM completely REMOVES the PART tags!! Is there a workaround that you guys know of for this huge problem?
Since starting to use Roon I have, on a number of occasions, fixed the problem that certain “suites” in pop music, such as the famous medley on the second side of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album, were not automatically treated by Roon as such a suite but instead as individual songs that therefore were also treated as such in Roon Radio and Shuffle mode, just like @Jeff_Bellune wrote, back in June 2017.
But using dBpoweramp for individual tag editing is rather tedious. It needs to be done from within the Windows file Explorer, using the context menu (‘right mouse click’) to open the dBpoweramp tag editor on a PER FILE basis. Compared to the ease with which I can tag using MM4, this is absolutely gruesome!
Regarding the radio buttons in the Metadata Preference tab, I already asked this question (never received a response)… but it seems normal. I agree with you: I don’t understand why the ON/OFF status of these parameters, once selected (or unselected), disappear when you close and re-open the editor.
I never used MediaMonkey. I use dBpoweramp for ripping, and MP3tag for tagging (which works well for mass-tagging as well).
mp3tag is a killer piece of tagging software. It’s free, but I’ve donated a couple of times over the years because I couldn’t do without it.
I only use dBpoweramp to verify tags, but there is a way to tag a group of files all at once. The key is all the files selected have to be the same file format; flac, wav, m4a, etc. No mixing and matching.
In Windows Explorer, select all the same-format audio files and right-click the selected group. Choose Edit ID-Tag from the context menu and go from there.
It is normal behaviour - the tab is stateless; that is, it lets you apply bulk edits, but shouldn’t ever come up with anything preselected. This is by design.
Thanks, @Mike_O_Neill,
I do remember trying out JRiver once, a very long time ago, when I first started with computer audio. Maybe I should investigate once more!
I did recently install mp3tag but I haven’t been able to find out how to use it in order to add WORK/PART tags. And it also seems to be rather on the slow side…
Thanks, @Geoff_Coupe, for clearing that up. I am still a bit bewildered though, since in most other software such a screen of settings would never be stateless. Mind you, I am aware of the complexities of having to make such a screen cater for each and every siuation, especially where a user has selected multiple tracks whose preferences differ individually (e.g. previously changed one by one with different settings). Perhaps the Roon programmers thought this was such a daunting task and decided against carrying it out, knowing in advance that only a very few users would ever complain?
@Jeff_Bellune
Yes, I know. I have been using it as such. I only have FLAC files, so no problem there. But when adding WORK/PART tags there is little opportunity for multiple selections. Only for the the WORK tags can I use that but for the PART tag I still have to address each and every file individually.
I think that’s the reason why it’s stateless - it can be used with multiple albums all of which can have different settings. I agree it is confusing - it confused me the first time that I encountered it.
