Question regarding WORK tag

hi @support

I recently bought the box set “The Tokyo String Quartet plays Beethoven - The Complete String Quartets” (9 cds).

I observed a strange behaviour regarding the way Roon treats the WORK tag.

I meticulously completed (with MP3TAG) the WORK and PART tags for each of the quartets.

Regarding the six first quartets, which belong to the same opus (Op. 18), I completed the WORK tag as follows:

  • Quatuor à cordes n° 1 en fa majeur, Op. 18
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 2 en sol majeur, Op. 18
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 3 en ré majeur, Op. 18
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 4 en ut mineur, Op. 18
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 5 en la majeur, Op. 18
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 6 en si bémol majeur, Op. 18

In the Album Editor window, I checked the Prefer File button (Multi-Part Composition Group).

And the result was surprising:
In Roon, the six quartets had the same name (“Quatuor à cordes n° 1 en fa majeur, Op. 18”), just as if they corresponded to the same composition.
I double-checked the accuracy of my tags… no errors.

Then I decided to change the names of the compositions in the WORK tag:

  • Quatuor à cordes n° 1 en fa majeur, Op. 18/1
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 2 en sol majeur, Op. 18/2
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 3 en ré majeur, Op. 18/3
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 4 en ut mineur, Op. 18/4
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 5 en la majeur, Op. 18/5
  • Quatuor à cordes n° 6 en si bémol majeur, Op. 18/6

And now it is ok: Roon recognizes each composition as a separate work!

I thought that by giving a different name to each composition (in the WORK tag), it was ok for Roon to recognize them as being distinct compositions. But it is not the case. Could someone explain this to me?

And are there other tips that we should know to complete the WORK tag properly?

Thanks!

Thierry

Hi Thiery,

If it is any comfort I have noticed this behavior as well. I routinely use the Opus numbering convention Op. 18/x just as you have done. Any time I have tried it with variations such as the following I have failed to get a composition id.

Op. 18-x
Op. 18.x
Op. 18(x)
etc.

I am very surprised you have got French translations to work with Beethoven. I am working on Ravel at the moment and in general I have to translate to English by laboriously cutting and pasting from allmusic. Is there any reason you can think of why you are having success with French? Do you laboriously tag Country, Catalogue Number, Barcode on rips of discs sold into French speaking markets?

Hi Tony
No, I don’t do that! (tagging Country etc)
The Work tag of the majority of my classical albums are in French. I’ve never noticed any problem with that.
Thierry

Is it not auto-translated into English as on allmusic? Or does localised (French) roon keep your original French WORK titles?

In my roon, if roon makes a match then it auto-translates WORK into English, whatever is on allmusic. It usually means that I end up with a very strange mixture of English WORK’s and French PART’s. In English we call such a mess a dog’s dinner.

Hey @Thierry_M — Thanks for the feedback here!

At this time Roon does not support the ability to extract the Opus sub-division from anywhere in the string. Since this appears to be “working as designed” I would recommend also posting your suggestion in the 'feature request" section of the site.

Our product team and developers keep a close eye on that category, so that’s definitely the best place to propose a change like this and get feedback from the Community.

Thanks again!

If you enter WORK and TAG data exactly as written in Allmusic, then all will be well, or as well as it can be. AND, you will be captain of your “voyage”.

If you choose not to tag, you will begin the magical mystery tour that is the Roon ID algorithm. Uncharted waters will be traversed, and with it will come surprises and disappointments. Your mind will attempt to reverse engineer the ID process in an effort to divine “what works”. Success will appear “just around the bend”, only to disappear as you near it.

Fear not: Roon’s algorithm is non-destructive except to your time and ego. If you don’t care much about consistently clean displays and organized works, it is the way to go.

Feel free to request features. The experience is similar to the suggestion box at work.

2 Likes

Mine are standardized

Op.18 No.1 etc

I use MusiCHI Tagger to lookup but that uses the Op.18/1 convention so I find And Replace / with No.

I have taken recently to splitting off the Movement name it normally helps

Mike

Thanks to all of you for your answers.

Just some additional information regarding my classical library.
Actually, the majority of the compositions in my library are in French: they are encoded in French in the Work tag, and I translate in French the ones that Roon displays in English.
And I can say that everything is ok: It just takes some time to do the translations within Roon. But the hard part is done, I just have to do that when I buy a new classical CD… (I don’t use Tidal: for classical music, I only listen to music encoded from my CDs).

So, I can say that the Work tag completed with composition names written in French is ok for Roon: I have almost 650 classical albums, and in Roon everything is ok for 99% of them.
And sometimes (fortunately, these are exceptions), something strange occurs during importation. It was the case for the album that I mentioned in my first post: “The Tokyo String Quartet plays Beethoven - The Complete String Quartets”.
I firstly imported the box-set using the default settings (as I usually do), with “Prefer Roon” selected in the Album Options (Multi-Part Composition Group).
The album was identified and everything seemed to be ok… except for the eighth CD of the box-set (containing the quartet op. 130 and the Grosse Fugue op. 133): I don’t know why but, for this CD, Roon did not group the parts (movements) under the composition name (work). For the rest of the box-set, it was ok: each part was correctly grouped under its composition name.
But because of this problem for quartet op. 130, I changed the setting for “Multi-Part Composition Group” to “Prefer File”. From there, quartet op. 130 was correctly displayed (with its different parts displayed under the name of the quartet [in French])… but now a new problem appeared for the quartet op. 18: each number of this quartet (quartet op. 18 contains 6 different compositions) was displayed with the same Work name.
Here is what I obtained in Roon:

Quatuor à cordes n° 1 en fa majeur, Op. 18

    1. Allegro con brio
    1. Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato
    1. Scherzo: Allegro molto
    1. Allegro

Quatuor à cordes n° 1 en fa majeur, Op. 18

    1. Allegro
    1. Adagio cantabile
    1. Scherzo: Allegro
    1. Allegro molto quasi presto

Etc (same thing for the other 4 quartets op. 18)

Hence my initial question (which has not been answered yet): Why didn’t Roon recognize each of these compositions (each of them having different names in the Work tag) as a different composition?

And then I observed that, when I simply added “/” followed by the composition number after the Opus (in the Work tag), the problem disappeared.

Now Roon displays:

Quatuor à cordes n° 1 en fa majeur, Op. 18/1

    1. Allegro con brio
    1. Adagio affettuoso ed appassionato
    1. Scherzo: Allegro molto
    1. Allegro

Quatuor à cordes n° 2 en sol majeur, Op. 18/2

    1. Allegro
    1. Adagio cantabile
    1. Scherzo: Allegro
    1. Allegro molto quasi presto

So a second question is: Is the crucial point related to the way “Opus #” is written in the Work tag, with “Op. 18” not working, while “Op. 18/#” would be ok?
And are there other tricks that we should know to complete the Work tag properly?

Thierry

That is exactly what I see. Whereas in English speaking countries it is very common to see English WORK’s but Italian PART’s, it is extremely odd to see English parts but French or German PART’s. I assume you do your translations in the composition screen rather than the album screen so you only have to do it once?

My experience has been that TITLE’s being unique/different was never a “sufficient” condition for roon to get the grouping right. Only “necessary”. It is certainly not reliable so I am not surprised by your experience.

There are exceptions but in general my experience is that a minimum necessary and sufficient condition with hierarchically grouped Opus like your example is that the titles are different and Op. XX/x is somewhere in the title. But sometimes that doesn’t work either so the actual order and structure of the title name is required as well as other catalog number and identifiers. In stubborn cases the record label and catalog number often helps as well.

All of these are important in getting an identification/grouping correct and I would not be surprised if there were others.

  1. Unique/different title
  2. Op. XX/x identifier
  3. Structure and order (grammer) of the title components
  4. Other composition catalog numbers such as K, L, M and Hob numbers
  5. Record label
  6. Record label catalog number

Personally I have given up trying to second guess roon with the type of disc in your example and often I just cut and paste the canonical names from allmusic including Op. XX/x and any other catalog numbers before even trying to import into roon.

PS. With much French music, even this trick with Opus numbers will not work. Debussy, as several of us have discovered did not use Opus numbers. In this case in roon to accomplish something similar you are going to have to use two L numbers from 1977 and 2003 respectively. There are many other cases where this Opus XX/x convention is not relevant. Mozart, Bach, Haydn and Telemann come to mind. In these cases unique WORK titles is not sufficient either. Only necessary.