Questions on Metadata quality...not impressed at the moment at all

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@brian : Many thanks to your great response to this.

You clearly take your metadata very seriously, and you’re exactly the kind of customer we would like to serve well.

I highly appreciate this.

You do have some more specific needs that we aren’t serving well yet. I can’t promise that this will be fixed overnight–we are a small company with pots on the stove, but we do take this stuff seriously, and we appreciate your input.

This is not the point. No one, or for sure me not, is expecting that things happen overnight. I know you are putting a lot of effort into pushing Roon. You can read it here, you can see it in the app.

For most popular albums, there are several editions that could conceivably produce identical files and metadata tags in the real world. How do we know whether you have a Japanese release or a US release if they have the same release year, same track titles, same album title, and same track lengths (which in general can’t be trusted due to variations in ripping software)? In the vast majority of real world music collections, the information required to make these distinctions is barely present.

This is something I tried to explain to @magnuslsjoberg yesterday, it would be a pretty demanding task which can be broke down at least to the matrix code on discs for instance. But you are right, if you aren’t a serious collector but just collect for quantity or are no collector at all you won’t have these informations in your tags. I also don’t store any matrix /runout codes in my tags but I compare them to providers to get my exact match manually. What I store for instance is the release country, the label, the catalog number of the label, the barcode and the release date. This gets me pretty close and often is enough, for the rest I compare matrix codes. But I also admit this is really picky.

I have ideas about some lightweight things that we could do to improve edition matching specificity and will be discussing them with the team.

The problem here I see, as often mentioned now, is not Roon. I am sure you can get that. It is : Do your providers have the information about these releases…

At the moment I can see also problems with compilations by Mix-DJs like mentioned here by
@freelancr

Wrong playing artist displayed from DJ-Mix/compilation

Hi, when playing a DJ-Mix compilation the wrong artist is displayed. In this example I play Balance 005 by James Holden: Track 10 - Jase From Outta Space Feat. Claire - Do What You Want (Infusion’s Sky Mix) Roon displays the following: [image] Instead it should display “Jase From Outta Space Feat. Claire” as artist. This is how the file is tagged: [image] I guess its because of the missing “Performed by”? [image] But even when “Performed by” is present it is not entirely correct: …

I have also a lot of them where these problems, with big gaps in performers,… occur. There are really better sources out there but don’t know if considering such things is an option to you.

For me it would be not that bit problem to input that manually if it was possible, where I mean a certain release is groomed by you where the tracklist and all other things fit. So if then is just the release date, the label, a name extension (eg. 40th Anniversary edition) and country I would add that. It’s manual work again, but hey, it’s all in my tags already. Whereas name extension and album art are already possible.

So might it be possible to get a field release country (like the field Edit Version) in the album details, and a field catalog # maybe. These would be really great. Theses can really be plain text fields if you don’t want to use it for aquiring any rich data.

It will take us some time to figure out if and when we want to become a platform on which people groom their metadata (as they might have done with various tag editing packages in the past).

Our data model is an order of magnitude larger than any other music player, and building a comprehensive editor for it is a herculean task with an immense amount of UI surface area. I think that it will eventually make sense to do that, but it’s not something we are going to hastily rush out the door.

As I am developer myself I fully understand and respect this point.

In the nearer term we are focused on providing solutions for people with highly groomed collections so they can continue to leverage the work they’ve already put into their tags. This is a complex problem–often, tag-based metadata is frustratingly inexpressive, and blending it with a well-structured and precise data model is a difficult engineering problem.

This is of much more interest for me because my metadata is full, up to, or down to the barcode of nearly every release I have. I am really looking forward to what you will bring us there!!!

Take a look at our last months of release notes. It should be obvious that we are moving very, very quickly. Releasing some wins on metadata handling issues is one of our next big priorities. I know better than to commit to timelines publicly before work is basically done, so I’m not going to do it. Work is being put into this issue on a daily basis, however. We will get there.

You achieved a lot already and hopefully this is going on. Better take the time you need before putting out something buggy. I would have only had concerns if you had told me come back and ask in 2 years

Thanks for your interest and for taking the time to write down your ideas. It has given me some insight into problems in our system that I might not otherwise have

Thanks for getting back to me and letting me know of your thoughts on this.