Re-assign a composition in an identified album

Support Metadata
1

Even after hours of searching this community I have not found a useful tip how to correct a wrongly attributed composition in an IDENTIFIED album. I have learned the trick of correcting compositon links in UNIDENTIFIED albums but not in IDENTIFIED albums.

Today’s use case:
The complete Beethoven symphonies by the Berlin Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan, recorded for DGG in the seventies. This 6 cd set also contains the usual array of overtures, most of which had already been recorded in the sixties and they are the culprits here.
The current DGG site (much less helpful than the previous one) gives this incarnation of this set:


Allmusic.com has the following:
https://www.allmusic.com/album/beethoven-9-symphonien-mw0001941428
There are two discrepancies between these two sources of information, track 5 on disc 3, and track 9 on disc 4.
Track 3-5:
Allmusic: Leonore Overture No. 2 in C major, Op. 72a
DGG: Leonore Overture No. 3 in C major, Op. 72b
Track 4-9:
Allmusic: Leonore Overture No. 3 in C major, Op. 72b
DGG: Fidelio, overture, Op. 72c: Allegro
DGG has it right, of course, as I was able to ascertain by comparing the tracks to other known and trustworthy sources.
Unfortunately Roon listens to Allmusic and not to DGG…
Roon identifies this album with a different cover and the album review refers to the 1984 Beethoven cycle instead of the one from seventies, although the performance dates and track order reveal that the album is otherwise correctly identified:
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In the above screenshot the title of track 3-5 has already been corrected, but when I click on the composition link (with the figure 9 in it), I’m led to the wrong composition page:
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So how am I going to fix this?
In the past half year or so I have, in a number of cases, reported some of their mistakes to Allmusic on their site by submitting corrections, but I have not seen any improvements as yet. Has anyone else ever had success with Allmusic?
As it is probably impossible to re-assign a single-track composition to the correct composition within Roon, my only hope is that these mistakes will be corrected at the source.
So what’s the best approach here? Submit corrections on Allmusic.com? Or would it be better to do it here in this community and hope that the Roon team has a little more clout and can have Allmusic / TiVo carry out the necessary changes in their database within a shorter timespan?
Please advise! @joel @Tony_Casey, @bbrip

2

Maybe this is more complicated than I think, but what if you just edited the metadata manually, and then told Roon to just use your metadata?

3

Hi @Hans_Valeton,

How did you correct the faulty track? In Roon itself in EDIT or in the file tags (WORK/PART)?

If you correct the file tags only for the wrongly allocated tracks with the correct composition name, and then set multipart and track to read your files in the Roon Metadata settings. Those tracks that are correct and where you have not filled the WORK/PART fields will continue to use the Roon metadata.

This has worked for many similar situations where I had such problems, although I would not say it works for each and every situation, as Roon often shows pretty inconsistent behavioural patterns that are quite unpredictable…

4

It’s hit and miss, but if you have a local copy then it is not enough to change title names of single part works. You have to put the canonical name in the work tag as well. Doesn’t work every-time and I don’t know why that is, but if you have a streamed copy then it doesn’t work at all as you cannot edit work/part tags with streamed content.

Most of the time I will just un-identify something like this as the most important thing about these Karajan Beethoven cycles is which decade they are from (50s/60s/70s/80s) and roon has got the album description completely wrong. This is the 70s cycle not the 80s cycle as you point out and the Overtures are wrong as well. However, there is a work-around if you have the patience. All those 70’s cycles (Beethoven, Schumann, Haydn, Brahms, Bruckner etc,) were collected together on a single box and you can get an identification against that. The Overtures are correct, but you loose the album description (who cares, its wrong anyway), and you can change the album cover and title. But you also loose the performance dates and locations. This is something only you can decide. It’s a great pain but roon lets you put those back in as well. To me it was important as I want to be able to distinguish the Karajan Beethoven cycles.

Identify against this:

RoonShareImage-637285133953784421

Shouldn’t be like this of course, especially with core repertoire.

5

Hello @bbrip!
I corrected the composition in both the TITLE and the WORK tags. If there is a tempo indication for a one-movement composition, this tempo indication ends up in the MOVEMENT file tag. I can’t use PART tags, because MediaMonkey systematically removes these tags anytime I change other tags in the same audio file via MM. But MOVEMENT and PART are treated as equals by Roon.
Then, after the changes I made were processed by Roon, the old titles were still shown in the album page, simply because the album is an identified one AND I have set the track metadata preference in the import setings to prefer Roon. So, in order to show the correct title, I had to use the track editor to change the title from the Roon version to my own, manually, for those two tracks.

Not sure I completely understand this, but what I do know is that both of the problematic tracks in my use case are single-movement compositions, so there is no way multipart settings can help me here (leider…)

6

Are you sure about that? I never had luck with the MOVEMENT tag in Roon, since I use PART I seem to have more success fixing such nags. But if MM Ignores this, thats bad.

EpWhat I was trying to say on that unclear part: You can have roon to only partialy read your WORK/PART tags for those items Ou have problems. You dont need to tag the entire box set just because a few tracks are wrong.

On the one-movement-composition you‘re right. if you type the entire WORK into tracktitle, does that change anything?

7

Thanks for your reaction, Tony.

Shortly after writing my first post in this topic I had already discovered that the overtures in the “Symphony Edition” are correct and that I probably should use that one for identification. You are also completely right about the album review: not a great loss.
About the recording dates: As a matter of fact I have always put detailed information regarding recording venues and dates in the Comment tag of my files. But because I use Comment tags to store roles and singers as well (for operas and oratorios), I started to use two Custom tags for storage of recording (location plus dates) and recording type (live or not) metadata, in order for MinimServer to be able to serve this information to BubbleDS and BubbleUPnP. Even more recently, after starting out with Roon, I have started to fill the RECORDINGLOCATION, RECORDINGSTARTDATE, RECORDINGENDDATE and LIVE tags with the aid of a script. So for me it is no problem to have Roon use my own recording related metadata.