Recent Activity - Played Bugs?

As of 1.7 “Recent Activity” now has a “Played” option that displays two strange phenomena. First, albums closely related by artist and title to the album played show up here in addition to the album actually played. This might be related to the fact that the albums played were recently added. And second, some of these albums have a wide black border around them and not others.

I’d be content to turn this feature off if anyone knows how. If only Roon would just leave the product alone!!

You can’t turn it off, but you can set the tab to just show your recently added albums - that was what Roon originally showed here on the Overview screen.

BTW, a screenshot would be useful to aid the Support team in their diagnosis of what’s going on in your case…

Sure, but it seems to arbitrarily set itself back to recent played at times, which is very confusing.

Have you got more than one remote? The setting should be “sticky”, and per device. If it happens again, then report it here in the Support category of the forum, so that the Support team can take a look.

It’s putting albums I didn’t play in recent activity, with a wide, dark margin around the image. They are closely related by title and artist. In the image below you can seem them. I didn’t play the middle top and the lower right two, but I did play other albums very similar in title and artist. All the time I have today for this:

Just checking: these mysterious albums are also missing from your History list as well, but the actual albums you played are recorded correctly in the list?

Correct. History looks legit.

This is a bizarre feature. Is it intentionally giving other instances of the same piece in recent activity/played? Note the groupings below:

I’m not seeing that. I’m getting the last 12 albums I’ve listened to.

Or this…

The only thing I can add is perhaps an idiosyncracy of my settings, which is that I populate the artist tag with the composer in the form of “lastname, firstname” and set the artist sort to first name (the only way I could find to use classical with this library management). After months of trying to resolve an earlier sort issue, Roon told me this setting bypasses normal OO sort processing, and literally uses what is in the artist tag. Somehow, it may be affecting this feature.

In your first screen, see the thick border around “Love Will Tear Us Apart …?” What did you do differently with that album?

That’s probably it. I just link to full albums on Tidal and Qobuz and sort by artist first name then last name.

It’s not an album, it’s a track.

It’s three tracks. I linked it to help another person here, then deleted it after listening for a few minutes. Not my thing.

RoonShareImage-637308709985392150

I expect that indeed this is the cause of the mysterious albums. Is it really still necessary to populate the artist tag with the composer? Why not use the ID3 Composer tag, and Roon’s Composer browser?

Geoff, I’m not certain of your role with Roon, but first of all, thanks for your assistance.

As to your question, I have a mixture of classical (95%) and pop/jazz. I’d like them to be handled the same way. I told Roon (Dylan) about how I’m doing this and their response was that classical support wasn’t truly implemented, and didn’t suggest doing anything differently. I have no problem with another approach per se, but I wasn’t informed of it.

One of the annoying things about Roon’s handling of classical is the seemingly arbitrary fashion in which it imposes composition grouping and title names, despite my checking every possible “Prefer File” import option I can find (I know I can ungroup with the editor one by one, but why can’t this be a once-and-for-all import option?). So not sure if this is related to the above, but Roon classical metadata handling, though highly touted, is an impediment (btw, release dates are rarely correct due to the substantial number of classical re-releases, particularly from Japan). For these reasons and more, my preference is to isolate as much Roon metadata handling as possible. My ultimate preference would be to turn it all off and use my file structure, which contains all the metadata I need in the folder structure and filenames. I’ve been saying this for a few years,and it will never happen, as I would loose the benefit of their superior OO programming.

That said, can you explain where the composer browser is? It is not a big deal from me to re-tag, as I only apply them with dBpoweramp because of Roon.

I’m just a Roon customer… but I also help out in the community where I can and make minor edits in the KB on occasion.

The Composer Browser is one of the six main Library browsers:

You can restrict the Composer Browser to just show Classical composers if you wish:

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I’ll give it a try, but I’m not sure why recent activity would behave differently. Roon “knows” what an album is.

Hi @anon20084133,

Recent Activity, not only shows albums and tracks, but also artists, composers, and compositions that you recently played.

Roon should be identifying when you’ve been playing performances of a composition, and will then give you quick access to that composition on the Overview screen. I think part of the issue with what you’re seeing here is that your collection is tagged in a way Roon doesn’t really understand, so you’re not getting the benefit of features like this that are designed for classical music but depend on Roon understanding your metadata.

As we’ve discussed before, this method of tagging will complicate many features in Roon but I did pass this on to the product team to see if there’s anything we can do make it more clear that what you’re seeing here is a composition. I can’t make promises specifically about this way of tagging but I can understand the confusion here, if I’m understanding the issue correctly.

Just to confirm, if you click on the Clarinet Concerto are you taken to a Composition page? Can you share a screenshot of this?

Have you played this composition recently?

Yes, they are the same composition, just different albums. Is that what the thick margin block shows? I’m okay with what it’s doing, it just doesn’t make sense for recent activity. It would be thoughtful for Roon to explain all of the features it decides to add, because this one is strange.

Regarding the tagging, we have discussed this before, and all I’m doing is putting a value of my choice into the tag. It took Roon several months just to tell me that the artist sort setting must be “first name” in order for it to use what I put in that tag literally. To me, that is an undocumented design quirk, and it’s on Roon to better explain these things, and in a more timely manner, and on Roon to make the software work properly through proper testing of releases.

Erm, from the File Tag Best Practice article:

One thing worth noting is that Roon will attempt to match up names that you have put into your file tags with Roon database versions of the same individuals who are associated with identified content in your library. You’ll get much better results if you stick with the likes of the following:

  • Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  • Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky
  • Paul McCartney
  • Richard Rodgers; Oscar Hammerstein II

than if you use:

  • Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
  • Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
  • Rodgers and Hammerstein