Is there no way to easily display all remixes done by a certain artist? For example, take Man With No Name. I have 28 tracks that he has done a remix of for other artists. Ideally I would like to be able to go to his artist page and see all of these somehow, but I’m not seeing any way. I even have “Remixer” credited in all the metadata.
However it seems to work the other way around, for example under “Appearances” on MWNN artist page I am getting remixes of his tracks done by other artists. This seems backwards. Am I doing something wrong, or is Roon just really bad at this?
I guess it is a matter of which categories of participation are shown by roon on the main artist page. We had a similar discussion about in which cases the ´Composed by´ section is shown or not.
´Remixed by´ seems not to be existing, probably for the reason there is no consistent tagging in roon´s own pool of metadata to accumulate a comprehensive list for that. Did you add the ´remixer´ credit by yourself?
The other general problem I see with your idea is that roon´s way of showing releases in form of accumulated covers is to a certain degree album-oriented. If these 28 remix tracks done by one artist are mainly on samplers or albums of other artists, I could easily imagine things to get messy the moment you list them all as covers.
That is probably because he is credited as a main artist or performer for these tracks so roon´s algorithm is meant for accumulating these albums on his main page (same is true to ´Production´, and in some cases ´Composed by´).
Are the album(s) Identified?
If not, what you see is Roons interpretation of your metadata/tagging.
Even if they are identified, it is not a guarantee to have all credits for remixers, arrangers and producers assigned to them. That is particularly true to samplers.
Thanks so much to you both for the “why” as to what’s displaying (and not).
I did manually add the “Remixer” credit to most of them in hopes that would get it to display, but some did have it already. After playing around a bit the only way I’ve found to get them to display on the main artist page is to go into the metadata for the remix track and add a “primary artist” credit. This then groups them into the Appearances section, along with other tracks by the artist on DJ mixes and his tracks remixed by other artists. It’s not perfect, ideally I’d like all of those split into separate sections, but it’s a bit better than what I was doing which was just creating playlists for different artists that I have many remixes by (which was quickly cluttering my playlist section).
I guess a nice feature request would be to somehow be able to have a “Custom Credit(s)” option for the artist page to choose a credit(s) to display on a section of the artist pages aside from primary artist ones, or perhaps just subsections of Appearances. Of course, I’m no software engineer so have no idea of how difficult or the plausibility of this.
Just to follow up after playing with this more, the only solution I’ve found is to manually go to every Remix track and add the credited “Remixer” artist as a “Primary Artist” to get them to show up under Appearances. Quite annoying really, as I’ve found other credits such as “Keyboard” on a single track of an album manage to get an Artist to show up under Appearances.
Why can “Remixer” not be such a credit that allows this to show up in Appearances?
Remixing an entire track, which often becomes more the Remixers music than the original, seems much more significant than one track on an album where somebody played a few keyboard lines.
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Totally agree with the sentiments here.
I have a library with many remix tracks, some obscure and never receiving formal release. This was no small part of my motivation to leave Spotify and embrace Roon’s hybrid model.
Some artists (The Twelves, Rayko, etc) are prolific remixers, more so even than producers.
I feel the remixing credit deserves ‘appearing on’ status.
There is another solution. The problem is that roon considers the credit “Remixer” an engineering “production” credit rather than a creative “performer” or “composer” credit. If you want roon to treat your remixers in the same way as it treats other performers and composers you need to change the production “Remixer” credit
Roon will recognise thousands of roles of different sorts and 109 “mixing” roles. Most of them are engineering production roles. But there are some composer roles like “Remix Arranger” and also performer roles like “DJ Mix”. You need to choose one of them in order for roon to behave closer to the way you expect. You can find the roles in the roon knowledge base:
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Roon_Credit_Roles
Unfortunately, although much of this role infrastructure is there it is all very hit and miss in terms of roon’s implementation. As a typical example, Rob Garza (Thievery Corporation) gets 12 production “Remixing” credits on a remix album on Qobuz. If you change them all to “Remix Arranger”, then depending on how you have set up roon he will now get an “Arranger” credit against the tracks and also the album will be a “Main” album rather than an “Appearances” album.
For some reason this only works (on my system) with individuals like Rob Garza rather than groups like Thievery Corporation. You are also going to find that the metadata roon is is using is riddled with holes. Composer, performer and production mixing credits are used interchangeably so there will likely be a great deal of manual re-tagging involved. Personally after a bit of experimentation I just gave up as I wanted to prioritise the time I had on other genres like Classical and Jazz. But this might work for you.
Periodically complaints come up about the way roon treats remixes but I guess there has been insufficient critical mass to make much headway. A lot of the issues that come up are very similar to the content hierarchies that are common in Classical libraries and years have been spent on that with a way to go yet.
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@tripleCrotchet what a deep dive, thank you for sharing with a newcomer.
Metadata is such a unperfected art. The ink jet printer of the data world.
This fix will work for me perfectly! I was dumbfounded as to why these tracks were invisible when looking on an artist page. Even having to massage the data this way, works just fine, appreciate it.
Hopefully the ‘Remixing’ credit can rise to the level of ‘appearing on’. Likes on this thread would be 
@jtrezzo perhaps you could alter the thread title to include something to that effect
for example
“Find remixes by artist? - ‘Remixing’ credit = Composer role = Appearing on”
Yes. There are probably several “solutions” in here. Flagging the mods @Geoff_Coupe.
- The simplest thing is that roon reassigns the role “Remixer” as a composer rather than a production credit, if that is how it is mostly used. Needs to be checked by roon, there may be reasons why that is not a good idea.
- Also it is probably not generally understood that remixers can be assigned both composer and performer credits depending on their role/contribution and then roon will treat them in much more expected ways with little change.
- There seems also to be differences in the way that roon treats individual and group remixers which needs to be checked. It may be an outcome of other dependencies. For example, dependencies on how Classical tags are being processed in libraries.
Thanks for flagging this, @tripleCrotchet. Us forum mods are probably not the best target for this message, so I’m flagging @support and asking them to pass it along to the devs.
Perhaps this whole thread belongs in the Feedback category - what do my fellow @modfathers think?
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Agreed, I’ve adjusted title and moved the topic over.
I’d recommend interested parties to add to this discussion and also use the voting feature at the top of the topic.
Thanks,
I think there is a lot of low hanging fruit in this general area where much of the infrastructure already exists but the meta-data is not being processed in sensible ways that matches the design architecture. Needs roon to look much more closely. Over the years there have been periodic comments but just because the complaints have not been as loud as Classical collectors I don’t think that means disinterest.
Another example is the way that celebrity DJ’s are routinely given a “Compilation” credit. This is also a production role which means the DJ will only by accident come up in searches and groupings which are geared towards performer roles. For example, José Padilla, the Ibiza DJ did a lot of compilations for the Café del Mar series. He is only coming up in searches because he often gets performer credits on one or two tracks on his compilations. Worse, often these sorts of albums get credited as “Various Artists” when really you want to search by the DJ involved, in this case José Padilla but that will require manual tagging. It would be be better if José Padilla got a performer “Mix-DJ” credit, or similar, for the entire album rather than a production “Compilation” credit:
Another related use case is Soundtrack compilers on Movies. For example, Quinten Tarantino. In many of these cases, the work-around is to add a primary artist credit when really this should be fixed at source by ensuring that various types of mix and remix credits are composer and/or performer based rather than production based. Then roon’s search, sorting, grouping, presentation etc. will behave in the way expected.
Thanks so much to all responding to this recently. The aforementioned “fix” to mark the remix credit as performer or primary artist works, but it’s too much manual labor when you have probably 1000+ remix tracks by different artists, many of which are on compilations. I had to just give up.
I still think having a separate heading section for Remixer credit on the artist page would be the most useful, but any form of getting those remix credits on the artist page would be big improvement.
The options are limited with streamed content but with local content you should be able to do an external global search and replace of all instances of “Remixer” with “Remix Arranger” in one go. I use mp3tag but I am sure there are other taggers. There will likely be internal roon edits as well to tidy things up but waiting for roon to change the way it handles remix credits will likely be a long wait.
Love mp3tag
How do you tag the file in mp3tag to get Remix Arranger into roon? Do you need to change the roon preferences for tag vs roon metadata?
You will have to be motivated and prepared to experiment. I gave up myself. The basic problem is that downstream metadata suppliers are using production, composer and performer mixing and remixing roles interchangeably and roon’s default logic is that any mixing or remixing roles it sees are treated with primarily production logic. This is not watertight, roon does seem to treat “Remix Arranger” sometimes with production logic and sometimes with composer logic. It all needs a thorough overhaul so for the moment it is quite hit and miss. Adding a “primary artist” role to remixers does seem to be a pre-requisite workaround at the moment even if you do change “Remixer” to “Remix Arranger”.
Over the years I have heavily customised mp3tag to include all sorts of additional roon recognised tags. If you want to set any kind of “role” tags in roon, including remix roles you need to set a PERSONNEL tag. So know my mp3tag looks like this for example if I want to set the remix tags for the 2022 Kraftwerk remixes album:
In this case roon will equivalence François Kervorkian to François K, so there are aready advantages. You can make a long list of role assignments. This logic was all put in place for Classical collectors where thee might be dozens even hundreds of performers but the logic works the same (in principle) in any genre. I say “in principle” because there have simply not been enough posts outside the Classical community to iron out all the bugs, miss-steps and usability issues that are going to arise with other genres.
If you are able to sort or group your albums in some way then you can make batch changes to your entire library. For example, if your remixer has a “artist” tag then you can use mp3tags “Action” feature to make batch changes across your entire library:
Be careful using this feature though and do a check with “Preview” to make sure it is doing what you think it is doing.
I probably have my roon set up differently as well. So for example in settings I have composer credits set to “always”. I also have quite a mixture of prefer file, prefer roon and merge file and roon for metadata. For all practical intents and purposes this is unchangable now as that triggers a library wide reset that can take days. So you will need to take that into account as well.
The end result is that navigating my remixers is a very similar experience to navigating a Classical library. But as I say this is not for everyone as there will be a very considerable manual retagging overhead and I myself gave up but as an example. Francois K. now has an arranger credit for his Radioactivity remix:
I can also see I have 6 remixes/versions and Qobuz has 52 so it is possible (in principle) to integrate remixes into roons navigation logic:
Francois K. also starts to have the beginnings of a creative Performer / Composer profile on roon:
However, without a great deal of manual editing and intervention his output is primarily treated as “Production” and that means none of the Performer / Composer logic will work. So if I press the Production tab on that page I get this:
Unfortunately, this will be what you find as well. Primarily, I would say this is down to categorizing remixing as a production rather than creative activity all the way through the meta-data chain. With such extensive issues, manual editing is not really feasible and I gave up.
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Tony - top work! Can’t tell you how insightful this has been thank you. I have tinkered with mp3tag before, I will investigate getting a Roon style set up.
I used mp3tag along with beets to prepare music for my LMS library … a process which I gave up and moved to Roon to escape haha. I feel your pain, though you have gone much deeper. would it be possible to have a copy of your mp3tag tag panel configuration (*.ini) I could interrogate what you are doing behind the scenes. I would also appreciate seeing how you are handling your Roon vs file metadata decision making in Roon.
I think for some key remixes I will ticker to have the track appear where I would look for it on the remixing artists page, not commit to a entire library re-catalogue.
Few quick questions RE your workflow.
-
PERSONNEL works well. Roon will find the added ‘remix arranger’. However as you say that is not sufficient to have the track appear on the remixing artists page. Do you add them twice both as primary artist and as remix arranger here?
Because I note this Kling Klang remix doesn’t have Kling Klang listed as performed by / composed by. Is this due to the unquantifiable Roon inconsistency you speak of. -
I am very curious about your auto tag-tag action in mp3tag. I don’t quite follow, why would I have the remix artist in the %artist% tag?
Yes. That is what I am doing. There needs to be a will on roon’s part for a complete overhaul otherwise there is just too much manual retagging involved. But there are things that can be done within the present limitations.
In answer to your questions. In order to get an “arranger” credit to display I have to switch “show composer always” to “on” in settings. I also need to double up “Primary Artist” and “Remix Arranger” in order to get this:
There are clearly still problems with this. If you apply a “Classical” or “Jazz” genre then roon automatically changes the presentation logic to suit differences to “Pop” music. However, despite the fact that “Electronic” music has a lot of similarities in terms of presentation requirements, to both Classical and Jazz, roon does not treat the Electronic genre in a more expected way. Hence, a lot of manual intervention is required to force those behaviours. It obviously doesn’t make any sense but you can experiment with adding a “Classical” genre to your remix albums to see what I mean.
In this example with this style of music it would be more appropriate if roon displayed François K. with an “Original Mix” rather than a “Composer” credit and Quiet Village with a “Remix” rather than “Arranger” credit. This is not possible at present and unfortunately there are similar precedents with roon’s treatment of Classical music going back to roon’s launch. For example, after years of lobbying it is still not possible to distinguish between Composition, Orchestration, Transcription and Arrangement and everything gets a blanket “Arranger” credit. Again it is the same root cause that roon is treating creative roles such as “Orchestration” as engineering production roles. On the other hand, there is no such thing as a Lyricist in Opera and after years of lobbying it is now possible to assign a “Librettist” credit. So it is long overdue in my view for roon to consider some root and branch changes to the way roles are handled as all sorts of genres are affected by a lack of a much more fine-grained control of role assignments.
The reason for the %artist% mp3tag example is to show how you can go about making batch changes across your entire library. So instead of editing track by track and assigning roles one by one to Kling Klang or François K, you can highlight entire groups of tracks or even albums or entire directories of albums and get roon to make the changes to all artists referenced by the placeholder %artist% in one go. It is all explained in the mp3tag help text which of course no one reads 
. There are also various youtubes covering the basics which you can also search for online.
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Glad to see some of you have found workarounds. Unfortunately, this is a long standing issue dating back to (at least) the changes made in version 1.8. I have brought it up in threads years ago here, as did someone else before me:
The real answer is, it’s not you, it’s Roon. Before 1.8, under the ‘appearances’ section on an artist page, there was a production section which would include anything from remixes, to engineering and so forth. This issue is still unresolved, and quite annoying if, like me, you listen to a lot of reggae or electronic music, it was nice to have all your remixes or all works of a producer in one spot (which was part of the reason I switched to Roon - it was so helpful how it pulled all of these things into one view).
Now for whatever reason, it seems to show up arbitrarily. I have the odd artist page that shows a production section, but 99% of them do not. I have wondered if it stems from the change to Valence, which seemed to ‘emphasize’ certain artists and credits the A.I. deemed relevant, and essentially not showing everything else. Which is baffling to me (like, how does King Tubby not get a production header??)
Anyways, good luck to you all…
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