Retaining display name variations with merged compositions

With multi-part works it is often the case that slight modifications of the ‘master’ work title are desirable, even when the compositions have been merged.

For example with opera and ballet I have versions that are the entire opera including the recetive, but also ‘lite’ versions with the recetative stripped out and also recitals where there might only be one or two arias. I want to merge all these different versions of the composition together, because it is really cool to find long forgotten versions in my library but I also want to be able to preserve slight differences in the display title. For example:

Tannhäuser, opera, WWV 70 - for the whole opera case
Tannhäuser, opera, WWV 70 (Highlights) - for the ‘lite’ minus recetive case
Tannhäuser, opera, WWV 70 (Excerpts) - for the recital case

However, when I merge compositions I loose these distinctions. Is there a way round this?

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My (unsolicited) advice is not to merge 'em. It seems like what you want is a way to easily view multiple versions of the same composition, and Roon provides better ways of doing that.

At least in my mind, merges serve a different purpose; that is, they’re a way of fixing something that Roon has identified as multiple things (composers, performers, compositions, albums) when in fact it should be identified as one thing.

It’s a tricky problem. To some degree it depends on where you draw the line. For example, are you a “Fidelio” man, or a “Fidelio (3 act original) vs. Fidelio (2 act revision 2) vs. Fidelio (2 act revision 3)” man? It would be nice to do something better here, but for now, @orgel’s advice probably makes the most sense.

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How would you precisely achieve that in the current Roon version in the light of the examples provided by Tony and Joel ? Could you provide an concrete example ?

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I’d like to provide some examples, but I’m not near my Roon installation at the moment. Truthfully, if it were my library, I’d just start typing “Tannhäuser” in the search field (but I know there are more elegant ways).

I do agree with @joel that it would be nice to have a well-defined way to have Roon deal with these kinds of “version labeling” issues. For me. it’s often something like “Analogue Productions SACD” vs. “SHM SACD”. Not the same thing, but same sort of issue. I have to say that the “multiple version” icons for compositions have been very useful for me, so maybe something along those lines could be used, at least in part, to address the issue at hand.

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I think I didn’t explain myself very well. Vanilla roon in my library was treating individul tracks of a lot of 'highlight’s and ‘excerpts’ albums as individual compositions. So, for example, I have several Tannhauser ‘highlight’ albums and also excerpts in box sets where there might be 6 to 12 tracks individually classified by roon as WWV 70. I was astonished by this method of accounting to find I had 67 Tannhausers which of course I do not. This is growing on a daily basis as I am engaged in a long conversion exercise of a backlog of cue’s and apes which is the vast majority of my library.

So in order to put a lid on the chaos, I started grouping these highlights with WORK/PART. Of course these are technically incomplete operas and completely different from complete operas but it makes no sense to me at all to try and maintain another ‘tier’ of matching ‘highlight’ or ‘excerpt’ versions of the compositions. They never quite match so I would be back to square one.

A lot of the point of roon for me is to go to the ‘composition’ link and find I now have a much more manageable 12 Tannhausers, some of which are complete operas, some of which are different revisions, some of which are rehearsals, some of which are highlights, some of which are excerpts and some of which are single tracks. I don’t want to maintain a tier of composition grouping at that level of detail but it would be nice to be able to make minor adjustments to the work display name (not the key) so I know what I am looking at a glance.

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Hi Tony,
I have a similar problem with operas - lots of complete recordings mixed up with excerpts and overtures or single arias shown on the work page.
If it’s only for the complete vs. excerpt problem, I think a kind of flag would do for me to allow filtering on the complete recordings only.

For the Tannhäuser example you probably could differentiate between the Dresden and Paris version to begin with on work level, but afterwards I would be happy to have a way of flagging “incomplete” representations of the work on a given album.

Much more fun would be to differentiate between all editions of the Bruckner symphonies… :wink:

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Yes. I hadn’t thought about it that way. But a system of flags is probably a lot of development effort although even a simple on/off tick for complete/incomplete would be handy. I just thought it would be easier to just have a ‘prefer file’ option for the display of composition titles with out changing the underlying key. That way you could add what ever text you want if it wasn’t a requirement to be searchable.

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