Continuing a discussion branching from this thread as to whether the Roon KB Export page should be edited to clarify what is and what isn’t written to file tags of the new copy when an Album is exported.
I will be experimenting over the next week or so to see if I can confirm what exactly is written to file tags when an Album is Exported and would welcome any assistance by anyone who cares to participate.
Once we can determine what is written, I will check with the Devs as to what is intended.
I’ll give you a hand Andy.
I selected a random album, selected the first track, and then edited the following three fields in the Edit Track pane:
Recording Location
Recording Start Date
Recording End Date
The Edit check box is clearly marked for this track on those 3 fields whenever I reselect the track and go to the Edit Track pane.
If I export the album, my user edits are definitely not recorded in the new file tags. Same situation if I export to an Excel spreadsheet.
However, Roon correctly honors file tags
RECORDINGLOCATION
RECORDINGSTARTDATE
RECORDINGENDDATE
if I set those 3 tags on my files using a tag editor(eg MP3Tag). I would thus have expected the export function to export my edits in a similar way. Unfortunately, this is clealy not the case, and the current export behavior is inconsistent.
As I use extensively those 3 metadata to document my library, this is another compelling reason to prefer edit of local file tags through a tag editor rather than direct Roon edits.
The KB should be updated to tell which user edits are exported, and which are not. My impression is that only a very few are.
I haven’t used export very much but I have many discs which are a nightmare to tag. These are recital type discs where all the tracks are different works, different composers. Discs like this:
I thought I would chance my arm. Roon identified the album no problems, with just a few basic tags from me like album title, artists and label. But it also found all the composers (which I hadn’t tagged). So, not expecting very much, I tried an export and I was very surprised to see that it preserved all the composer tags I had never edited. I re-imported and now I seem to have a cleanly tagged album without very much effort on my part. For a program that is not a tagger, roon has done a pretty good job.
So far I haven’t noticed anything obviously wrong. But this is a scenario where I didn’t start with very much so everything roon exports is a bonus. I can see on other threads that there is doubt and uncertainty about what roon actually exports. So if you have heavily tagged files you need to take care before overwriting like this with an export. Maybe you will get some new tags but at the expense of others that are lost.
