Roon File Tag processing

One can read in the v1.7 introduction:
Roon can now automatically create “Roon Tags” from special file tags at the album or track level. This is a hugely flexible mechanism for the importing of nearly any external organizational system.

Nice, but how?
I have a meta data tag called „Grouping“ content „female voice“ (see screenshot; red circle)

How can I tell Roon: read that meta data field and turn it into a Roon tag?

In the Knowledge Base I found only info about ROONTRACKTAG, but this seems to be something different, meaning creating a new meta data field, but I already have it (hundreds of it). Even though „a hugely flexible mechanism“ I couldn‘t figure it out.

Thanks for your help.

You can’t. Roon can create “Roon Tags” from special file tags, namely ROONALBUMTAG and ROONTRACKTAG. The link to the relevant document of the Roon manual was given in the release note directly below the text you cited. There is no support for arbitrary user-defined tags to do this.

The use of ROONALBUMTAG or ROONTRACKTAG is an additional method that wasn’t present last time, unfortunately it still does not seem to be what you are looking for.

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In short, if you copy your GROUPING tag to ROONABLUMTAG or ROONTRACKTAG, Roon will be able to pick it up.

At least that’s how I understand it.

This means that I actually would need to rename the field grouping into Roontracktag.
While I know how to alter the content of the field I am not sure how to rename itˋs title.

Also copiyng the content of your GROUPING tag into a new ROONTRACKTAG might be an option. It would allow you to keep the GROUPING unaltered should you still need it for whatever program you created it for.
Sadly, I’m no expert when it comes to file tagging software. I never faced the task to do such modifications myself so I don’t even know if the software (Mp3tag) I usually use is able to do that.

Sorry that I can’t be of more help here.

I am not sure you can do rhat. My tagging software cant, but most taggers have a „copy tag-to-tag“ feature, so you just copy the contents of „Grouping“ into one of the tags mentioned above.

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Roon’s Tags are one dimensional in the sense that there isn’t both a label and a value - i.e. it’s not Field=Artist and Value=Led Zeppelin as embedded metatags provide. ROONALBUMTAG is the Field Name, so all you get to do is assign a value in the emedded metatag.

So you could try something like ROONALBUMTAG=“Led Zeppelin - Presence” to at least get to an approximation.

In your case it would be ROONALBUMTAG=“Grouping - Female Vocal” and then your content in Roon should have a Roon Tag applied called Grouping - Female Vocal

You can also Tag Tags. So for example you could tag all your different styles - Female Vocal, Male Vocal, 4-Piece, whatever with a Tag called “Grouping” and that would be a 2-level organization.

Foobar will do this for you. You need a view where you can sort by the existing metatags and then you just select all the albums and apply a new ROONALBUMTAG as an embedded metatag. No need to rename anything. Just add another metatag based on your sort view.

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Thanks for the helpful answers so far.
I still don’t get the point why Roon is advertising this as: „ a hugely flexible mechanism“, When in fact it’s the opposite it’s fixed to ROONTRACKTAG (and albumtag).
This allows only to import a single additional tag per song.
But what if some users have more than one additional individual organizational tag?
This way all users have to change their tag(s) to ROONTRACKTAG, Instead of a Roon creating a form where you define your tag to be imported as new Roon tag.
At the moment this function is very development oriented instead of customer friendly oriented.
I mean that Roon is already able to read my grouping tag, so why is the import function not realized towards existing meta tags?

Roon is advertisising all sorts of things that fail to match reality. They also keep telling me: „Roon understands your music“. Even after a few months I havnt quite figured out what that might mean as many tags they provide automatically via their ‚high quality’ (!) data providers are totally wrong or dont match up and need to be corrected manually.

Keep trying to fiddle around those quirks, thats what I do. If eveyyting would work as advertised this could be a great software.

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Roon Labs doesn’t claim that the implemented import mechanism is flexible in how it works – it’s flexible (non-restrictive) in what information a user can use it for (“This is a hugely flexible mechanism for the importing of nearly any external organizational system.”).

I guess that you can just use more than one ROONALBUMTAG or ROONTRACKTAG per file. Maybe even lists are supported. Unfortunately I can’t see any of this documented so you may have to try it out or another user with experience on the matter or an official might chime in and clarify.

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I have not tried it, since Roon released this 3 years too late for me (I’d already used alternate methods to get Roon as far as it will go via Tags), but presumably you can have more than one entry of each. Embedded metatags work that way - you can have more than one Field with the same name or you can separate them in a single Field with semi-colons.

I don’t know how Roon would pick that up, but you might try.

It’s more flexible than it was before. As for being a hugely flexible mechanism, I’d say that is a bit of marketing puffery.

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Actually I would like that Roon offers me the tool I need to do so (importing an existing tag to create a new Roon tag). But at the moment I am depending on third party software to do so…

Roon will import an existing tag to create a Roon Tag. The Roon Tag just doesn’t work like the embedded metatag. It doesn’t have a field + value, rather it just is one dimensional - field and value combined. It’s not so much that aspects that limits the value of Roon Tags however. It is the lack of Boolean logic to use with Roon Tags and the fact that trying to combine Roon Tags in a Focus or other query moves more slowly than a glacier. Roon’s database performance is really not good enough to support more. It’s too bad because it keeps people from building smart playlists and the like.

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