I have just started a trial - I was expecting my classical collection to appear under Classical but the only albums appearing here are musicals and one Schubert album. The rest are mixed in with rock folk etc.
I assume that your collection is comprised of local music files and folders, rather than added from a streaming service such as Qobuz? If so, then I would check that the file metadata is correct. These help articles should give you an idea of what Roon can use:
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Clean up and clarify the metadata/id3 info of your files. Use a program like TagScanner. It’s worth doing properly. Roon will update as you update the files.
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Have you set a “Classical” genre tag for your Classical albums? Roon uses that tag for all sorts of Classical treatment of your files that differs from Pop/Rock. If you don’t have many Classical tags set it sounds like you also have a lot of unidentified Classical albums because if roon can identify the Classical albums in its database it will set a Classical tag even if you haven’t.
As others have mentioned, it’s not a hard and fast rule and everyone’s milage differs but in general if you want to get the best out of roon you should try and follow roon tagging best practice as closely as you can. Depending on how much your tagging habits, that you may have built up over many years, differs from what roon is expecting you may need to invest in a substantial retagging effort to get roon to behave how you prefer/expect.
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Thanks for all your replies … much appreciated! I embarked on a major tagging exercise a while back so that all of my albums appear as I’d like to see them. [I’ve been using Media Monkey to display my main library]. It seems to be quite at odds with Roon though. However, I can see what I need to change to make everything compatible with Roon now. Regards, Dave
Just here to say that you might check out mp3tag as an alternative for editing metadata. It’s free, so might be worth exploring to see if it addresses any gaps with your current solution. I’m not sure it will, but thought I’d throw it out there. It was recommended by a fellow Roon community member, and I’ve found it very helpful!
Thanks for the reply. I’ve been using mp3tag for a while and it has proved very helpful in tagging my library. My problem is it rather clashes with Roons tagging. Having looked at it, I wish I’d used Roons system - a lot of good thinking has gone into it! I might get around to re-tagging at some stage but there are other ways to find my favourites.
Tagging external to Roon is probably better, Roon does NOT edit your file tags , Any edits you make are stored in Roon’s db.
If you need to use the files with another music player, all your effort will be lost
Maybe read these articles for a better view of Roon.
If I am not mistaken MP3Tag supports Custom Tags which once added Roon will honour if they match Roon’s tag naming
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Retagging is super easy and takes a few moments with TagScanner. You can move tags into their proper place in bulk. It’s a 2 minute job.
If you run the free Status Report that comes with SongKong I can probably determine the issue for you, please see here for details.
One issue that messes up some Classical users is that sometimes they break up albums into works so that each folder represents a work rather than complete album, that is going to cause major issue for Roon because its primary matching algorithm requires a folder to represent full album (allowing for subfolders if multi disc album).
is the Roon algorithm proprietary , I would love to know how it’s done in lay terms. I have always wondered
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I don’t know for sure but I think main algorithm works in a similar way to how tools such as DbPoweramp work but instead of creating a checksum based on the length and order of each track on a CD, it does a checksum based on the length and order of each digital file. Times not as accurate as a CD but still good enough for many albums (not singles), I know this because that is one of the methods we use in SongKong, but it only works if have complete album and accurate rips of the tracks.
Additionally if songs have been matched by 3rd part tagger, and that tagger actually adds MusicBrainz Ids to the files such as SongKong, Jaikoz or Picard does rather than just the basic metadata then Roon recognizes these ids and accepts these matches without having to search itself for a match.
Roon probably has other methods but I think these are the two main ones.