Roon indexing - misses 80% of my Beethoven. (restart)

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So why was this thread closed without any resolution? Now i know why i never saw replies. Hey guys, help, dont just close cases! bad form.

Ages ago i wrote:

"For a product that sells itself on the rich user experience, I’m getting very frustrated with Roon. For example, i wanted to explore a bunch of Beethoven works. I have ripped literally hundreds of disks int he last months, many of which i am not familiar with. So i need to start with simple searches.

First, i get multiple matches for Beethoven. Is Roon unaware that “Beethoven, Ludvig” is the same as “Beethoven L, [dates]”?

Next, and here’s the really bad part, it fails to bring up full half the matches. Only if “Beethoven” is in the album’s name does it come up, and even then sometimes not. If it is a pieces on a multiple piece performance from some artist, i don’t see it. This frankly, is a step backwards from itunes (yikes!) where I can at least Boolean search the database (out of iTunes if need be).

Help!

(note it is possible that some of this is related to my other request re: data lost in the upgrade to 1.7)"

Let me correct myself. I was being very generous. I have in my database dozens of Beethoven works. Some have “Beethoven” in the CD’s title, while on some others it may be a work along with works from other composers, or under the performer’s name/title - but the metadata ought to be in there regardless. If its not, the search is not of much use frankly and maybe i ought to go back to physical CD cases. Or itunes. Or ???

When i search on Beethoven i get maybe 10-15% of what i have. It gets worse, i have the complete symphonies from MHS. But when i search i get one half of the collection (volume 1A,1B), but none of the other half. I also get a few of the individual symphonies listed, but others not. What is the logic? I’m perplexed, and more than a little annoyed.

Help

G

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So the question is, have those titles been properly identified in Roon and therefore findable in a search?

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Sounds like you have a lot of poorly tagged and “unidentified” albums. You will need to start manually “identifying” those that roon couldn’t find in it’s database and this will more than likely require at least some manual tagging of the underlying files on your part so that roon can make a match. Although things have certainly improved with Classical, the migration of a Classical library to roon can be challenging if your tagging and organising methods depart radically from roon expectations.

Taggers like mp3tag for windows and Yate for Mac are good places to start. One tip is to find your album on allmusic and to tag the same in terms of composer names and work titles. You can also try auto-taggers like “Songkong” which will tag your albums in a roon-friendly way. If your tags are in bad shape, re-tagging your library can be a very long process.

Other than that it is difficult to be more specific as it sounds as if you have multiple issues. But as a direct answer to one of your questions and by way of trying to illustrate why many of us have found migrating a Classical library to roon challenging (you are not alone).

Probably not. Although it has got better this has been a problem for roon from the early days as there are so many “equivalent” namings for Classical composers and Artists, even for the most famous. This is what discogs has for Beethoven:

Beeshoven, Beeth., Beethovan, Beethovania, Beethove, Beethoven, Beethoven L. v., Beethoven L. Van, Beethoven L.V., Beethoven Ludwig, Beethoven Ludwig van, Beethoven Van L., Beethoven Van Ludwig, Beethoven, L. van, Beethoven, Ludvig Van, Beethoven, Ludwig Van, Beethoven, Ludwig von, Beethoven, van Ludvig, Beethoven,L.V., Beethoven’, Beethoven’s, Beethoviana, Beetoven, Bethoven, Bethovena, Betoven, I.Ivan B, L Beethoven, L v Beethoven, L van Beethoven, L-V-Beethoven, L. Beethoven, L. Bethovenas, L. Bēthovens, L. Betoven, L. V . Beethoven, L. V Beethoven, L. v, Beethoven, L. V. Beethoven, L. V. Beethoven, L. V. Bethoven, L. V. Betoven, L. V.Beethoven, L. van B., L. van Beethoven, L. van Bethovenas, L. van Bēthovens, L. Van Betoven, L. van. Beethoven, L. von Beethoven, L. W. Beethoven, L. W. Bethowen, L.-V. Beethoven, L.Beethoven, L.V Beethoven, L.V. Beethoven, L.V. Betoven, L.v.Beethoven, L.V.Bēthovens, L.V.Betoven, L.v.ベートーヴェン, L.van Beethoven, L.Von Beethoven, L.W. Beethoven, L.W. van Beethoven, Louis van Beethoven, Lu. v. Beethoven, Ludqig Van Beethoven, Ludvig Van Betoven, Ludvig van Beethoven, Ludvig van Betoven, Ludvig von Beethoven, Ludw. V. Beethoven, Ludw. Van Beethoven, Ludwig, Ludwig Beethoven, Ludwig v. Beethoven, Ludwig Van, Ludwig Van B., Ludwig Van Beethofen, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Ludwig Von Beethoven, Luis Van Beethoven, Lv Beethoven, LvB, LVBeethoven, V. Beethoven, V.Beethoven, van Beethoven, van Beethoven, L., Van Beethoven, Ludwig, Μπετόβεν, Бетховен, Бетховен Людвиг Ван, Л. Бан Бетховен, Л. Бетговен, Л. Бетовен, Л. Бетховен, Л. Бетховен*, Л. В. Бетховен, Л. Ван Бетховен, Л.Бетховен, Л.В. Бетовен, Л.В. Бетховен, Л.В.Бетховен, Лудвиг ван Бетовен, Лудвиг ван Бетховен, Людвиг Бетховен, Людвиг Ван Бетовен, Людвиг ван Бетховен, בטהובן, ל. ו. בטהובן, ל. ואן בטהובן, بتهوفن, بيتهوفن, بيتهوڤن, ベートーヴェン, ベートーベン, ルートヴィヒ・ヴァン・ベートーヴェン, 貝多芬, 贝多芬

Good luck.

1 Like
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All of the above assuming the same deaf composer … maybe he couldn’t spell his own name reliably either by the looks :wink: yes Im joking. I wonder if the 3beez product does better - as its perhaps said to do with classical.

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Interesting. Roon does something similar in the composition screen but development stopped.

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Thanks for the comments so far. Now, can someone explain a bit more about “identifying”? I made sure each CD was matched to the proper – or closest i could find ( the same recording session) release when i loaded them.

I’ll also note that i had much better luck BEFORE the v17 “upgrade”.

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Go to the main albums screen and search for all your unidentified albums via focus.

albums->focus->inspector->identified (key twice to turn negative)

What do you see? If you see most of the albums that you are missing on search then this is a large part of the problem. If you don’t then there is another cause.

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Everyone seems to be missing this. <=====

No albums are totally unidentified. Every single one, when imported, was attached to a metadata file. If i doubted its accuracy, i manually looked att eh options for best fit. All the selections can be found if, for example, i happen to know the main album title and search for it.

This is not " i have mystery albums". This is “why are albums which have successfully been associated with metadata not showing up when i search on “beeth” or whatever?”

To make it even clearer, last night i quickly played with various built in filters. When i used “composers” and scrolled to “Beethoven” lots of stuff was there. But not by searching (magnifying glass) or by “artists” - although under “artists” mussorgsky, for example, did show up - so its not [always] a technicality of the player vs the writer.

IMNSHO, this is a search bug, plain and simple. But i’m open to being convinced otherwise.

G

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Classical metadata is mixed :heart_eyes: but it sounds like your tags maybe a bit wanting

The advise above is all sound so I’ll add my 2 p

I use MusiCHI tagger and SongKong to help

MusiCHI makes Beethoven, Ludwig ( dates) simply Roon doesn’t recognize that format I manually change to simple Beethoven, thats OK

MusicBrainz uses Ludwig van Beethoven, Songkong uses MusicBrainz, worth a look theres a 30 day demo

Get a third party tagger and groom, Roon is not going to change, there is nothing better than AllMusic and MusicBrainz out there. To get the best out of Roon needs a little effort unfortunately

I have 3000+ classical albums with about 10 unidentifiable so it can be done of that 406 Beethoven many are x disc sets use Focus > Composer and create a Bookmark

Hope this helps :heart_eyes:

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Hey, thanks. Not what i wanted to hear, but maybe a solution. Any advice on how i use either on an existing library, already in Roon?

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SongKong you can literally point at your music folder and go get coffee but I would recommend a more controlled approach @paultaylor is the author of SongKong and an active member of the forum so he may advise better than me

A lot depends how obscure the record is , DG Decca , EMI are covered well in MusicBrainz, odd labels maybe less so

What I do is remove the disc from Roon you don’t need to but I find it cleaner

Use SongKong to clean up
Then use Settings>Library > Clean up library

Then put the corrected album back into Roon so it reimport and re identify

You could take the same approach with say all the Symphonies

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you mean totally delete and re-import? There are hundreds of CDs! and the problem is, since they are supposedly identified, i don’t even know which are the problem. Many are major labels. Many are Mercury LP ( i have the boxed sets). Quite a few are audiophile labels, like Wilson, Chesky - but they are not fly-by-night outfits… Thanks, I’ll see what it can do in repair mode first.

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Roon search doesn’t work for everyone. There are a lot of posts on this topic. For many with large local libraries it may seem more like a browse than a search. Particularly with Classical, search is more geared towards making sense of streaming libraries rather than local libraries. Roon I guess judges that is the future so even basic operations like search and navigation of local Classical libraries can prove surprisingly awkward.

Having said that, if you have basic tags like “composer” in place then even on a partial search you should be seeing a drop down like the following.

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If you select “Ludwig van Beethoven” that will take you to another screen with a lot of sub divisions including “composer” and that in turn will take you to the composition screen. This is only going to work if you have consistently “Ludwig van Beethoven” tagged as a composer though and if you have different composer formats (including dates for example) or it’s in the artist field or its part of the album or track title you will have a lot of problems with Classical search in roon just as you describe.

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Hi @Just_Me,

Can you share an example of a search you’re performing and what content you’re expecting to see? Can you share a screenshot of an album you’d expect to show up along with the results of the search?

Here’s one thing to try:

From the Album browser, choose Focus > Composers. Then choose Beethoven from the list.

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Do you see your albums when doing this?

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