That album has an orchestration of Carnaval 
that should of course have top priority Maybe by Liszt 
I think that’s quite slow. In my experience, searches never take that long. I’ve just repeated the same search. 1.3 seconds this time!
That sounds familiar. Unfortunately…
2 Likes
That is the album title. Click on it and it takes you straight to the album with the Schumann Carnival. I quite like that. Not sure I understand what the issue is?
A lot of good points being raised. Very useful thread if the temperature can be turned down a notch or two!
All you rellay only need is a tag COMPLETE. A „yes“ shows you complete work/opera/set of preludes, a „No“ shows you recordings of „bleeding chunks“ as opera highlights often get called. so all your quazillion of „Nessun Dorma“s and „Träumerei“en fall into the latter.
1 Like
My internet connection is slow due to living in a remote location. We are also homeworking due to Covid and I was listening to some Marin Marais stuff at 24/96 at the same time. I have no complaints about the speed of search.
1 Like
Sounds plausible for local libraries. There are likely a lot of ways of doing this. There is already ROONALBUMTAG and ROONTRACKTAG which could probably be used the way you describe but I was never motivated to try.
It’s different with the streaming partners like Qobuz/Tidal unless they are passing through a “completeness” identifier roon could use. But I wouldn’t know. @Jez’s idea also sounds good to me also. Roon must understand the structure of a composition so using those composition structure rules “completeness” could be inferred. But I am the wrong person for that sort of detail. I haven’t been hands on technical in 30 years so I really have no idea what the technical challenges really are.
As I say unless I completely misunderstand sorting on the work length would be enough for me, maybe for others, and TBH just adding a few additional sorts to the composition browser at the same time would be handy.
I don’t listen to classical and only have three or four albums of it in my library. But holy cowabunga! Anyone trying to read through and parse this thread would surely conclude that the OP was correct.
2 Likes
Strange how our perception and experiences of control points can differ.
I used Minimserver with the Lumin app for 2 or 3 years when I moved from a Naim Audio streamer to a Sonore microRendu/Chord Hugo setup on one of my systems and it was just about adequate - but no better than that and very counter intuitive to use in my view. I preferred the Naim app I had used earlier or the Linn Kazoo app that I used to use on my main system. Then along came Roon and it completely changed my whole listening experience for the better.
I have now been using Roon as the control point for all 4 of my ‘systems’ for around 2 years, and I absolutely love the ease of use and features of the Roon app. For me, it is much more intuitive to use than any of the other control points I have used. I also love the fact that I can now control music on each of my 4 systems with a single app.
The Linn and Naim control points are fine, as to some extent is Mconnect if you want to access MQA, or even minimserver/Limin, but Roon is very much better for me and many others.
Of course, the fact that Classical music comprises only a small part of my locally stored music or music added to my library from Tidal may explain to at least some extent why our preferences experiences are very different.
2 Likes
The fiddling-around of Roon in my library, wrongly tagged/grouped/named compositions, having no visibility of what Roon actually does in the background makes this a very far shot from becoming my primary control point any time soon.
Yes, it got all my 80 or so Jazz albums right, Pop, Reggae, Bob Marley, Beatles, Norah Jones Dire Straits. All good. Because there is not much to get wrong here in the first place.
But the 5000+ classical Albums? Just an unbelievable mess. I’d have to spend weeks or months to get everything cleaned up. There’s better use of that time. The entire concept is not fully thought thru if you ask me: Naming conventions? They probably never heard about them.
Roon doesnt even behave as advertised. “Use file” works for some albums, not for others. Why? Nobody knows. Black Box.
I have full control of what I want my control point to show using MinimServer. I am much happier with that concept and can do without the cosmetic niceties of Roon.
Others may/will of course have a different view, and thats just fine.
Roon is already using that, otherwise you wouldn’t get what Roon calls metadata on your screen (the album review, the artist and composer information). As far as I’ve been able to gather from 2+ years of Roon use, this is is the infamous third party metadata.
I dislike this kind of inaccuracy of terms, because in IT terms, metadata is extra information that is stored with files. Like file tags for genre, composer, performer etc.
This causes confusion in discussions like these.
There is no accepted standard for true metadat in music files, unlike say in photography, where metadata is consistent and every image file’s metadata will be accurately read by any photo editor.
Roon tags imported music files with it’s own tags AFAIK and sometimes (not to say most times) these tags are either too general for use and retrieval or they are plain wrong.
None of us know how music services tag their catalogues, though Roon must have at least a partial handle on this.
The trick - which Roon hasn’t mastered - is to either normalize this data or else to make the querying process flexible enough to cope with different identification data points (pre-normalizing if you will) as well as making it robust enough to cope with data structure shifts in case one of the streamîng services alters their data tagging (for lack of a better term).
Queries lie at the base of the whole UI and I don’t subscribe to the notion that classical music is harder to catalogue and query than other music.
Yes, classical afficionado’s have preferences like piece x by ensemble y with soloist z but definitely not by soloist u, but all this information is there, even at the level of most ripped CD’s. Then again, Jazz enthusiasts can get even pickier: composition x by ensemble y but only that one recording where bass player z was replaced in the studio by bass player w and we only know this because it was mentioned in an interview with the frontman and it isn’t even mentioned in the liner notes.
And still I am convinced that stuff like that can be retrieved. Actually… Roon implies it can do that. It says so on the tin.
This kind of information retrieval takes serious efforts and takes kowledge of data. That is to say, knowledge of extracting relevant data points from both structured and unstructured data alike.
Stuff like file tags is a thing of the past. It is nothing more than building an electronic phone directory. You can call this stuff tags, objects or whatever, but the fact remains that it is an approach that is even less sophisticated than using index cards.
And from these index cards we get inconsistent results as shown in this and countless other threads.
NoSQL databases provide the means to fix this. Only it is not enough just to pour everything into a data lake. The information still needs normalizing, nodes don’t just magically appear and you need a hell of a DBA to achieve this. Or natural language understanding data analysis.
It remains odd that a limited dataset like music (seriously people, it’s not because it’s big that it isn’t limited - there are only so many permutations of composition, performer, composer, recording, label etc.) cannot be queried accurately.
2 Likes
Metadata can be stored in the file directly or it can be stored in a “sidecar” file. This is highly file format and application specific. IT should have no preference here as IT should be concerned with the robustness of the network and systems used and not how an application manages its metadata.
2 Likes
I find it pretty disrespectful how experienced and knowledgeable Roon users sometimes get run down here by the very same people who want help from them. This shouldn’t be happening on a thread like this!
9 Likes
I was thinking of it in a much more mundane and practical way on my laptop not roon’s server farms. More like cue files in local libraries which roon also does not support either so no one should have any concerns. Roon will not support what I was thinking and neither will any one else because it is a concern of those managing local libraries that will die out with the owners.
Everytime I have migrated my library to the next roon I have fought against the need to re-organise my library. Just like the OP. Just like several others here. It’s at the heart of the OP’s issues. He doesn’t want to throw away his sunk effort in his personal library. Eventually everyone just gives up, moves back to their old player, or complies, compromises and complains about something else instead. But if the meta data and data structure could be “stood off” from the local music files (like cues, rather than the mark-up), then migrating a local library from one player to the next would be more like mapping the schema of one player to another, even if that schema was just of one, i.e. your own personal invention. Supporting multiple players on the same library would then be relatively painless as well. Of course, I don’t see this happening but roon in small ways already supports client side schema mapping. For example, mapping your delimiters and genres to roon’s and maybe there is scope to extend that in small but useful ways.
You have an interesting idea on the server side but I must admit I remain skeptical. Introducing a business rules layer into data organisation is not a new idea but I accept that with AI, big data, other innovations like natural language processing, the state of the game has probably moved on considerably and that is really what you are getting at. The reason I remain skeptical is that much of the problems with roon’s treatment of Classical is very mundane nitty gritty detail that is expensive in terms of time and labour to sort out. This detail is not somehow recorded in free form text. I think you are probably thinking of album reviews and artist bios. There are no publicly available systems of rules or standards about how to use all the competing cataloging systems for Ravel’s music for example that would be immediately comprehensible to any current computer (even your clients system I suspect). Roon often gets this wrong and misidentifies very famous Ravel works as a result. I have only ever seen this issue raised a handful of times by a handful of posters and yet it is in everyone’s library. So what is the business case to fix it once and for all if it is a concern to so few? And that is just one composer. The sets of cataloging rules are different for every composer (at least the major ones). Many minor composers have no cataloging rules at all.
I cannot see that any amount of computing helps automate this very much and what the business case for the particular use case of Classical music library management is although you seem to think so. I would certainly be interested in the results. The technology cycle would certainly be pointing to a new roon emerging soon as long as there is a business case.
Classical music data organization predates computers, databases, IT etc. by several hundred years. Each major Classical composer is treated differently and many have competing organizing/cataloging systems that have themselves been endlessly argued about long before computers. I think this is a lot of the problem. There is no such thing really as “Classical”. It’s just a top level identifier and we all sort of know what it means, but below that there are different forms, periods, instrumentation all the way down to composers and even individual compositions which all have their own sets of rules and organising principles. And being art rather than engineering, each new generation is keen to overturn any of the rules of their forebears .
Difficult to capture that, like herding cats. Idagio is the best I’ve seen but from their public comments this was a largely manual exercise by a specialist team they assembled in Germany. This has taken them years by the way and it is ongoing. Now they have the model they are seeking to monitise it so there are several alternatives out there seeking to solve the Classical riddle. Personally I don’t see a once and for all solution any time soon as there just isn’t enough money in it.
These sorts of threads come up every now and then but they often turn into long lists of feature requests that never get done. Roon will never be perfect but it would be nice to see a small (very small) list of three or so requests that would benefit most.
Next issues I am trying to fight: Duplicate soloists. On every Oratorio, Requiem, Opera etc, I get something like this:
I have set Roon to choose its setting for Artists, but on top it also lists my soloist tags, which I have put into SOLOIST. The result is that I get every singer twice, once in his voice role (tenor, mezzo etc.), once under Soloist.
Is there a way to avoid this? (No, not deleting that Soloist tag 
)
Many thanks
A shame its not more generally supported. Every time I have migrated to new player I have left a lot behind as I never get round to editing everything. Same with roon. I thought this time round I would plug the gaps with a streaming account. Sort of works but there are issues with streaming as well. So a new learning curve.
I don’t think so. Doesn’t everyone get this? I think there are a few feature requests.
At least with the artists, the duplicates are hidden on this screen. But it’s the same problem on the main album page with duplicate composer roles, especially with vocal music.