I think noone is advocating spending zillions of hours.
There are a few things Roon could to that would help tremendously (such as adding a works choser functionality and getting the metadata issues feedback loop to allmusic fixed).
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I don’t think that I ever wrote that in any of my posts. In fact, I have adapted my tagging exactly to Roons File Tag Best Practice right after I joined this forum in 2015.
So I do what Roon recommends me to do with my file tags. Still I point out that even with this strategy you don’t always get your tags displayed the way you expect it, because Roon wants to improve your metadata.
You want Roon to spend tens of thousands of man hours architecting a way for Roon to work not only with how you tag classical albums, but every other guy tags classical albums.
As I said - I tag my albums exactly the way Roon recommends. I also couldn’t care less about how “any other guy” tags his collection.
I do not expect Roon to invest time in anything. It’s their business decision in what to invest or not.
I thought we were on a forum where we could exchange our thoughts and ideas about improving Roon? I post about things I would benefit from. Would the majority of the Roon users benefit from it, too?
That’s not for me to decide. I honestly don’t care, because I don’t need to. I’m not the provider of this software. I do not have to make design decisions. I’m a Roon subscriber for 5 years now and I share my thoughts.
I try to follow Roon’s Best Practice. What I say is that even if you follow Roons Best Practice you run into problems. That’s what I’m trying to bring across.
I do not understand why you seem to be put off by that. At least that’s how I read your post towards me.
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I agree. Roon should regularly evaluate its strategic directions and tactics. For example, I sure hope Roon is working hard to get Discogs as a data source. Not only does Discogs have a lot of data. That data is generally easy to fix if it is found to be incorrect or add if it is missing altogether. Roon also needs to fix how it deals with boxed sets. Roon should also offer a more effective way to use tags users add to their files. But, there are a bunch of UI issues that need to be addressed too.
classical music is not sexy … Hence ignored ?
Box Sets have been on the feature request list for years
Roon make no comment so we must assume no change
Its not just classical I understand that jazz is equally impacted
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Well all genres are impacted when the metadata isn’t readily available. Those into dance/dj style music likely have virtually no readily available metadata that Roon can use from their online sources… So, I’d assume few users would be those that strictly listened to that style of music. By contrast I can see just from the users around here that there are plenty of classical music devotees.
I understand the way that Roon handles classical music is far from ideal & at times causes conflicts, attributes albums to composers and not artists & vice versa with no level of consistency and more.
However, when it comes to a digital collection of music, I still believe that the initial phase of curating is the user. So, they should ensure their files have the necessary metadata they need to be satisfied.
Having said that, there’s no doubt many users have come to Roon with the expectation Roon will be a complete solution to collections of music that have never been properly curated previously. And alas it appears that’s simply not the case & nor will it be anytime in the near future.
There’s just too much music for Roon to be able to completely curate everything.
Cheers!
I absolutely agree. I also think Roon faces challenges at both ends - both for the user who just expects Roon to clean up his digital files and the user who is a long-term curator.
For the latter, the experience can be rather hard, especially if he/she has adopted a way of curating that does not work with Roon.
It obviously has a lot to do with the style of music you are collecting and the publishing strategy of labels.
I can only speak for classical, but for example there are a lot of classical re-issues who are not “Versions” in the sense of Roon, i.e. they have different work combinations on it. So what you normally have are “versions” of recorded works, since they might overlap from one single recording and a box-set.
Just the other day I had to manually clean up my versions of Symphonie fantastique recording from Colin Davis.
What I have are three recordings
- Colin Davis / London Symphony Orchestra
- Colin Davis / Concertgebouw Orchestra (Hi-Res download)
- Colin Davis / Vienna Philharmonic
Roon listed those as duplicate “Versions” which is not correct. I would be willing to try to tag my files in a way to avoid this happening but I do not understand the logic behind Roon’s decision to group these as versions.
At the same time I have an older 6 CD set of Berlioz orchestral Works from Colin Davis that includes the Symphonie fantastique recording with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Now this would be a “version” in my understanding and I’d like to have a chance to see those as a single entry on the composer/work page. However, I see two separate entries.
Admittedly that’s a minor glitch, but it illustrates the difficulties to come to a common data model. I could imagine that Jazz enthusiasts experience similar situations.
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Very good point Klaus, Roon has its own way of curating, which maybe new or in conflict to those of long time curators. That’s where the trial period plays an important role.
Interesting Roon had your three Colin Davis albums as duplicates. I can clearly see they are not, but obviously Roon was not able to distinguish the difference based soley on orchestra. That no doubt is an issue for you and similarly others with large classical libraries.
Where you able to rectify the issue via editing within Roon or manually editing your metadata?
Given the editing function is rather crucial within Roon (I beleive), I presonally struggle with the way it fills the screen and isn’t a floating screen, where one can cut and paste various pieces of data from another screen and so on. Further, the minimal keyboard shorcuts I also find limiting & hence more time consuming than need be.
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In order to illustrate one of my earlier comments about the magically appearing Primary Artist…
I have added a copy of the complete Mozart Edition Vol.9 (Wind Concertos). Library Import Settings are as follows:
Of course youcould argue that this is a “Various Artists” album. However I have decided to tag Neville Marriner as my album artist.
That is what I get from Roon:
OK, so I have two additional artists added as “Primary Artist”. I do understand that there is some Roon logic/magic involved, beyond the mere album artist tag.
Let’s have a look at the album properties
I do see my tag “Neville Marriner” and I see a “Roon tag” listing the Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields.
For the Primary Artists links I get these two plus Heinz Holliger. No idea where he comes from… Of course he is a soloist on the album, playing Mozarts Oboe Concerto.
At least I am happy that I don’t get Wolfgang Amadeus Mozartas primary artist on top.
Now why does this bother me? At the end all of those three are potential primary artists.
There are a lot of other artists involved that I choose to not list as album artists (I cannot choose “primary artists”, I know. That’s what Roon adds when having identified the album).
If I now click on the link for Heinz Holliger, I navigate to his artist page:
He is listed as primary artist on two albums and as “Appearance” on three others. Why is he a primary artist on the Mozart and not on the Bach and Vivaldi? He is only playing three tracks on the 5 disc Mozart album…
Of course this is a rhetorical question. He is there because a metadata source lists him in a way that makes Roon think he’s the primary artist. Got it.
What I don’t like about it, is that I can’t control this behaviour in order to achieve consistency. Of course I do make decisions on how topopulate my metadata that may be different to other parties. But I do that in order to have my personal consistency established. Therefore, if I do want to have the same consistency in Roon I have to check every single album imported on what it did with the primary artists.
I live with it for 5 years now, but I still do not like it
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And this is why I cannot get my head around this thread. Anyone is totally within their rights to have their own tagging schema.
But if you’d trialled Roon first, discovered issues and decided you didn’t want expend any energy on changing that schema, why would you then invest such a considerable amount of effort barking at the moon?
[Moderated]
Hallo Mike, that‘s exactly the way I‘m using this Tag, only for the „big“ classical composers.
And as mentioned, the information of composers in the Jazz and Pop&Rock genres delivers Roon. A very interesting fact, because before roon I did not fill the composer-Tags in these corners.
With Roon I nearly stopped completly to download albums. I rather add them to my library from the Qobuz streaming service. And even to this albums I can apply my ROONALBUMTAG-Composers! In my opinion the integration of Qobuz and Tidal is a very strong argmument for the Roon software.
Kind regards
Walter
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I simply used Roons function to “delete duplicate” in the versions view. All is good now. As I have written - it is not a terribly big deal, but one these small annoyances that frustrtates me.
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That I think is key & people want to ensure consistency best practice would be to do likewise. I do the same!
As for your example above, still months later I’ve really not looked deeply at my classical collection. So the albums & artists you’ve shown I’m very familiar with & I would have that Neville Marriner is the main artist, but often an album be titled Academy of St.Martin-in-the-Fields - Neville Marriner. So, I completely understand how Roon has both listed, which in this instance is a far better solution to ignoring one over the other.
I’d typically not want to see Heinz Holliger as I’ve not listened/bought any albums especially due to his oboe. However, as a composer - yes. e.g. his albums for ECM label.
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Room is a complex bit of software
Two weeks trial, including maybe one day simply importing the library is hardly long enough to even scratch the surface.
I invested in the One Years paid trial
Blaming someone for buying in on such a short exposure is hardly fair
Just my 2p
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Haha, sure.
If I’d imported my library and couldn’t see a clear path to resolving a major metadata malfunction to my satisfaction I wouldn’t be dropping five hundred dollars on it on a whim.
I would have worked that out in an afternoon.
Thats why I am still on annual, as well as being 69.95!!!
Some people just like to argue. I know, as I find myself doing it, and I appreciate my sparring partners here.
Here’s my two cents on the oft-repeated retort “why do you try to use Roon if it does not do what you want?” (Used heavily by the pile-onners).
Roon is more than one thing. The network protocol alone is uniquely powerful; DSP is great; integration with streaming services…phenomenal… and so it is easy for someone to fall in love with 75% of Roon and have that other 25% just stab you in the side every day. It’s a personality type but we do exist.
That 25% (or whatever the number) is often in the structured presentation of the collection. That’s one reason people tend to ask if there is a way to browse by folder. People want to be able to slice and dice their collections as they wish. Roon’s tools to do so have a lot of potential but they are incomplete, or represent some of the areas of the product that have not seen an update in the longest time.
Box set handling is the most obvious but not the only example of this. Tags don’t offer query logic and are too slow when you kludge it; I’ve never even really understood what that crossword puzzle of a track-mover thing under Album Recognition is supposed to do. And boy would I relish the ability to lay out my own pages accessible from the hamburger menu.
Software like Foobar2000 and J River, and there are others, provide much more flexible, user configurable means to display collections and pivot on those displays. These programs are also much more basic, in a sense, because they do not by default provide nearly the rich experience that Roon provides (really just limited to what you can stick in embedded tags) - i.e. you can get MUCH MORE information from Roon. And perhaps that is the tension - Roon’s richer experience is by its nature less flexible?
But I don’t think so. I just think it makes it harder to be flexible. I’d hope that Roon sees as one of its next challenges to get back to working on the library presentation aspect of the software: tags, bookmarks, alternative views, user configurable drill-downs, etc. while preserving the rich experience it also offers. You can do it Roon!
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Hi Walter,
being a JRiver user for years myself I can relate to your problems. What I do not understand is how you deal with albums that contain more than one composer?
I use the ROONALBUMTAG differently (for tagging my albums regarding Editions or Awards they received) but I wonder how that works in your case. Do you use the ROONALBUMTAG as file tag or do you just tag your albums with the composers?
I have kept my non classical music out of Roon, since I only listen to it in my car (and there I use spotify…).
And why do you do it in the format you do? Is it because you want to have the composers sorted by last name? This is something I have abandoned. In JRiver I am using different tags for this: COMPOSER for the normal name and COMPOSERSORT for the sort-by name.
I use the swap function in JRivers expression language to convert.
https://wiki.jriver.com/index.php/String_Manipulation_Functions#Swap
If its for the birth/death dates I have moved them in separate tags, too. In Jriver I can calculate combined tags easily for display, so there is no need to combine them into one tag. I always try to have different type of content in dfferent tags. This allows me to combine them as needed. I have found this gives me more flexibility to adapt to different players.
Hallo Klaus,
here an example of an album with 2 composers:
The ROONALBUMTAG’s are file tags. The result is shown in the screenshot. The search-focus was on ‘Mendelssohn’. Roon shows always the complete album. Not an ideal result for the search filter ‘Mendelssohn’, but I can live with it.
In JRiver I have a strict hierarchy for classic albums: Composer --> Work --> Album --> Title. This is something I’m missing in Roon. JRiver would here only present the works of Mendelssohn with the possibility to jump to the complete Album view.
But Roon knows the works and shows them in a good scheme, as the screenshot shows. The 3 works on this album a clearly separated and structured. So Roon knows all the informations and should be able to build a view for classical music similar to my JRiver view.
The big disadvantage of JRiver is, that it doesn’t link with Qobuz. Roon together with Qobuz has lifted my approach to digital music on another stage. The first stage was ripping my CD’s on a hard disc. The second stage was downloading HD-Files on a hard disc. And the third stage is linking to albums from Qobuz with Roon.
In the music press you find album critics of new releases, often other records of the same work are mentioned. Most of them can be found and heard in Qobuz. And you can compare a large number of different records. That’s the main reason, why I switched to Roon.
The form of the naming of composers and conductors is something, that I always did this way. It because of the old habit to talk like ‘The 5th of Beethoven under Karajan’. All the other artists in my tags are first name - last name.
Having the birth- and death-years of the composers in special tags gives you for sure more flexibility. But for me it would be too much work.
I have been watching this thread dispiritedly, as I more or less gave up on the subject years ago.
Classical is an essentially impossible genre, and Roon will never get it “right”, and certainly not in everybody’s view.
However, the constant theme is that users have spent years massaging the tags to do what is right for them, and so objectively, the only way that Roon can get it “right” is by offering enough options so that users who want it their way (me most definitely included) can get it presented their way while still getting the undoubted benefits of the overall Roon concept.
Much of the anger boiling over is because the holy grail is in distant sight, but we are not allowed to get there by our own hard prepared routes.
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