This has been an interesting thread. I’m 3 days away from the end of my Roon trial and am completely undecided. Much I really like, but I’m really wondering whether Roon will handle my classical collection to the extent that I find it useable for me personally.
I’m by no means a metadata obsessive and am willing to change the way that I do things, but I have a pretty well organised library and can quickly find, say, all the recordings of Beethoven’s 2nd Piano Concerto. My tagging system is very much based on the tags you get with Hyperion downloads, especially for composer names. At present, I use JRiver for library organisaton and Audirvana Plus for playback and for Qobuz. Roon is much nicer to use than either, but I’m not sure I’ve got the energy to change the metadata for 1200+ albums. Still two days to decide though.
You don’t necessarily have to decide in two days. You can let your trial expire and take a break. Then, come back a little later if you decide Roon makes sense for you.
@anon18614226, I agree with you. It is impossible to decide in those two weeks trial. In the end I decided to book a “prolonged trial period” , spending 120 Euros. As it stands now that amount is mediocre compared to the hours invested in cleaning things up, and thats just fine.
It is probably unlikely Roon will work for you “out of the box”, but it also depends on your exceptions, the kind of collection etc… But if you are not prepared to spend a fair amount of time fitting Roon to your needs, I’d probably leave it alone.
Sitting on the fences as @Jim_F suggests gets you nowhere IMHO.
I think I did a 30 or 45 day trial via Oppo special. Then, I purchased a one-year subscription. After another month and the life-time price increase, I was able to jump on lifetime at the old price.
It’s funny, but as I was writing my post I was already thinking how much I would miss Roon. I did get an extended trial through Audioquest, but one problem with any trial is you don’t feel inclined to put in a huge amount of effort that might be wasted. Logical thing is is to sign up for a year and see how it goes. Looks like there is a lot of good advice on the forum, so I’m looking forward to joining the debate
You do not see this as a drill-down list in Roon as you could see in JRiver. However, I think the hierarchy you describe is the exact one used in Roon.
The main difference is that if you accept Roon for what it is and what you get your “metadata management “ goes away Roon does it
The big question is , “is what Roon does” to your liking
I did the $120 extended trial while keeping my legacy system live, I subsequently extended by annual subs , now in year 4, money was not the determining factor, frustration was.
Each to his own I guess
You can manage classical (3000++ ) albums but maybe with a mind set change
For what it’s worth I still prevaricate , so I use both systems depending on what I am listening
I won’t miss metadata management so that is my big hope for Roon. I recently ripped the new Karajan Complete Decca Recordings 33CD set and I’m still trying to sort out the metadata mess. I’m hoping the set will appear on the Roon database soon!
First thing I’ll do is follow @Klaus_Kammerer1’s suggestion to create a COMPOSERTSORT tag as this will make things much neater in JRiver anyway and take it from there.
thank you for your post. Maybe I was too much relying on my own ‘ROONALBUMTAG’-Composers. What I did not like in the original Roon Composers view is the fact, that every composer appears. But now I found out, that I can filter ‘Only Classical’. That’s pretty close to my wish.
Yes, I forgot to mention that. Since I do not have a mixed library in Roon, I tend to forget about these filters. Happy that you are getting closer to what you want.
Use Album Focus to select a Composer, then save as a Bookmark. This is dynamic so any new Beethoven (say) albums added afterwards will beincluded useful for your Top 10 composers
How are you guys handling Genres in Classical? I have about 30 classical genres. But Genre at Album level makes little sense in classical as often you have say an Overture, a Violin Concerto and a Symphony. I tag each of them in these categories, but of course when I search for “symphony”, the Violin Concerto and Overture are coming up es well. even I have not searched for Genre “Overture” or “Violin Concerto”
Best would be to link these to composition level. Any smart solution?
I am ignoring Genres completely, since they are applied on album level only and this makes no sense to me for classical. Therefore I have set all my files to genre “Classical”. Roon does add its own Genre information as usual, but I just ignore this.
As far as Roon is concerned, there already is information available on composition level that would do the trick for me:
You can not focus on all of those fields but it is a start. What I would like to have in Roon would be a tag mapping possibility for file tags.
In my files I have started to fill the tags for PERIOD, STYLE and INSTRUMENT. These could be, of course, copied to any source if required.
Not sure if this would be a smart solution but I’ve started (but did not finish it yet) to add genres to tracks using the ROONTRACKTAG. In theory, this should be possible (semi-) automatically with an external tagger.
Since I’m using a strict hierarchical genre structure, I thought of recreating this with tag nesting and special characters (the · is not used in any other tag), like this:
Certain tags you could then bookmark. But since bookmarks aren’t really manageable (no core side storage of bookmark order, no nesting) this is still (too) far from being a perfect solution.
, so I use both systems depending on what I am listening
