I wouldn’t expect it to fix your issues either. The point of the exercise is to identify the patterns in your meta-data that roon does not understand, all of which you will need to fix one by one.
For example you have mentioned Germanic spellings a few times and you may have to Anglicize these spellings. Also if you are having a lot of problems with composition hierarchies then roon may be having problems parsing your work/part titles and changes might be needed there. I don’t really know. But once you wind roon back to its defaults you have a baseline and you can then start the process of editing your metadata in a way roon understands.
At the end of the day It may be that with a very large Classical library manually re-tagging a significant part of it is unrealistic and you may need to run your entire library through an auto-tagger that re-tags your library in a roon friendly way before attempting to re-import your library into roon. Several here with similar issues to yourself have reported a lot of success with Songkong for example.
This is not gonna happen. I have things tagged so that it returns consistant results and is easily searchable in my existing setup (Lumin/Minimserver). I am not going to give up my tagging consistancy to fit into Roons half-cooked way of handling classical music. I‘ll have to give up the cosmetical aspect of „slightly better look“. But I definitely prefer solid functionality over cosmetics.
I think something like Songkong is meant to be compatible with multiple players, so it is not necessarily either/or but it is certainly worth checking. The author is a frequent contributor here.
Do you have a screen shot of the tags for an album that works in your existing Lumin/Minimserver but doesn’t in roon? A reasonably complicated album with several composers / works / artists. Some change might jump out that does not need you to throw the baby out with the bathwater. For example, before roon I rarely tagged the record label or the record label catalogue number. Now, I almost always do and find it helps with roon a lot. Identifiers like this can really help roon but have no impact at all on other players.
Composers
Roon does not like "Beethoven, Ludwig van (1770-1827). It is expecting “Ludwig van Beethoven”. All your composers will have to be changed I believe. With Beethoven and Mozart etc. it is obvious. But it can be tricky with Russian composers as there are so many alternative spellings and roon does not understand all the “equivalents”.
Conductors & Soloists
Same drill. “Nikolaus Harnoncourt” not “Harnoncourt, Nikolaus”. Luba Orgonasova not “Organasova, Luba”
Tracktitle
The reason why you are getting so few WORKS identified is because you only have the PART in the Tracktitle. This should be:
Fantasia for piano, chorus, and orchestra (“Choral Fantasy”), Op. 80: I. Adagio
(Note the WORK/PART delimiter = “:” in this example. Also the alternative delimiter “-” works.)
You will see that I have used an Anglicized form (roon is a US company). Roon is picking these up from its metadata supplier (Tivo). An easy way to see what the “canonical” form of the work titles is to go to allmusic.com. Your Germanic titles may still work if they have the right Opus and catalogue numbers but roon will swap them to these Anglicized forms. It actually annoyed me at the beginning but the advantage is that roon starts grouping together all the performances of your compositions in your local library and potentially the universe of recorded performances from streaming services if you subscribe. You will have great fun comparing different performances of your favorite works. This is the big plus of roon and goes way beyond being “pretty”. The other players cannot do this.
I am sure this is not what you want to hear but there are basic incompatibilities between your metadata and roon’s ability to interpret. This is why you are having such an unusually large number of problems that others are not experiencing. You also want your tags to work with your existing setup so maybe the best way forward is to change a few albums and figure our what works for both roon and lumin/minimserver. Your tags look very consistent to me so when you figure it out you should be able to make bulk changes. For example I use mp3tag and there are simple scripts to swap first name /second name and concatenate works and parts.
You may also want to make other edits like adding recording labels and catalogue numbers that I find benefit a lot. We all have a lot of time on our hands these days. It’s quite theraputic. (I use tag names “Label” and “Catalogue #” which roon seems to understand).
This album was matched easily, therefore no WORK/PART tagging. Roon also didnt mind the Composer and artist way of tagging, and I’m not going to change that anyway
The way Roon recognises or doenst recognize Albums seems pretty artificial. I have not made up any logic…
May biggest concern at the moment is not the album matching as such, but the way Artists, Composer and Compositions are shown in those matched albums. Really totally messy and artificial. Sometimes you get everything properly displayed on top (all tracks performed by…), sometimes you get that whole litany listed on each track.
Just zero logic.
And apart from that if Roon is not smart enough to recognize that “Ludwig van Beethoven” and “Beethoven, Ludwig van” is the same guy, than they should not be in the business of writing software.
This stuff is more expensive than my annual Microsoft Office subscription. So these guys should get real or should get out.
Notwithstanding the efficacy or otherwise of your tags, the Handel Ariodante album you showed above has been badly treated by Roon. The metadata for this album (from Allmusic) is pretty poor but does at least use the HWV number, which has completely disappeared from Roon’s listings. This doesn’t help Roon trying to match the Handel composition.
If you say you don’t want Roon’s album match, then your own metadata may do a better job.
(Edit > identify and refuse the offered choices).
Of course this is just one album in your list of problems…
None of those reasons for me to look at Roon, as I am not a believer in all this “sound optimization” wizardry unless you have a mediocre system to start with. I am using Linn around the house and that sounds pretty amazing as is. But their control point(s) seriously suck, which is why I am using LUMIN App since 6 years or so. Sometimes looking around and trying other solutions (ie. Roon) re-focusses your mind just how good the things are that you are currently using.
Sigh - no, there’s a distinction to be made between the object model of Roon, and the simplistic approach of using track-based file tags. Issues arise at the overlap of these two worlds. And when we’ve been using file tagging for years, usually with our own nomenclatures and schemas, then those issues are thrown into sharp relief.
Dont worry, I’ll be out of here very soon. And btw. this is not even the core of the problem. The problem is that albums recognised by Roon are being presented completely inconsistently. Has nothing to do whether you tag first/last or last/first on your composer / artist whatever.
My understanding is that roon uses a lot of data points to identify an album even when roon tagging best practice is not being followed. I really like this feature as I am a “lazy” tagger and only tag when roon has made a complete mess. It hadn’t occurred to me that this was a problem.
I must admit that my experience also is that roon is a bit hit and miss with this work. But several releases should work straight out of the box including sectioning by Act which was new in v1.7.
If your particular release doesn’t work then you can certainly force it to as long as you have a local copy and you are prepared to minimally conform to roon best tagging practice. I do get why people cannot be bothered as manually editing a long Opera or Oratorio of 50-100 tracks is no fun at all (I fall into that category) so it would have to be a favorite piece or important to you for other reasons. This is one of the reasons why I am pleasantly surprised when roon gets a complicated work right despite my bad tags and only mildly irritated when it gets it wrong. I usually have the editing options to re-tag works that are important to me except for streamed content!
Ok, just to let you know the result of changing “Genre” and “Albumtitle” to the Roon default:
Not a single album as been identified in addition to those before - but a lot that I fixed manually have been “unmatched” again. Great.
On Genre, I have now 2 Albums in Genre “Reggae” a handful in “Jazz” - and close to 6000 in “Classical”. Extremely useful.
I will undo these changes straight away as they have added zero value and subtracted a lot in usuability. I am sure it wont be long and I’m running out of patience with this junk…
