Which came first Roon or the Collection , I started collecting at age 16 , I am 70 next month (Hopefully) and my collecting has been fairly linear over the years.
Roon is in my case 3 years old , while my collecting has slowed of late , adding to my collection via Tidal has replaced it , being significantly cheaper.
I have often considered a split library “Core” and “Non Core” to single out my favourite performances , I have MANY Beethoven Sonatas
That said its unlikely I will stop collecting from whatever source, its the closet librarian in me
Sigh. There is no issue you are reporting that has not been reported multiple times in multiple threads by about 6 other people. You are not prepared to change your tagging scheme so you will continue to have a truely horrendous although quite entertaining roon experience. So thanks for that.
For others reading this thread and struggling with this particular issue of how roon deals with transcribers my experience is entirely the opposite. There is no rule about the composer to use to get a composition identification. But mostly with Liszt transcriptions you need to use Liszt as the composer and not use the original material composer. But this is not a hard and fast rule and you have to experiment. Same with Busoni/Bach transcriptions or Debussy/Ravel etc. With multipart works it is also not possible to customize the work titles to reflect the different instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement etc. Although, confusingly it is with single part works.
I think you mean the OP? I am mother tongue UK English. I often have problems with Americanizations in roon and yes Americanizing Composer and Artist names and album and work titles and even genres really helps.
There really is no point in fighting with roon. The best possible (though imperfect) experience is just by best practice. You will be assimilated and be happy.
Yes. There are some rules of thumb but it is not hard and fast. I occasionally go round in circles chasing my tail trying to get a composition identification with transcriptions and forget to swap the composers and arrangers which often does the trick. I would really like to be able to customise the work titles though. I live in hope.
I have similarly read, without comment, a number of threads regarding classical music all with a similar theme.
I’m yet to really go through my classical music; seems kinda scary with all the negative reading.
However, I personally tag…I just view that as part of the course with digital music. I’ve found otherwise, if you rely on the tags of downloaded music, don’t tag your own rips, etc it just becomes a mess.
In saying that, I am already conscious of the fact much of my classical will need ‘deeper’ tagging unlike other styles, which I’ve not been overly fastidious about. It has previously played the way I wanted & needed. It likely won’t now.
To me tagging is part & parcel of digital media. I have some 5000+ albums on my NAS drive…I know what it’s like having a large cd & record collection (which I still have). Without organisation it’s just unmanageable.
Yup it takes a long time…Can Roon do better? I have no idea (yet). It’s the complexity of so many classical releases, the way individuals want their collection to appear that no doubt makes a metadata collector such as Roon very awkward to collate to meet the needs of all concerned.
Hence, it’s back to tagging the way a person demands for Roon to work according to individual needs.
Perhaps I’ve missed something & I am certainly not meaning to trivialise people’s experience. I certainly recognise tagging can be an exhausting task.
Well, its the collection. I had to wait for Uni to get my first serious (budget) turntable. Blew my entire first term grant on that and had enough left over for 5 LP’s I recall. Still have them.
For me the motivation for computer audio at the beginning was search., I just got fed up “loosing” favorite albums and CD’s. Computer audio didn’t really solve that one so I find myself drifting back to physical media. The hardware manufactures have started making hybrid SACD./USB streamers I notice and that is the sort of equipment that can bridge you back to old school audio.
I am just reading between the lines and I could be way off base but I have the impression from posts and screenshots that the vast majority of roon users simply use roon in a completely different way to roon’s (very small) Classical user base.
Classical music is essentially a “covers” genre. Many here will have dozens of copies of exactly the same composition. But these copies will be by different soloists, conductors, orchestras, choirs, played in different venues with different acoustics and at different times with different emotional energy. My favorite Bruckner or Shostakovich for example is most certainly not the latest most high rez, technically perfect recordings but truely horrendous quality 2nd World War era recordings. For example Shostakovich at the siege of Leningrad followed of course by Furtwangler at the siege of Berlin. Priceless. A lot of the “hobby” of Classical collecting is comparing different versions of favorite works.
Roon, in principle really helps with that. Unfortunately, the state of the art in meta-data standards means that this way of enjoying music requires a great deal of tagging effort. Many here, like the OP will have spent years grooming collections how they want them and are now reluctant to change. Personally, I don’t care. When the next roon comes along I will just change my metadata to suit yet again.
As it happens, Classical music is not the only genre where this type of “listening” is common. Its also the same with EDM (Electronic Dance Music). That genre also is built around a lot of arrangements, mixes, celebrity DJ’s of identical compositions and is often enjoyed in exactly the same way as Classical. When I started out with roon I actually tried to identify as much pop/rock covers as I could at a “composition” level. But it was too hard and I gave up. It’s a shame because the advantage is that roon will then make really interesting playlists and shuffles.
Does that work? In the sense that roon will “equivalent” your composer formatting convention when matching in its database. Or is it just display? I often add accents, umlauts etc. to both composers and artists as I find it annoying that roon strips them out. That seems to work but I don’t change the structure of the name. I’m not really brave enough to go further than that!
I’ve not seen any evidence/numbers from Roon to corroborate this assertion. I think it is very probable that Classical users are in the minority. However, what do you mean by “use Roon in a completely different way”? I suspect “serious” collectors (those who are very particular about releases and/or performances) exist across all genres in Roon…
Geoff, I am not following. Isn’t that what I said (or at least meant to say)?
What I meant by using roon in a “completely different way” is that if the forum is a reliable proxy for the roon demographic then “collectors” (by which I mean manual taggers) of all genres using roon are a tiny minority. I don’t know the numbers any more than you but it must then be the case that the vast majority of roon users are more than happy with the auto-tagging they get with roon and the gaps in meta-data are unimportant to them. TBH with most genres they are also unimportant to me! At least 60% of the time I am also one of the vast majority of roon users who find the Classical pre-occupation with manual tagging incomprehensible.
Again I tip my hat to all the users who think up the workarounds. I haven’t got the patience for this.
Now I’m going to shamelessly plug one of my clients. They have developed working natural language understanding software. This software can (and does) retrieve results regardless of spelling, so it will identify “Scriabin” and “Scriabine (French spelling)” as the same composer. And it does this with Cyrillic and Chinese characters as well.
Beethoven, Ludwig van and Ludwig van Beethoven will be identified as the same. Concerto and Konzert will be identified as the same.
Provided that Roon’s data model contains all possible identifiers (which it should), this software should be able to return a correct result from input like: “Beethoven triple concerto yo yo ma” or “Beethoven triple concerto versions”.
Not exactly, I think. You seem to be implying that it’s only Classical users who use Roon in a completely different way to all other users. I consider myself primarily a Classical user, but I don’t think I am using Roon in a completely different way from the majority of users.
I suspect it’s more likely that “serious” collectors, who have likely come to Roon after years of collecting and developing their own way of managing their collection, are likely to be the ones who struggle with Roon’s way of doing things. And my point was that “serious” collectors exist across all genres.
Oh Geoff do me a favor. That is clearly not what I said. I also said this.
As it happens, Classical music is not the only genre where this type of “listening” is common. Its also the same with EDM (Electronic Dance Music).
I have also posted many times that many other genres share the basic composition-centric data model of Classical and users in those genres would also benefit from long outstanding feature requests from Classical users. I had hoped that widening the net like that would encourage roon to re-prioritise functionality often being requested in the Classical domain. That hasn’t happened and in fact the roon trajectory is clearly now in the direction of a streamed model so I just draw the perfectly reasonable conclusion that “serious” collectors of locally managed libraries across any genre are a minority of roon users. Roon themselves often comment that their future is streaming. Every now and then roon themselves confirm that local collectors in any genre are a minority. Users with large local libraries in any genre would appear to be a very small roon demographic from roon’s own published comments.
Just to be clear. My view is that for a tiny minority of roon users, manual tagging is important. Many of these users have invested a great deal of effort grooming large personal collections and migrating to roon can be a very painful experience. One particularly vocal sub-group of that minority is Classical, another is EDM. Personally I have a large collection of 80’s indie and Vinyl rips that also don’t migrate easily to roon. No doubt there are many other genres. So I am aware of the difficulties across genres. But if the forum is a reliable proxy for the roon demographic I hear very few complaints except from the same handful. Over the years, maybe a few dozen or so. There has been no significant update to the composition browser in years. What that says to me is that using the composition centric organising features of roon is unimportant to most. What seems to bother you is that for most genres these features are unimportant to me also. I can certainly appreciate why they might be important to others and actually have tried to use them for example to better organize an 80’s indie collection. But I found it practically impossible as the auto-tagging was very incomplete and I wasn’t interested in manually tagging. Maybe a few are but it can’t be many. That’s all I meant by the vast majority.
This is more than hyperbole; it’s a tantrum. “It’s your fault, not mine!” Blanket condemnation serves only to absolve one’s role in the problem. Look up “GIGO” sometime and see if anything rings the proverbial bell.
TBH the only reason I am aware of this thread is that I had a problem with a streamed version of the Zinman Beethoven cycle. In general it is not possible to edit streamed metadata in roon. So, instead of making my own post I made the mistake of searching the forum and found someone had posted the same issue 3 years ago (still unresolved). So I posted there. This thread seems to have been split off from that thread and I got copied. More fool me.
For what it’s worth roon is what it is. Going back to the original topic I don’t believe it is “simply unusable for classical collectors”. The best possible experience is just using best practice and finding a few tips from other users here on this forum. For a few that is not going to be realistic as there is too much sunk effort in legacy libraries. Personally, it never bothered me that much. I have edited and re-edited a digital library going back maybe 20 years now. It is usually very straight forward with bulk editing tools. I must admit that roon has been quite a step change and my own migration is far from complete because of that. I just use several players and have no expectation that roon is somehow the end-station on my own personal digital audio journey.
If only we would know what “Roon’s way of doing things” was. It’s all a black box. Total mystery. If Roon would apply some common sense and basic logic, focus on the important things and not get lost in mostly irrelevant detail - that would be a huge step forward!
Can it return a result for “what are my complete Beethoven triple concertos”? I get 262 for Qobuz but a lot of them are “partial”, single movements. What would the tool need from the data? At the moment I usually just randomly scan the list for anything about 35 mins. Not very systematic and it can be worse when there are more than a 1,000 performances. This come up a lot. There have been several posts.
Indeed, it comes up a lot. There is no excuse for not fixing the issue. Roon understands that a composition is (say) composed of three movements. No reason that I can see why it can’t show you instances of the complete composition without the noise of the individual components. This Easter Roon found 1203 performances of the Bach Mathew Passion on Qobuz, most of which were of course single arias or chorales, not the whole work. It isn’t unreasonable, esoteric or perverse to expect the possibility of seeing just the complete composition - indeed, Roon used to make a big thing of “understanding” classical compositions.
I just can’t understand how a software engineer with any self-respect can let such an issue remain unresolved for so long.
