That is probably true at the margins. Similar comments come up from collectors every now and then who are used to more control over their libraries. But getting a working roon up and running in your case should actually be quite straightforward. All you need to do is follow tagging best practice. If all your files have been tagged consistently the same as your screenshot a handful of bulk edits is all that’s needed as far as I can see. Take a backup first of course. In any case there shouldn’t be a problem reversing 4/5 bulk edits if you don’t like the results. I would say I have done this on average every 2/3 years since the ipod and never had a problem. mp3tag works for me but no doubt there are many equally capable alternatives.
New topic, same story:
The album commentaries / notes from Qobuz are available in German (and French) when I use the Qobuz App (or their webpage).
Can anybody explain or provide any sensible reason as to why Roon is only capable of presenting these in English??
Developers only speak English? (JOKE, it may very well not be true)
I thought most of them speak Indian… or Hindi
Given roon’s international profile and all the localization initiatives I thought there would be more feature requests on this but I could find only a few. If the number of community responses is anything to go by there doesn’t seem to be much interest either. Maybe I am searching the wrong way:
https://community.roonlabs.com/search?q=translate%20artist%20bios
When it comes to music player software then since the rise of digital music distribution there is either no such additional data like bios and reviews available or available in (American) English only. So most of the non English speakers have long-ago given up on asking such questions.
Note: A simple translation of the available bios and reviews from Rovi might be possible with today’s technology but isn’t a good solution IMHO as this content often presents a very American point of view on the matter. A translated version of these bios and reviews might not go well or even upset people from other countries. The only good source I know of is Wikipedia but there the coverage and quality might differ greatly between different language versions (greatly depends on the size of the active community of a given language).
Wikipedia is as good in German as it is in English. I know many English speakers believe they are the center of the universe…
Maybe not that many international people interested in this US centric piece of software? I wouldnt be surprised.
Let’s say that the ones that are interested are most-likely not for the bios and reviews but for other reasons. How many that are? Only Roon Labs knows.
Er, Roon Labs is a small team of 32 people. How many people are there writing Wikipedia articles? Ah, about 130,000 at the last count.
What are you trying to say? That all the bios and reviews available from Rovi are actually written by the small team of Roon Labs?
Well, if you insist on using your own standard, which Roon doesn’t understand, you probably will need to write your own version of Roon which understands it.
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No - just that there are many thousands of minds at work generating (and arguing about) the multilingual content of Wikipedia. Managing crowdsourcing at that scale is clearly beyond Roon Labs. At the moment, Roon Labs uses crowdsourcing for translations of the UI, and for maintenance of the Live Radio directory. Crowdsourcing of multi-lingual bio’s and reviews (with all the traps and pitfalls that you point out) is a much bigger challenge, and not one that I think Roon Labs would rush into.
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Nobody expect them to do that, right? If the work is already done (Wikipedia) they just have to figure out a way to make use of it (if it’s possible, if it’s allowed, if they want to).
They do make use of it via links to Wikipedia for artist bio’s already. And presumably, once you have landed on the relevant Wikipedia page, if there are alternate translations/versions, the links are there to follow.
I can.
Bear in mind that software engineers don’t typically run companies and get to say what to work on. But even were that the case, there are some real problems to overcome.
First of all, metadata management is a huge issue, across all forms of digital information, not just music. People who understand the issues and standards associated with metadata management and use are in great demand and hard to hire. A small company is at a great disadvantage in competing with the likes of Google, Apple, and Facebook.
Secondly, the music industry is far behind the curve in metadata standardization. Try googling “metadata standards for book publishing” (I get about 5 million hits). Then “metadata standards for music publishing” (I get about 2 million hits, mainly complaints.) And the proposed standards are geared towards popular music publishing, not classical. A published, standards-body-certified metadata standard is crucially important for compatible metadata to become a reality.
Thirdly, the use of in-line metadata markup, inadvertently promoted by the success of HTML in the World Wide Web, has unfortunately reduced the ability to deploy multiple sets of stand-off metadata, in which the same track could have multiple different sets of metadata tags for different systems. Many younger developers have never even heard of stand-off markup systems. This is an endemic problem throughout the software engineering field right now.
I’d imagine that even if some charismatic figure in the music world wanted to take this on and make it his life’s crusade, it would still take at least ten years to move the industry even slightly in the right direction.
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I don’t need Roon (or more precisely the fine people that provide the links for the musicbrainz DB) to find a Wikipedia article and I mostly ignore the bios and reviews from Rovi anyway because they are too often just disappointing.
Maybe things change at some point in the future if Roon provides native language bios and reviews of sufficient quality.
Many older ex-developers as well I suspect (including me). No one wants to turn this into an overly technical thread but I am curious. What are the sorts of use cases facing roon where this helps?
Or a way to add yours.
What has the problem I mentioned got to do with inadequate or inconsistent metadata? There is clearly sufficient metadata of sufficient quality to identify a composition, for Roon does so. It knows that a set of tracks form a particular composition, and shows the composition title above them. Excellent. Just what is wanted. But then why does it also show (often tiny) excerpts from a composition as instances of the whole composition? If there is some mystical technical reason, why can’t it provide a simple filter based on duration say to exclude the excerpts? Have you any idea how long it talked to scroll through 1203 possibilities for one work most of which are not of the whole work? Do you actually understand or experience the issue I am talking about? If you searched for the “Rubber Soul” would you expect to get an Andy Williams album called the Shadow of Your Smile because it also had Michelle on it?
I think what you’re actually talking about here is search. Yes, Roon does not seem to implement a good search algorithm. It’s probably optimized toward some conception of the user which you and I do not fit well.