I think what it’s actually identifying is a release, not a composition. The metadata available for that release controls whether or not it can reliably be mapped to a composition, and which composition it gets mapped to.
Yes, my client’s software should be able to do that. If it can take a question like “am I allowed to use a motorized lawn mower on sunday in my town?”, and retrieve the relevant legislation from actual unindexed texts of law it should be able to answer a question like that using semi-structured data.
I asked one of the main developers if he thought the software could be used in something like Roon and he got very enthused. He was already thinking of using the third party metadata for correlation purposes. I love that guy, you pitch him half an idea and he runs with it.
It’s not an end user tool though. This would be something for Roon to implement. I can always put them in touch with my client.
I remember years ago finding out the hard way that a tagging system that I thought was logical and clever was not compatible with server that fed my Squeezeboxes at the time. I had to adapt if I wanted the server structure to be useful to me. And I did.
I listen to a lot of classical music - but I am sure my library is much smaller than the classical collectors here that are frustrated with Roon (and its competitors). I have learned that the easiest way to find classical recordings I want to listen to is old school - by eye - browsing across album covers. I gave up on searches of classical years ago. The worst is the junk recordings on streaming services that clog up the search results.
I think people getting frustrated by this need to remember that they are a niche inside a niche inside a niche… meticulous taggers and classical fans and audiophiles etc. When you are in that many niches you are in a very small cohort - and sometimes need to accept that manufacturers and developers have little incentive to craft a products that meets all your needs.
I wish there were better standards for tagging classical globally - but until that happens this is where we are. If the OP isn’t willing to change his system, he has to accept the functionality as is or walk. It sucks - but you have to play the hand you are given sometimes.
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This is where I struggle. In the roon context that would be similar to asking the question at a syntactic level like “is my authorization to play the Karajan/Beethoven triple concerto in Denmark still valid?”.
The problem is that to answer more complex questions like “what are my complete Beethoven triple concertos?” (and I have deliberately kept that relatively simple) requires deep symantic domain knowledge of the structure of Classical music. That is a very hard problem at the fringes of research on the future internet. Significant breakthroughs employ large academic teams in 12/15 year research cycles. I didn’t know that anything like this was already starting to come out of the research labs into the commercial domain. I thought we were at least 10 years off as noted in a post above.
Nope, it’s here. And yes, it uses semantic analyis and it even does this cross-language.
All that would be needed for the triple concertos question would be reference texts. Notice the use of “texts”. The software is actually capable of analyzing natural text and retrieve the pertinent information.
That’s why I took the lawnmower question as an example. It’s from an actual use case.
All the software needs to know is where you live (where your library sits în this case, even if the library is spread over different locations like your home system and your selections on a streaming service).
In the real life use case it will search a country’s national, regional and local legislation (your library) in whichever format it is stored ( provided it is machine readable, so no pictures) as long as it is granted access to the data and will return the information pertinent to you (no, your town prohibits the use of motorized equipment on Sunday and this includes lawnmowers - or in the Beethoven case: these are the full versions of the triple concerto in your library).
Based on the question it will not tell you that one town over it is permitted to use a motorized lawn mower on Sunday (so you won’t get that one version where the Rondo is missing).
I think that is what I don’t get. I don’t see where the free form text is going to come from. The album pdf’s is that what you mean? And even if you had the free form text how do you map it to the music files? Isn’t that the meta-data? Maybe you mean the use case is natural language auto-tagging? Or more likely I just don’t understand.
Everyone thinks they are the center of the universe. Well, because from their perspective, they are…
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Stand-off basically means that the information about the content is not stored in the same “place” as the content. What “place” means can differ. Typically, though, the content is referred to with some unique ID, perhaps a hash, and the information about the content (could be metadata; in the case of books and other documents, could be markup) references various aspects of the content. The information could live in a database, for instance, while the content could live in a file. This allows multiple incompatible kinds of information, like different sets of metadata, to be used with the same content.
For a different meaning of “place”, Bravo, the word processing application for the Xerox PARC Alto computer, stored markup separately from the document text, but in the same file. The text came first, then a NUL byte, then the markup (in a binary format). This allowed the text to be viewed, indexed, etc. without having to deal with the markup. (Bravo is the program which was the first draft of Microsoft Word when Microsoft hired its author to recreate Bravo for DOS.)
Forgive me for being something of a formats and metadata geek. 
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I sort of get that. But in the roon context how do you use it? For example, improving recommendations or radio.
In the particular case of @bbrip, it would allow him to store both his particular schema of metadata, along with another separate one which would enable Roon to do its thing, instead of trying to force Roon to use his schema.
I am a heavy user of Windows Explorer / Foobar. Not so much JRiver these days so my case is not directly comparable but I don’t have this sorting problem. With Classical I just make the prefix of the folders the composer last name so windows explorer sorts that way. With Pop I make the prefix the album artist first name last name so windows explorer sorts that way. This means I am only really using the tags in roon. I find it very easy to navigate in both environments with that structure.
Gotcha. That makes a lot of sense. I like to use several players as well.
Hey Tony,
My original comments were meant to agree with your thoughts, although I continued my ‘ramblings’ & adding some of my own thoughts.
I appreciate your added detail above & it makes complete sense to me. However, as per my original response, I’m really yet to ‘test’ Roon with my classical music - there’s been so much of merely getting used to Roon & playing plenty of music, other than classical.
I had begun to add artist images where there were 100’s missing (closer to 500 I think). Whilst usable the overall UI experience is not the same with pages of ‘greyed’ out images. I thought that more pressing than classical tagging issues first up. I quickly got bored with that, but will continue to add over time. I don’t find that overly annoying & completely understand why so many artists are missing. Albeit, if I did have a gripe, I can’t understand why some of my artists that seem well known or at least with extensive catalogues are missed. Thus far, those that fall into that category seem to be from mostly European artists. Again, I can understand that.
I may return to this or other threads that will likely occur in the future, once I’ve had more first hand experience with Roon dealing with classical music.
Cheers. 
Are your albums being identified? That’s quite a lot of missing artist art. If the albums are not being identified, there will be a lot of other missing data as well, not just artist art, and then roon will not really be linking your library together which is a lot of the point of roon. Missing artist art used to be a common roon problem but there were big improvements in recent releases so I am a little surprised.
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Hi Tony,
Yes, I don’t think that’s an issue.
I just had a very quick glance now, (in between phone conferences) & see it’s not overly familiar with Italian artists (some well known I’d have thought), smaller Australian artists (I totally understand that) & some looking like I need to ‘merge’, so not an issue with Roon per se.
I figure it’s largely a case of the fact that my music is not of the most commercial kind, which doesn’t mean I don’t have commercial music as I have plenty. Just a fair portion isn’t overly commercial.
I’m not concerned about this…just more ‘stuff’ to keep me occupied when I’ve got some free time. When it comes to my music, I never really find it a chore. I am happy to make Roon work for me!
At least there is an explanation. Best of luck when you get around to your Classical library.
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Thanks to the more than brilliant way how MinimServer handles and interprets tags, I have now copied my Composer to a different Tag, where MinimServer picks it up and interprets it accordingly. Therefore I have now the “official” composer tag available to work around non-matching composers in Roon.
But there are just so many other bugs and inconsistencies that I am pretty sure this software needs to mature a few more years to be of any real use to me. I had looked into Roon 3 years ago. Dismissed it then. Maybe will dismiss it now and look again in 2023. I’ll fiddle around a bit more. Corona provides time…
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Yep, you nailed it. Roon is stupid, buggy, and inconsistent. It’s amazing that so many people don’t see it the way you do. Oh, wait, maybe it works fine for those people…
That is just absurd nonsense. Roon is perfectly capable of identifying “Beethoven Triple Concertos”. Look at the attached screenshot. Since Roon can already do this it is evidently not a “very hard problem on the fringes of research”. The particular issue that folk like me have is that the results Roon returns from Qobuz for this composition include CDs with only a single movement of the concerto on them. This makes finding complete performances tedious, if not effectively impossible. There are several possible solutions, none of which would require 15 years work. A trivially simple one would be to have a playing time filter or sort. Or just return the results for the complete composition. As it stands Roon is just frustrating. Look at the picture. It shows the composition. Correct. It says there are 264 versions on Qobuz. Incorrect. Fix it.
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do a search in Roon for complete Turandot renditions… Good Luck scrolling through the gizillions of Nessun dormas finding the complete recordings.
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