Roon Labs Changed My Life — Wayne Weddington | Blog Extempore

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If I could provide some feedback, I would proffer that Roon improve the Personnel section for each album. It is not uncommon that the personnel for each song on a single (jazz) album may vary. Thus, it is important to list the personnel in greater detail for each track where appropriate. Lack of detail may obfuscate the fact that, say, Freddie Hubbard was the guest horn player on a particular track of a Nancy Wilson album. Or if one is really wonky, you might want to know the studio or the engineer of the recording. For jazz or classical recordings, these are useful datapoints.

It is great to have metadata about players and other details. But Roon is not a metadata creator. It can display metadata that music publishers and metadata services make available. But if you want more than that, you have to DIY.

Doesn’t mean it never can be. Maybe it should branch out and expand its horizons. There’s a lot of metadata on album covers and CD inserts that doesn’t seem to make it into the databases.

Hiring people to create metadata isn’t something I would expect Roon to do. My understanding is they prefer strategies where automation works smarter, rather than having humans make data entries.

I expect previous suggestions of facilitating sharing of user generated metadata have been more interesting to them, but I don’t know how far such discussions have gone.

@andybob

“But if you want more than that, you have to DIY.”

Is there a way to do this (DIY for personnel) in Roon?

If not, and an external editor is used, what tags need to be set for Roon to pick up the information?

@andybob

I’ve just realised that part of the solution within Roon would be to edit individual tracks.

Would be useful to know though - in case using an external editor is easier and/or if the information is available feom a provider not used by Ron, what tags need to be set.

Read here.

The Knowledge Base is a good resource to find out more about Roon.

Here is another example: I was listening recently to a track, Jazzanova or other such musical group whose practice it is to sample historical jazz songs, and to improvise over it. In the liner notes, the Artist is required by licensing regulations, to publish the source of the sample, which significantly enhances the enjoyment for the listener to know… but it is not available on the accompanying Roon data. Whereas Roon does not “create” metadata, it does make use of rudimentary metadata already. I am suggesting that Roon expand its “call” on the metadata database Roon already accesses in order to provide more data on each of the songs. Programmatically that should be a simple solution… but I recognise that it may not be so simple legally or economically.