it is in MusicBrainz , the other would not appear to be
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You need to get the “Composed by” section displayed for all your composers, not just for Classical composers. So as a workaround, you can set a composer as a “Classical” composer in the Artist editor on the Composer page:
That will then display the “Composed by” section on the composer’s page in the Discography list:
This will just display those albums in your library that have pieces composed by the selected composer rather than all the albums known to Roon that meet this criterion, but I think that is what you are wanting…
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The Brian Eno / Daniel Lanois album is definitely known to roon and identifiable. Roon knows 6 versions, maybe contradictive track order or duration was causing it not to be identified automatically:
You might have to select the correct variant or assign tracks manually.
Meaning you have been going through manual identification process and did not get any suggestions by roon - or wrong suggestions?
In this case Artist and album title seem to be partly mixed up so that explains why roon did not dare to identify the album automatically. Usually in such cases the correct one is shown among first suggestions if you identify manually.
Everything in kyrillic letters should not pose any problem as the transliteration algorithms work pretty fine. Same is true to Japanese according to my experience…
With other letters album title and primary artist are key for identification. If there is any equivalent in latin letters in MusicBrainz or Tivo or these 2 tags are accurate, it will most probably work.
That’s very true, and naturally I would not expect demos, bootlegs, samplers being released in a limited number of countries or private recordings such as DJ sets to appear anyhow among roon´s metadata.
It is not really predictable what gets identified automatically, what needs manual identification and what is simply not existing. When going through my personal collection I found it pretty surprising that a lot of non-common releases are identified correctly (in my case very niche classical, prog rock, soundtracks and alike). On the other hand lots of releases by big non-label entities (particularly public broadcasters such as the BBC, BR or WDR, hi-fi manufacturers or culture sponsors) I would have expected to have full metadata as they exist in large quantities but some are resisting to being identified.
As mentioned you can make that one a classical composer, so the ´composed by´ list of albums will appear. Or find the composer´s work in his/her composition list which is anyways the more comprehensive method to find recordings of all the compositions.
Would recommend not to do that as it is messing up with the internal hierarchy of metadata and can even cause an album not to appear on a composer´s page if he or she is recognized as a classical composer at the same time with being a primary artist. Better follow Geoff’s advice.
Im not sure about roons rules regarding composers page, (but have you tried adding them to the Composer field maybe that would work) but I was suggesting why albums are not being matched. For MusicBrainz usually the composer is not an album artist and therefore when Roon tries to match your album against MusicBrainz it is more likely to get a good match if your album artist matches the MusicBrainz album artist and therefore not include the composer.
Also, worth noting if you use a music tagger on your files beforehand that writes the MusicBrainz Ids as well as the metadata to the file then roon usually accepts these ids and therefore doesnt have to search for a match it can just use the existing match.
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Regarding MusicBrainz you have to remember that all release metadata is added by MusicBrainz users not by record companies or publishers. So I would suggest most artists have their fans who would be willing to spare their time to add the artists discography to MusicBrainz however niche the artist. But I dont think there is such a relationship between users and hifi manufacturers or broadcasters. Even if a user is a big fan of a particular hi-fi manufacturer they are going to be more interested in the actual hardware than some promotional cds that happen to be released by the manufacturer.
Same problem with Various Artist compilations, they maybe popular but unlike original artist releases they have little intrinsic value, also they are more difficult and time consuming to add to MusicBrainz then single artist releases.
Boxsets are also difficult to add because of their size.
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Useful thoughts, thanks.
I am aware of the way MusicBrainz works and find the quality of metadata to be astonishingly high and consistent given that fact (compared to discos and FreeDB in the old days).
I would have thought exactly the opposite way. I am talking about broadcasters like the BBC and Bayerischer Rundfunk having their own orchestras, concert series and shops presumably selling a significant number of albums to their concertgoers and listeners. Main releases by their orchestras seem to all have sufficient metadata, which was leading me to hope some of them would upload comprehensive metadata on MusicBrainz for all albums. Same to hi-fi manufacturers like Denon or Naim spreading quite some discs among their buyers and visitors.
I would have thought exactly the opposite way. I am talking about broadcasters like the BBC and Bayerischer Rundfunk having their own orchestras, concert series and shops presumably selling a significant number of albums to their concertgoers and listeners.
I thought for a while that the record company Naxos did that, since all their albums were recognized and equipped with catalogue numbers and other detailed information. But now I have a handfuld of inrecognizable Naxos albums, so I have lost that belief. Maybe Naxos albums just happened to be found because a lot of people bought them and some decided to key them in to MusicBrainz?
That Would explain why such composers as Joseph Michel and Hakon Børresen are hard to find for Roon, as they are presumably bought by very few people.
Are you sure they are completely unrecognizable, or are they simply not identified easily? Could you show an example please?
Never had issues with a Naxos album not existing at all neither on TiVo nor MusicBrainz. Automatic identification in many cases does not work and even suggestions by roon are at times questionable, seemingly because Naxos has a tendency to releasing numerous versions of an album with different track listing/track numbers, different combinations of classical works, highlight CDs and alike. If only a release with different track listing is known to roon, you have to apply some tricks to make it identify that one. Example:
Definitely the right recording, album name and artists but wrong number of tracks, obviously a later re-release. Mine has 31 tracks and is from 2004, not 24 like the re-release from 2012.
Exactly, record labels and artists hardly ever upload the data themselves, almost all of it is just added by interested MusicBrainz users.
Why would labels be interested in adding data to MusicBrainz, at the end of the day they want to sell music anfd MuscBrainz doesnt help much with this.
Yes, it’s a bliss when getting to a template to work with in the album identifyer 
Sometimes, however, there is nothing that can bring me in there.
Take this rather obscure album, for instance, which seems to be available only in Scandinavia (I have a few that are specified this way on Naxo’s website):
A more normal album, with some metadata to work with, could be this one:
Roon can find a couple of similar albums, but not this one:
No luck with this one either:
Good old Børresen, then? No, not, but wait… there is another record company that started the whole thing for Naxos, called Marco Poly. And that particular CD was sposored by the Danish Radio, so… using various alternative words in the search, trying both Danish and English titles, brings me to something that I trust is in fact the same:
Picking that one means that I get the wrong cover, so I must go searching for the correct one from Naxos, but that is doable.
A couple of locally published CDs that cannot be found with Roon:
Dan Evmark is a local phenomenon for Sweden, it seems, ans some of his albums cannot be found in Roon:
That is everything I have left to get identified from Naxos.
Now we are talking about it, it could be good to have some kind of button to push that tells Roon not to worry about this or that album - and just accept its current status. Because some of these albums function well: I can queue them, listen to them, etc., and they do show up on the composers’ pages etc.
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I recognize this too. I found out that simply deleting the composed artist entries which you show on the left from the album and track credits usually does the trick quite well. In most cases the individual artists are credited correctly anyway.
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On boxsets: it took me two rainy days to tag my Bowie boxsets in such a way that they are recognized by Roon as the boxsets but are grouped within the set by individual albums (including album titels). I (mis)used the ‘composition’ and ‘work’ tags for this and the result is quite satisfying:
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You are right, this is not identifiable as it is existing neither in Tivo nor MusicBrainz. The latter is explainable as it seems to be a rather unknown composer and merely nationally known orchestra, as you mentioned availability was regional. Naxos not putting up even the title and artist into a database is a bit surprising but maybe originated from that time in the 1990s being kind of a lowcoster not depending on amazon and retailers.
That is what roon is doing if you just do not do anything about that album. Leave it unidentified as it is and just doublecheck that roon recognized all the artists, composers and compositions correctly from the local tags. I recommend to do a quick search for ´Ludolf Nielsen´ and ´Frank Kramer´ if they exist manyfold in your roon library (if yes, then merge them with roon´s primary composer or artist entry). The last check is using the ´Go to composition´ option from one of the tracks to check if the multi-part composition was recognized correctly and assigned to its composer. BTW, the orchestra is known to roon as ´South Jylland Symphony Orchestra´, so with comprehensive local tags and some merging you can fully integrate this album into your library.
The Easter album seems to be pretty common, has EAN and is still available. If you try to identify it in roon by using solely the album title the results are strange as if they are limited. Maybe the fact that it is a sampler with numerous artists are making it complicated to find it. If it was in my collection, I would start doing some detective work to find it, chances are at least promising.
With samplers and re-releases there is always a risk something might not match or is not existing in a database.
I see you are getting deeper and deeper into that work, and that’s exactly how it works with perfectionist your collection for roon. Good work, enjoy roon!
I, too, have been struggling with the new Sonos app. What were they thinking?
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It’s definitely not just you. Classical music, in particular, is a mess–on any platform.
One thing that happened to me a long time ago, that I’m not complaining about, is the name “Carla Blay” appeared in my list of composers, a name I was unfamiliar with… It turns out she composed a song or two on one of my Chick Chorea albums. So I learned something. Subsequently an option appeared under “composers” to “show only classical composers”, which I have so far declined. Hey, I’m not a snob. At least, not that much.
JRiver is still an excellent tagging program, in my opinion.
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Surely you mean Carla Bley? Or is the typo the point?
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They have their agenda, no doubt, but it says a lot that they are not explaining what it is but rather leave their customers guessing. As there has been other episodes in the past, for which I had exactly a week earlier decided to forgive them - and order a new device from them - after which, overnight while I was still in the process of setting that device up, they ruined the possibility to use it for what it was meant for! I didn’t even get a day with a working system, actually not even an hour - just a quick glimpse at what seemed like it could become good. I had a short fuse, though, for the mismanagement, so I was quick to simply send that new device back and buy something else.
Well, it was good in a way (not happy about the lots of money it has costed, though), as it brought me onto the path with Roon for controlling both the music and the rest of the system - which then has just being offered the job as passive devices that send the sound to the loudspeakers, and nothing else.
Now, of course, I am beginning to see problems with this new solution as well. For instance, the Roon Server became slower and slower today, and at a point in time the system hardly worked. So I ended up first restarting the ROCK, which helped somewhat but not fully for an hour or so, after which it again became close to unresponsive - then I restarted bot ROCK, NAS, router, and even my laptop computer.
This all helped, and I made a cleanup in the app as well (cleaning up old files with the Roon function for this), and it has worked well for hours since then, But I was quick to order a more powerful NUC while there were problems, since I got the idea that maybe the specs from Roon were to be seen as absolute minimum specs, so that something more powerful was needed in real life.
It will arrive in a week or so, and then I will see how much it will help. New disks are on the way for the NAS as well - bigger, but also a newer model, with more cache, etc., so this should also help with the overall performance.
Sonos has done what companies do when they get big: ignored the needs of their customers. They believe that they control the market and their customers, so they do not need to be kind. Hopefullt Roon and its immensively big owners can stay away from such things and keep a customer focus, in the way they are capable of doing that (which is not fully, it seems, as they have no support function). Even though I just now like Roon and also put a hughe amount of time and efforts into arranging my music collection in Roon, I will be quick to jump ship if they start behaving like Sonos. Life is too short for spending time on arrogant vendors.
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Also, i wish that i could bookmark where i left on a multi cd album. If there is a way im all eyes and ears. Thanks