Roon seems to require a lot of work

Not that I am aware of , maybe a feature request for the box set development that Roon is hinting at

I have found the free sotftware mp3tag extremely useful in cleaning up my library…and Roon detects all the changes i make using that software. I only have 11000 cuts…but still, very helpful

2 Likes

I now took a closer look at MusicBrainz (well, still more to look at, but at least I now know what it is) - I also added a release, and now I wonder when Roon will be able to find it? What is the lead time?

Also, in case anyone here knows - I had one track that wasn’t already registered as a recording on other albums. So, with some trouble I found out how to add that recording - but it is missing the field “Recording Artist”, and I cannot see how to add that field?

It is this one: https://musicbrainz.org/release/c2c3d2fa-75ab-49b8-91a1-47c7f25cbba5

1 Like

:+1: Usually about a week until it syncs in

2 Likes

Thank you!

It is of course satisfactory to get through the problems and having previously unidentified albums identified, one by one, but my original statement still holds: it does require a lot of work to use Roon, at least if its full value should be released. So it no only providing an extra dimension to the enjoyment of music, it is also jumping in as an additional hobby on its own.

Now I have slowly started to register albums in MusicBrainz, to help them getting identified, but that by itself is a lot of work (potentially with a potential for reducing the work if I can export the details from Roon or some other system?)

I have currently 64 albums left to get identified, and maybe half of these will need to be keyed into MusicBrainz, so there is enough hobby activity for some time.

1 Like

Hi, I use Jaikoz & Picard to complete metadata. When Roon does not identify the file correctly, I used tha album edit and select the metadata from the file. Works also with classical music. Hope it works for U. My collections is from ripped cds and LP, 300k songs using ROCK with Intel Nuc.
BR

Jaime

2 Likes

I must admit the examples you are showing I would consider maybe as “fringe”, I am often amazed at how well Roon does ID but admittedly it’s “normal catalogue” albums. Some of the various artists compilations and obscure record labels often are the reason for failure. No offence meant BTW.

If you think about the array of available records , Tidal claim 110 million tracks for example, “some one” must provide that metadata for TiVo and MusicBrainz in the first case. The scale is quite mind blowing when you think about it.

That said the big labels are into releasing back catalogue with little or no metadata eg Karajan, Abbado etc complete recordings on DG , quite often big boxes like this must be done manually. MusicBrainz may catch up but somebody has to manually do it

4 Likes

That said the big labels are into releasing back catalogue with little or no metadata eg Karajan, Abbado etc complete recordings on DG , quite often big boxes like this must be done manually. MusicBrainz may catch up but somebody has to manually do it

Yes, there are certainly many albums out there, and after keying in just one small one (2CD), my first of the kind, taking me several hours, I can’t help wondering how people can find enough time for keying in boxes with tens of discs worth of music; hundreds of tracks. I just put some downloaded boxes into Roon, and they all, apart from one, were automatically or almost automatically recognized.

One was more than 900 tracks and slipped right through, no work from my side. So someone must have arranged 900 tracks in a reference database, just for that one box. It is about 30 times the amount of tracks as “my” little album had.

1 Like

Karajan is 240 CD and Abbado 255 , both are in MusicBrainz , glad I didn’t do it :rofl:

3 Likes

Hi you have posted the release url rather than track or recording url so im not clear which track you mean?

But you can edit the recording artist by selecting the recording and editing that rather the track within the release.

But your question does highlight one annoyance I have with MusicBrainz. For popular music the track artist and recording artist are the same 99.9% of the time so there is rarely the need to edit the recording artist. But for classical releases the track artist is meant to store the composer, and the recording artist the peformers of the recording so they are almost always different. I dont agree with the way they change the meaning of track artist for classical music only.

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical/Track_Artist

https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical/Recording_Artist

1 Like

It’s usually up to a week once the addition/edit has been accepted into the MusicBrainz database. Some things are automatically accepted; other have to go through the – up-to-a-week – peer review process.

2 Likes

Mark, I know you love Yate but it certainly isnt the standard in any way. I would suggest Metadatics to be the most standard music tagger on MacOS, and my own SongKong to be the most fully featured.

1 Like

Define standard ??

Also Mac only

1 Like

Classical recordings in general are mostly niche. You would be surprised by the relatively low number of copies even recognized artists and professional record labels are selling per title. Given the fact that also a lot of lovers of classical music are not that deep into streaming, ripping and IT, the high percentage of albums existing in databases like MusicBrainz is still a miracle to me. Cheers to all the contributors of MB, you are doing an amazing job!

On the other hand if you deal with classical recordings in roon, you will encounter a lot of metagarbage. A certain amount of work is required to neatly use all these exemplary browsing options like the composition lists.

It is kind of sad side of that phenomenon that streaming services are using the sheer mass of titles as USP. I would rather subscribe to a service offering 5Mio. nicely tagged tracks compared to 110Mio. with half of it being incompletely tagged or bringing metagarbage to my roon. Or would love roon (or Qobuz and Tidal) to offer an option to just suspend tracks with incomplete or inconsistent metadata. Apple Music classical seems to be much better in that.

1 Like

I’m not sure if this is directed at me or Mark, since Mark was the one to originally specify the word standard. But I took him to either mean it is the standard, as in the gold standard i.e the best solution that other aspire to, or to mean some kind of defacto standard way of doing tagging, and Mark was specifically talking about MacOS.

I certainly found it rather unituitive and not mac-like. I mention Metadatics even though it is not particulary powerful since it is quite intuitive and works like the majority of taggers do so its pretty easy for anyone to get some use out of it.

Sorry Paul I was being a bit lippy :sunglasses:

Oh there was a standard that the big labels stuck to alas we can dream

Somewhere I said put 10 Roon users in a room you will get 11 opinions ,metadata standards make that 12 !!

I agree but fringe amongst niche is an even greater challenge .

Funnily enough I find Tidal pretty good for classical, I read Gramophone monthly then nip off to find the recordings being reviewed , Tidal very rarely lets me down . I don’t have Qobuz being in South Africa they are struggling with the concept of the equator

I know what you mean.
But actually, there should not be any problems in bijective correlation of albums. There is a EAN (or ASIN) number for every single publication. Is Tidal neither using it nor providing it to Roon? Additionally, I guess AI could help a lot as all internet-available information is available. @Roon: wouldn’t this be something to consider in the future developments?

I remember why I bought a life-time license for Roon: there was an advertising for Roon (more than 10 years ago). I saw it during the time where I spend a lot of hours ripping my CDs, adding the right tags to it etc. Roon mentioned something like this: “… do you remember the time you simply opened a vinyl cover, read the song lyrics and additional band information”.

That times has past and so are in Roon. The currently provided quality of such information is not good. I often (extremely often) miss any information. There is no lyrics, no composer information… so in the end of the day I end up adding tags to the ripped CDs… that’s not really a “substantial progress” and far away from the promises of the past advertising… imho.

But anyhow, enjoy the music

1 Like

When the future becomes a commodity… I think that life is full of such experiences where big promises were initially looking like they had a chance, but then it ran out in the sand.

As mentioned elsewhere in this thread, the number of music albums published is very high, and on top of that, a lot exists in several versions. I checked one of my albums: “Music.Detected_” by Deep Forest, and I found more than 20 different versions of it - and mine wasn’t even among them, as it had a different set of extra tracks.

With such a variety, of course any attempt to keep completely track of it all by hand will fail. But, as you say, the information is available. Why cant the computer in front of you calculate the fingerprint of the album in your CD-ROM drive and compare that with everything on the internet? And why can’t AI help checking if something not found may be reasonably similar to something that was found?

My guess is that a bunch of features were built in the beginning, after which most activities became directed towards maintaining and adjusting these, without capacity left for going those extra steps forward, to really benefit from the technological development.

Anther pet thought of mine is that is is absoluterly stupid to have thousands of people rip the same albums - over and over again - to only share the metadata. Why not allow for the file version of the album to be shared among those who have bought the album, without demaning from them to rip it themselves?

It points to something that could be called legal madness - where, for legal reasons, a lot of silly things must be done that have no practical meaning whatsoever.

And I could imagine that the legal aspects also prevent many other possible improvements to our use of the music media and the actual value on it - the music.

Absolutely true to current releases, their portfolio is pretty good and if you know what you are searching for, you will most probably find it.

I was more referring to using it with roon´s dedicated browsing features such as discography, composition list and recording list per composition. If you want to dive into recordings of a well-known composition particularly from the analogue era it is ending in a mess with wrong release years, albums existing manyfold, lonely movements flying around as complete recordings and wrong primary artists.

It is usually not a problem of roon not identifying an album but how metadata is processed in combination with Tidal´s information about that album.

I know such cases but fortunately it is not the majority of new albums I add. Yes, I had to go through my existing collection and do quite some manual identification and party re-tagging work particularly for recordings from the analogue era plus non-standard or niche recordings. But ever since things have become much better and in most of cases metadata is consistent enough to enable roon to keep the big promise. Have to merge some compositions or classical artists here and there but that is doable.

Once the work is done I am very very happy with the roon experience and definitely know why I am investing that much time.

1 Like