A bit shout out also to @tripleCrotchet who seems to have an amazing knowledge of the intricacies of roon and classical allied with a willingness to help.
“Above and beyond “ is the phrase that springs to mind - kudos.
.sjb
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Couldn’t agree more.
+1 
Thanks.
What a community!
I would like to know the answer to that as well. I never found one. Probably someone made a feature request. I cannot remember. I cannot imagine it being implemented anyway.
All I do is use some judgment. There are a few giveaways:
- Many popular works have hundreds if not thousands of recordings on-line. So that should be reflected in disc counts. For example Qobuz has 1,719 recordings of Beethoven’s 5th. If you only see three or four, as in your case, then for sure roon has not made a match:
Naming your recording Symphony no. 5 or Beethoven 5 or similar is enough for a human to make a match. I have found in the past it is nowhere near enough for roon to make a match. You can see how different the allmusic canonical form is in my screen shot. In order to be unambiguous, you would be surprised how long and complicated these canonical forms can be, even for popular famous works. So roon making a match in an unidentified album (where it doesn’t have additional reference points it gets from an identified album) can be very unpredictable if you have not used the canonical form.
-
Another giveaway is if you see multiple entries from the same album in the list of compositions in the composition editor. On a box set like the Gielen it will not be uncommon to see different performances by a conductor from different stages of their career or with different orchestras. But if you see dozens of entries, as in your case, you know that something has gone wrong with the grouping and roon has not made a match
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Finally, if you click on the disk count and you arrive at a blank unpopulated page, as in your case, you know that roon has not made a match.
All in all. I really cannot be bothered with double checking like this what roon has done, so I just paste in the canonical form and forget about it. I know from experience that with my taste in music, that is the safest approach. Roon does the best it can but it is not perfect. I am often surprised at how well it will identify and populate a poorly tagged album. But especially with box sets (as in your case) or if your tastes are even slightly outside the mainstream (my case), the accuracy of roon’s automated features falls off quite rapidly and significant manual intervention is required if you want a different result.
I don’t see any of this changing anytime soon until roon or a new competitor finds a business case around reengineering a solution that incorporates new advances in AI and moves away from a legacy model dependent on human crowdsourced metadata.
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Tony,
Yes, all understood. Thank you. I have written myself a mini-project to:
- find all potential anomalies in batches of nine ‘Albums’ each day for three weeks; that should account for all my music in Roon; then amend my workflow going forward
- in Yate first ensure (using the Action - which parses very well indeed, I’ve just learnt) that I have separated the components of the Title field into Work and Part; that seems to have worked with the experiments I carried out yesterday as a result of your kindly guiding me towards the reason why Pélleas was not carrying on a proper relationship with Mélisande
- maybe change to the AllMusic canonical form of Work. But if the only/main benefit of that is to be able to see other recordings and if that would still remain someone hit-and-miss I may not spend too much time on that because of all the other ways there are to know about them… I am familiar enough with the œvres and recorded repertoire not to need ‘playlists’ and ‘suggestions’
Maybe a filter?
Worth rekindling; making another one? Some sort of scripting capability to create ‘Smart Groups’ would be useful in Roon, wouldn’t it?
Indeed! As I said before I was possibly misled (not intentionally) when first joining this forum on how well Roon would be able to identify classical music’s compositions. I probably assumed there was magic in the hills of AllMusic.
Specifically, I probably thought that Roon used the Label and Catalogue Number (in this case SWR19063CD).
Why couldn’t it?
Exactly. That’s what I shall be looking for in my 20 day project (above)!
Added to my checklist. Yes, thanks.
Shall adopt.
as are mine; but I’m used to it - as I expect you are, Tony 
Isn’t the logic of this that Roon can only work with AllMusic conventions; and so that it’s actually AllMusic’s protocols and emphasis on the most popular (?) and widely-consumed (?) material that gets all the(ir) attention?
Unless a polite and supportive lobby for attention to this area revives?
Yes?
Hint?
I apologize for the delayed response. I was referring to the process when Roon knows about multiple versions of the same “recording” (as part of the Edit → Identify process for manually matching), and one can select which “version” best matches the physical files in question. This has nothing to do with interpretations, or in fact poor metadata, but rather the source of your downloads and how well they match the metadata providers’ data. Variant track lengths is a common “miss”.
I’d follow @tripleCrotchet’s advice on this generally, being both more knowledable and eloquent than I. I’ll only stress that my initial comments focussed on the recurring edge case that Roon doesn’t “identify” your recording yet the underlying files / metadata are essentially okay (admittedly not the case in your example).
2 Likes
Thanks, Nathan!
No problem; thank you !
That is the ‘…’ in the circle under main album’s title > Edit > Album Options > Identify album (the first option at/towards the top under the cover image, isn’t it?
I haven’t used this… worried that it might adversely overwrite or alter my carefully-edited parameters.
Is it 100% safe?
What does that do which an initial search in AllMusic doesn’t/can’t?
Definitely!
So it’s a second level tidying up option?
Appreciated, Nathan.
1 Like
It is quite common that roon has different versions of the metadata for the same album or different versions of the same album. The default version that roon chooses during the auto-identification process may not be the best fit. It is worth experimenting with a manual identification and choosing one of the other versions (if they exist). It can avoid alot of manual editing of composition hierarchies, for example. But there are no guarantees I find, especially with new releases, more modern, less mainstream work, and box sets. Definitely worth a try. You can always reverse your choices if you make things worse. So no damage done.
I always use the best metadata match available with roon. Standardising on allmusic composition naming conventions is a completely different issue. It is extremely common with Pop music albums, for example, that there are dozens of releases. Different territories, different bonus tracks, different track running orders etc. etc. Particularly where there is a mismatch between the track running order of your local files and roon’s metadata, roon will misidentify tracks and compositions. Although less frequent this does happen also with Classical music I have found. Particularly with CD reissues of Vinyl core repertoire from the 60’s and 70’s. Labels, on occasion, will simply change the running order of reference recordings because what made sense on 2x 20 min. Vinyl sides, no longer makes sense on a 60 min. CD. The same thing is now happening with downloads. Multi-CD release where the movements of a piece were arbitrarily split over two or more CD’s can be treated as one long continuous download now. So it is always worth double checking that you are using the best available metadata match that roon has.
3 Likes
Tony,
All understood. I can see the logic, reasons - and (Labels’) reasoning behind everything you say.
For Roon to (try and) match in AllMusic by triangulating on Catalogue Number, Composer and Work would help, wouldn’t it.
Presumably I can follow Nathan’s advice of above by first keeping (I always do) a copy of the Album in question outside my Roon directory; and then simply replacing the latter with the former if anything went wrong?
This graphic highlights my questions, please:
I have no idea what your question is?
If you have updated metadata on the files then try re-identify as it will start from scratch . Identify allows you to edit what Roon has matched to automatically the correct version.
reAnalyze is to create waveform readouts so you can ignore that unless you need to remake one.
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Thanks, @Simon_Arnold3 - very helpful!