Roon we need to talk (about genres)

Hey! America First! :smiley:

Serious answer: you are right, of course. I nominate you for the head of the Genre Renaming Advisory Committee. Good luck on achieving consensus.

If I were Roon, I’d look upon Genre programming as a monumental time suck. Seems like “least worst” solutions are all that are available IMO.

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no no, please!
actually, i’m not a genre maniac.
in fact, while in general my files are quite well tagged, i can’t say the same for genre tags.

so, at the end, i’ve chosen to use roon genre hierarchy, and to map my tags onto that. it is, in any case, just a way to group music, for exploring.

there are obviously some genre roles that i don’t subscribe… but you can more or less correct them.

in any case, i think that it’s really a pity that roon, a product which aims to be… the new (and best) thing about digital music… is so closed minded on the english/american point of view…

… is so closed minded on the english/american point of view…

I really do concur! But at least they didn’t label it the “Non-American” genre. :grinning:

I’d say the better option is to build a better (user) genre editing mechanism

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Exactly!

10

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I do not know why, but Roon seems to be glued to its concept and implementation of Genre.
The lack of participation on this topic and the lack of and change in the software suggests that it is a very low priority item: they have checked the check-list item while the seem focused on deep technical aspects to broaden the product support base.
Meanwhile all the reviewers rave about Roon being the best-ever music library management software and so it is from a style point of view and the RAAT underpinnings. I still find myself reaching for JRiver to experience my library unpolluted by things I do not want.

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Let’s hold judgment until the next major release. I agree there a quite a few shortfalls in library management and it includes genres. The Roon team has said the next release other than bug fixes will be a substantial shift, so let’s see what that brings.

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Genres is essentially useless for me in Roon and I have offered my suggestions/comments occasionally for years. Nothing. I have 50,000+ tracks that have been tagged individually for genre - by track, not by album. Some albums have tracks fitting in to 3 or more genre categories. So the Roon system will essentially apply Genre by album such that if I shuffle a genre (Jazz? Reggae? whatever) songs from completely different genres regularly make it into the mix. Bob Dylan folk tune right next to Guns N Roses Welcome to the Jungle in the same mix? Useless…I seriously get the feeling that Roon is more focused on and knowledgeable about software and technology than serious music listening, by hard core music listeners who have spent years and years refining their music collection. Roon is good, I like it, but I really resent the fact that despite many users asking for “genre by track” genre and editing ability, it has done nothing. And I stopped listening to genres on my music collection some 2 years ago because it is so useless.

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Better Genre editing would be great. HOWEVER, if Roon would simply recognize custom file-embedded metadata and allow it to be mapped to Roon Tags, this would enable the functionality you desire. You could (outside of Roon - i.e. using a good library manager like Foobar or editor like DBPowerAmp) map track genres to custom tags, and then import the custom tags into Roon Tags, then play your track Genres using Roon Tags.

I agree, Roon’s added UI functions feels stagnant. I understand it’s a lot faster and easier to bring on new hardware compatibility and this will help expand Roon’s user base. But at some point Roon needs to “close the loop” on completing some of the half-done UI features for the true curators (example Boolean logic for tags and genres).

Roon seems instead to want to go for the mainstream, but I am not really sure there is a mainstream to get.

I expect some of that will be coming with the next release, unless that is entirely focused on mobile usage (which I don’t care much about, but I understand many do).

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That’s my main frustration with Roon as well.

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Roon seems to think that Black Metal bands fall into the Pop/Rock category. Not quite! I’m sick of having to change it all the time.

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It isn’t Roon. It’s their data suppliers.

I have the same complain about Pop/Rock, in general and not just for Metal.

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All these issues would be gone if Roon just chose a better and user-driven provider like Discogs. That would solve so many problems, and give everyone the possibility to fix errors for everyone each time they fond an error, not just locally.

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Roon genres seem to work ok for me, but my needs are simple.

Anyway, this reminds me of the time we met another couple a while back. They told us they were playing in a band.

Oh, cool, I said. What kind of music do you play? They said you can’t categorize us like that, man. We’re different, blah blah.

Oh, cool, I said. So If I went to the record store to buy your album, what section would I look in?

Puzzled looks…

Hey Andy,

I tried to create my own genre hierarchy with the Backslash, but it does not work in my case. I tagged my files with the fake genre “Lo\Rem\Ipsum” and I set \ as a delimiter. Roon only shows me three seperate Genres for the. I have to nest them by myself. Maybe I’m missing something.

Yes, I realized later that this only works if your hierarchy matches Roon’s.

Okay, so it’s no difference if I use the backslash or any other character.

Frustrating, isn’t it…
I understand that Roon is working on huge projects like Valence but things like genre tagging and M3U playlist support remain unchanged for years and that is sad.
Why do I need French x as a genre because French is hardcoded and embedded in a Roon hierarchy that I do not want.
One day my Genre boat will come in…

Why is French a problem? It’s nested into “International/Western European Traditions”. So how does it annoy you?

Well, that goes back to the start of this topic.

If you use a genre tag that Roon identifies, then Roon will place it into its own hierarchy. If you would like to use Genre in any other way than coded by Roon you MUST use tags that are not part of the Roon hard-coded structure. If I had arrived at file library management via Roon I would know no different and my Genres would be whatever data model Roon chose. Some of those automatic assignments can be quite colourful :slight_smile:. If you want your own assigned Genres, then you can do that but you must use tag values that do not exist in the Roon hierarchy.
Bottom line: this is an oldies issue, where we did things our way and want a modern system that allows us to retain our legacy structure. At least we can do that by using our unique tags so it all works with minor compromise.