Roon will not group Work correctly

I cannot get Roon to group Symphony #5 on this set into a single work with four parts. Roon groups the Te Deum properly as a single work with five parts (last two tracks are not shown in image) but nothing I do with the tags forces Roon to group the symphony correctly. I have tried deleting the album from my library and adding it in fresh. Any suggestions?

Hi @Robert_Daines,

First, can you share a screenshot of the WORK/PART tags?

Instead of Symphony #5 can you try using Symphony No. 5? Does that help?

@dylan thanks for your reply. I changed the the name to Symphony No. 5 and it made no difference. I have six versions of this symphony, some are listed as #5 and some as No. 5, this is the only one that Roon does not group correctly. Attached screenshot does not show much so maybe this is not what you wanted. None of the other recordings needed and tag tweaking, i.e., I have never needed to use the Work tag.

@dylan You’ll be happy to know that I was finally able to solve this problem. I was able to create both Work & Parts using SongKong and then selected Prefer File for multipart compositions. I was not able to figure out how to do the Parts in Yate. Still don’t understand why Roon was unable to figure this out, certainly would have saved me a lot of frustration if it had.

That may be a work around (more work) but I suspect you are pointing out a bug. I have this problem too but @support have not answered me yet. Grouping is not working reliably as designed since 1.7.

Hard to say, can’t definitively say that things are worse than before. I can say that things are not better and past grouping issues are still not fixed but these may be related to bad metadata in their database. I have spent countless hours “grooming” my collection and I am starting to wonder if it is worth the effort, i.e., too much frustration. All of this will be for nothing if I decide not to continue with Roon after my first year. If I do not renew with Roon, it will likely be due to the metadata issues with my predominantly classical collection, but I would miss the iPad App. Along with Roon’s higher cost comes higher expectations compared to other music players/organizers.

While I hope you stay with Roon, I will predict you will have more than your “expected” share of metadata/tag issues. Roon has made considerable headway in parsing crappy metadata given it, but there are still a meaningful percentage of issues remaining.

I made the decision to manually tag all of my classical albums into their appropriate WORK and PART segments, and I manually copied and pasted the canonical WORK titles from AllMusic.

You could probably be smarter than I by just tagging the ones that Roon does not get right.

2c worth.

Just curious what tagging app you use for adding WORK & PART?

Yate. And, BTW, it is pretty easy to parse a title to both WORK and PART.

Thanks for the info. Funny, I have just spent the last two days trying to get my head around Yate, I just don’t get that program at all. I seem to need help files in order to understand the help files. Have not found PART but the Movement Name seems to work as far as Roon goes.

It has a steep learning curve, true enough. Try talking to Barry, the author. He’s very helpful getting you started. He can be reached at support@2manyrobots.com.

Send me your email address and I will send you my custom fields that I created with Roon in mind. May not help, but try it.

I’ve done the same with all my classical albums. I use Yate which is a very impressive metadata editor and the developer is super responsive on any questions and will often quickly implement useful feature requests. You can get it here: https://2manyrobots.com/

I use Yate to make sure Roon’s Work, Section & Part tags are set correctly. Then if Roon doesn’t identify the album correctly and therefore doesn’t have good organization from the metadata it has it will use your tags to organize. Or if you like the way your organization is done versus the organization that came from metadata roon grabs, you can tell roon to use your organization by selecting “Prefer File” for “Multi-Part Composition Grouping” in “Metadata Preference” when you edit the album.

This seems to work very well for me.

I finally found the Roon-specific tag template in Yate which makes things much easier. I was able to correct two problematic albums that I had, however using the Work & Part tags did not fix another album. Nothing I do with this album changes what Roon shows, I have no idea where Roon is getting the Work titles from. It makes no difference if the album is identified, unidentified etc. I guess I will give up on that one, been fighting with this album for literally months. To be honest, I think I need to take a break from Roon for a few days and go back to using my previous (and much simpler) music player. There is something wrong when your music player/organizer is causing this much frustration. Maybe I’m just OCD and can’t ignore things that aren’t correct. I feel I have spent more time editing (“grooming”) my music collection than I have listening. After a few days I’ll see if I miss Roon. End of rant…

I’m laughing with you, not at you. Yes Roon can kinda suck you in. And I too am OCD, which is why I wound up hand tagging most of my library.

If you tell me the album title, I might have run across it.

Get some nog and chill!

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Hey @Robert_Daines - if roon doesn’t seem to be using your work / section / part tags, you need to edit the album, go into “Metadata Preferences” and select “Prefer File” for “Multi-Part Composition Grouping”. That should fix your problem… And I agree there is a bit of a hard learning curve with Yate but once you get through it it’s works great.

@Craig_Palmer thanks for your helpful comments. Unfortunately I have tried all of that with no joy. Attached are a couple of screenshots, the first shows my Work & Part tags (from SongKong) and the second is the result of selecting “Prefer File” for Multi-Part Compositions. Roon seems to be using my Part tags but not Work tag.

@Robert_Daines - You need to make sure you are setting the roon specific tags. If you do that, what I suggested will work. It is what I do. If you aren’t using the roon tags, you’ll get what you describe.

@Craig_Palmer I have used the Roon specific tags in Yate for Work & Part. Attached below is the tag info from Roon for the first track of that disc, Work & Part are correct. What am I missing?

23%20PM

Hmmm. Don’t know…I’m stumped. It works for me.

Yep, this has worked on the other albums that I edited but not this one. As I said earlier, I am tired of fighting with this stuff. Thanks for taking the time to help me.