Dunno, as an early lifer I feel a little like a leech, but then a little usage reminds me that I shouldn’t feel guilty, there’re a lot of half-baked biscuit in the tin.
The MusicBrainz database is sufficiently designed so that you can capture the information from a Classical release, but unfortunately it is more difficult to import a Classical release properly, partially because Classical releases are more complex, but more because the user interface is Rock/Pop orientated, and also because of a couple of bad design decisions made in the MusicBrainz database (e.g Recording Artists/Track Artists treated different in MusicBraiz for classical releases).
But the MusicBrainz developer and user community is not really an audiophile community, and as such they are quite unaware of roon, it very rarely gets mentioned. If a few more roon customers were more vocal on the MusicBrainz forum I think it may have an effect. If Roon offered MusicBrainz more/any money that may have a greater effect to improve some of the problems that exists with MusicBrainz.
But either way I cannot see a more viable way for Roon to get improve its metadata offering than supporting MusicBrainz.
(BTW you’ll be pleased to see MusicBrainz uses the same forum software as roon (discourse))
See my earlier post about track_artists, I just wonder when you have multiple artists if they are being added in a way that roon understands
Thanks Paul for your suggestions.
So let me give you some of my background with respect to this whole business of digital music files, file tagging and metadata.
I’ve been using digital music files for over 12 years. I started with a Squeezebox Classic back in 2006 and moved up to a Transporter in early 2007. I used LMS up until I switched to Roon in December 2018.
My files primarily flac and are well organized in folders and properly tagged using the MP3Tag program. I tend to use the minimum amounts of tags since one never knows how a given server, be it LMS or Roon, will decide to use those additional tags. Therefore I keep things very simple.
As you can see from the screen shots that i posted above, the way Roon handles metadata, and yes I consider file tags a BIG part of the metadata, is pretty much hit and miss. As these screen shots show, sometimes Roon uses my track artist level tags and other times it does not. To me that is just bad, poor quality coding - plain and simple.
Here’s what I mean: I add an album to my watched music folder and Roon sees the album and tries to identify it. Once the album has been identified Roon tries to find and download metadata for that album. So far so good. Now here is where the poor coding comes in - if there is metadata present from the file tags that is NOT present in the downloaded metadata then Roon should at the very least ask the user (me) if the metadata from the file tags should be added to the downloaded (but incomplete) metadata and not simply throw it away.
The funny thing is that if the album is not identified by Roon then Roon uses the information in the file tags as the metadata, which is as it should be.
And understand that my frustration is not with you or any other community member, it is with the Roon Team who keeps saying over and over and over again that the bad metadata is the fault of the metadata providers but as I have shown above this is not always the case and Roon is often the cause of worthless metadata.
Oh and to answer your question: yes I am correctly adding the information regarding multiple artists at the track artist level. This is easily verified by the fact that Roon understands the tags and shows the artists, except of course when it doesn’t! Again carefully look at all the different screen shots I posted above, sometimes the multiple artists are shown and sometimes they are not, with apparent rhyme or reason.
You could open up a support ticket for this if you like. To me, this behaviour seems to contradict what’s written in the knowledge base, but from my small library I miss the examples of which you seem to have more than you like.
From Import Settings:
Then problem with support tickets is that they tend too treat everything like a single hiccup rather than a symptom of a larger problem and I don’t want or care to point out each and every time this problem occurs. In the US this is known as a run around. I’ve given enough examples, time for them to fix things.
By the way, this same problem, i.e. the loss of metadata, happened again today when I added the album “Peaceful” by Nicolas Meier World Group - album identified, artists listed in the track artist tag, no artists listed in the credits.
Yes Roon has long had a artwork problem. I will start posting in depth reviews on YouTube about this software. I think this is the only way to get a fair view out to the world rather than this isolated forum.
So mine was a reasonable comment I’m glad to say
I see too that your forum is using this software too , looks goog
Another Roon metadata gem that it’s created all on its own. I have many like this:
Search my file based metadata (I have) there’s not a single instance of Totò in my metadata.
Let’s see who this Antonio chap aka Totò is:
Really love to know how Roon put this lot together. 
Artist / Performer ingestion / creation logic in Roon has longstanding bugs that need to be addressed. The larger and more diverse your library the more these issues come to the fore.
Never heard of him
While I admire and appreciate Roon and its obviously dedicated Support staff, I will add my voice to complaints about spotty metadata for both albums and artists. While I have not recorded actual figures, I estimate that maybe a third to a half of albums and artists do not have metadata.
Jim Heckman
Hi!
For metadata and covers the best I’ve found is SongKong.
http://www.jthink.net/songkong/
And I’ve been looking and testing various taggers, believe me.
I’ve been tagging (metadata+covers) for 12K plus CD’s I’ve ripped
SongKong is quick, customizable to your needs, find covers, does batches, rename file and folder structures to your preferences, etc, etc.
If I had not found SongKong I’s still been cleaning/uptading metadata the old way.
It seaches MusicBrainz + Discoga amongst others.
By he way, the developer of SongKong is the guy responsible for writing the search code for MusicBrainz where he worked earlier. He knows his stuff.
SongKong did wonders for my metadata, especially for genre mappings which I use a lot.
I have set up Roon to use metadata both from Roon and from files.
This give me the power and control I like to have.
1 Like