Have a look at PrimePhonic.com
You could try letting Roon doing its thing first before resorting to the option of manually editing tags. Iâve noticed on albums even where the tags were rubbish, Roon has been able to construct all the objects (album, performers, composers, genres, etc.) well enough. Manual editing of tags should be a last resort, IMO.
There would be much kicking and screaming before I put the Composer in the Artists Tag
Why have a Composer Tag if you donât use it properly !!!
I have found MusiCHI to be one of the most comprehensive and accurate dB for classical clean up
When all else fails I use MusiCHI Tagger
Mike
That we definitely donât want!
Please note that this âcomposer in track artist thingâ is just a work around needed at the musicbrainz data entry point. Itâs not meant to occur after Roon imports metadata into its own data set.
Perhaps Iâll jst stop at screaming then
The site seems a bit short of details like how much , which countries etc
Iâll put money on South Africa isnât included in its scope
I am not sure it was ever publicized that sanctions ended in 1994
Mike
As has been pointed out, classical music metatags are a hard nut to crack. My classical collection which spans thousands of albums is fully tagged correctly in which way, and Roon still makes a mess of it. It is just not boxed sets that cause problems, but also multiple compositions from different composers on the one album. The search system is simply unusable. As mentioned in other forums, the solution is obvious, the introduction of folders which allows us to arrange the content in a way that we wish store the classical material on disc. But Roon wonât go down this path, because it is beneath them to use some older technology from the past that simply works.
For my part, I disagree. I donât particularly want to groom, whether with folders, tags or anything else. I want Roon to identify albums, leverage off metadata services and serve them up in a convenient way. The most grooming Iâd be content to do is into some genres.
Roon needs to be visionary, for sure⌠However, as users we also need to be realistic .
With an average 25% of classical albums in my collection still being unidentified I donât see this happen during my lifetime. Not complaining about it, merely stating a fact.
I have just downloaded Martha Argerich Warner Classics set from a reputable retailer of digital music. This set was released in 2016 - so it is relatively new.
The metadata - which must have come from Warner is simply awful! The digital files contained the names of no composers - anywhere! Not all individual works have been separately identified. When individual works have been identified, these do not contain the name of the composer (so lots of unidentified piano concertos and piano sonatas - fortunately I can work out most of them from the opus number or catalogue details). The artist details were similarly sparse - if we were to believe these, Martha Argerich is multi talented - not only a great pianist but able to play simultaneously numerous instruments!
And we think Roon should be able to fix this gross dereliction of duty on the part of the record companies.
Pretty certain that if we were allowed to change the metadata for classical that it would never end, it strikes me that everyone who is passionate and serious (anal) about classical metedata has their own preferred system and as soon as one person changed it and it was saved someone else would change it to their systemâŚand on and on and onâŚ
I agree with @andybob
I have a collection of around 3000 Classical albums. In my previous library system I went to enormous lengths to correct tags for Composer, Orchestra , Conductor and more importantly Composition. I was a very time consuming exercise.
When I saw what Roon could do, I danced for joy , at last I could stop spending hours pouring over a keyboard and get back to listening (yes secretly I enjoy the organisational bit BUT )
This however is not to be , as with @Klaus_Kammerer1 I have a good proportion of my library unidentified,despite the metadata being âGroomedâ and effectively correct , and no obvious light at the end of the tunnel
It all well and good to blame the record labels, the metadata sources etc but the bottom line is that to get a comprehensive set of metadata you simply go to do it yourself, kinda defeats why I joined up with Roon
If there is no better source out there how do we progress, my standard answer is go back to âJRiver and Wikipediaâ which to me is somewhat retrograde.
The only decent standardization in classical Composition and Composers comes with MusiCHI , but the UI is a bit wanting. I wonder if Roon could persuade MusiCHI to share its db and MusiClean functionality . I used this extensively when manually fixing my metadata
I suppose what I am asking is how do we progress , because as far as I see at the moment , there is a holding up of hands and comments of the metadata id dodgy, How do we make it better , we all have sources of finding the right data to âGroomâ our collections so why not tap into that or
AND I hate to say it there has been little (or no) comment or contribution to this , or other, debates from the Roon Team
There has been lots of talk around crowd sourcing , but if I have spent a considerable time getting a box set straight from a metadata perspective I would gladly share it into some db managed on behalf of Roon and I am sure I am not alone. Unless there is some copyright issue , what is to stop Roon from developing and âcrowd sourcingâ its own data source. The design would be trivial , the population somewhat more complex
Mike
Hi @NickB
I do tend to agree . The 10 Classical lovers and 12 opinions of how to do it is too true
However there are a fairly standard set of tags covering the major data , even adding a few more custom tags would be pretty straightforward. Most tag and library management systems allow for Custom tags (eg JRiver dare I say)
I certainly get a better classical experience out of my JRiver library than I do out of Roon sometimes , at least I can find what I want. Thats one of the reasons I keep both libraries current !!
I donât think weâll ever get consensus on what is important but I do feel we could get a lot closer that we are currently
Mike
Me neither. But then I also donât want stuff to hide from The Roon Experience⢠because it lacks identification = metadata.
But I agree: while itâs easier to add some tags via a tagging tool than adding a release to musicbrainz or opening a metadata âticketâ every time somethingâs amiss local tagging is the worst solution of all because most of whatâs done there is lost from The Roon Experienceâ˘.
This is something good and well thought out style guides and bots can solve. If Roon could deliver the needed metadata it would be much easier to convince The Classical Collector to do things the Roon way.
Just because weâre not spending time engaging with these threads doesnât mean that we donât read them and take note. Bear in mind that every single post that the Roon team makes is likely to be poured over, dissected, interpolated, misconstrued, cheered and grumped over in equal measure, and then referred to as canonical truth 12 months later whether nothing or everything has changed.
Roon is committed to great metadata and a great user experience for all genres of music. As has been discussed in this thread and elsewhere, Classical presents some particular problems and we are committed to solving them; however, we wonât be able to provide any Internet age instant gratification and will not be drawn on timescales. Our (lofty) goal is unchanged: to provide a first class user experience for Classical music which does not require user intervention (i.e. editing).
Edit: I should have added that this kind of feedback is extremely valuable to us. Thank you and please keep it coming!
That is really appalling. It demonstrates a total lack of understanding of how classical albums are made and what they basically are, which is the work of performers (performing artists) not composers. Itâs amateurish, but I guess there are no classical music professionals working in metadata, sadlyâŚ
As for Roon, I am totally confident that @joel and the team will continue to produce world-class solutions, including to the big problem of classical music metadata. Patience, fellow travellers!
Sorry, Mike for the slow response.
I use Yate for Mac. Similar features as Musichi. It is about as âautomatableâ as it gets, but the editing can still be tedious.
Thanks for the tip.
That decision was a byproduct of the initial structure of the DBâs search routines. Composers werenât on the programmersâ radar screens in the early days, but users were still expecting to find albums with composer names. âAha, weâll just call composers Artists! Problem solved.â And now, the DBs are littered the Composer-Artists, and the labels are tagging new stuff this way. ughâŚ
I was hoping Roon would cobble a routine that compared tags with a âstandardâ set of Composers and cleaned up the false artists. But, much easier to say than to do.