Roon's Commitment to Classical Music

Oh yes. Berlioz, Rachmaninov, and Copland too. The exceptions abound.

I have a few boxes; about 5000 classical cd’s.

And how do you find roon on that enormous amount?

It’s not in the algorithm incorporated: born before 1850 will never be the performer?

We will be fooled by randomness cq spotify.

No. Brahms was born in 1833 and I have a recording of him playing the piano. I also have recordings of the pianist Francis Planté who was born in 1838 (and who had heard Chopin play). There may be recordings from people born even earlier.

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Except ‘some’ (how many?) of Brahms. You can correct that by hand.

I have thought about contributing to Musicbrainz, but the process looks too formidable – there has to be a better way!!

After all these years you’d have thought they’d have a submission app that could vet your data for compliance with their requirements and submit everything in your library that passes muster.

It’s not if you take in the whole picture - by for example reading the entire style guide https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical. I’ve tried to point it out somewhere in this thread - performers are far more important (see: https://musicbrainz.org/doc/Style/Classical/Recording/Artist).

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Musicbrainz is well aware of how classical artists work, but there are some serious issues with their classical schema.

  1. For Pop/Rock Track Artist is a refinement of Recording Artist but with Classical it means a completely different thing.

  2. They have different guidelines for Classical to Pop/Rock but have no flag to indicate if release is classical.

  3. Many releases still have composer as album artist.

4.They make it more difficult to add classical releases.

5.They make it more difficult then it’s need to be to add any release, with no automated option.

But if you understand these quirks you can derive the correct info from Musicbrainz releases

A post was split to a new topic: Tracks from TIDAL album showing out of order

I have been manually editing some of my classical albums in my Roon database today and I must agree with the OP’s concerns re. the quality of the classical Roon metadata.
Roon’s metadata model does not seem to allow for things like orchestra, soloist, conductor, so all those elements get crammed into Album Artist in one way or another, with slashes or commas, sometimes even the composer lands there, sometimes not.
If there were a good metadata model and a feedback process, I am sure the users (i.e. the people taking the time to post in this thread), would be more than happy to help clean classical metadata up.
A new metadata model has been mentioned in this forum for probably two years. I understand Roon’s refusal to indicate any timelines (“we don’t do timelines”), but this is getting very frustrating!
@joel, I can only speak for myself, but I’m quite sure several people would be ready to help, if there is a framework and process.

While I understand the complaints about handling of classical so many of them exist side by side with users proving that they haven’t investigated Roon’s features.

The statement above is one such in that Roon allows indeed all those tags and fills them itself when the metadata sources supply the info.

Or have I misunderstood?

Roon does allow for Orchestra, Soloist, and Conductor tags and will display them if the tags are populated.

Composers appear in Album Artist tags because Allmusic and other DBs put them there.

All that said, I share your frustration with the metadata state of things in the classical world.

24/192 remasters? or at least MQA I hope! :grin:

Thanks @Ludwig @John_V for pointing this out. I am sorry if the impression is that I lightheartedly accuse Roon of things that are not true. I have a music collection >100k tracks (about half classical) that I have tagged using jRiver. In my recent efforts to clean up some of the Roon data, I have not found a way to get Roon to filter and sort classical in a sensible way. Sorting (in the album view which is what I use most) is using mainly the album artist tag, and that one really is a mess for classical.
I agree that the metadata for orchestra is there somewhere deep inside, but it is not really practically useful for browsing, which is one of the two unique features of Roon. The other one being the streaming engine (RAAT, roon ready devices, roon endpoints).

If your files are tagged, you may want to consider preferring your own tags to Roon metadata. See here.

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But continue kicking?

Agreed, Phillipe has a thorough understanding of classical music and is a database maven besides. One thing that might be helpful would be for Roon to come up with a Musichi Clean Cleaner, to parse the not particularly helpful “Beethoven, Ludwig van(1770-1827)” (If Beethoven,Ludwig van(1712-1773), grandfather of the famous composer, had left significant compositions it would be one thing but he didn’t).

You would think that, being the database maven that he is, he would put the first name and last name in separate fields, right? Otherwise it should be just a matter of regular expression parsing.

One of these days I have to sit down and relearn everything I learned years ago about tags, and classical music tags in particular, and figure out how to reconcile it with Roon’s features. I was hoping not to have to do this, and that Roon would just take care of everything, but I see that probably isn’t going to happen soon. The thing is, when I get frustrated I just want to pull out the CD, or a piece of vinyl, and listen to that instead. Some day I’ll try following your prescription and see if that works for me.