I’m brand new to Roon.
When I browse composer and go to Dmitri Shostakovich, it shows 6 “Main Albums.” This is missing other Shostakovich albums in my music library. How do I get it to show all of his albums?
Thanks.
Hello David, welcome to the community.
Can you clarify your Roon setup: are you using Roon only with local music files, or are you also integrating a streaming service (Tidal or Qobuz) into your Roon? Thanks.
Sorry, all local music files. No Tidal, Qobuz or other streaming service.
OK, so the next question is: has Roon been able to successfully identify all your local albums? It may be that it hasn’t been able to identify some of your Shostakovich albums.
If you go to Shostakovich’s page, you should see the list of albums in your library that have compositions by him on them. E.g. like this:
And on the same page in your Roon, you are not seeing all the albums?
Go to the the Album browser, click on Focus, and then look for the “Identified” attribute, and select it. Then click on the highlighted (in purple) attribute to turn it into “Not Identified” (in red). You will then see the list of albums that Roon has not been able to identify.
Are your missing Shostakovich albums showing up in this list?
There are probably several things going on. Roon makes a strict distinction between performers and composers. Legacy players you have probably migrated from do not and often mix them up.
When displaying albums in the discography roon will split the albums into “Main Albums (xx)” and “Composed by (yy)” albums.
In this case Shostakovich was both a prolific composer and a prolific recorded artist. Your “Main Albums” are those albums where your tags are saying Shostakovich was the Pianist or Conductor. That may be correct. It is also possible that Shostakovich the composer has been arbitrarily tagged in an Artist field so that legacy players can sort displays sensibly by composer for Classical material. This is an extremely common practice with many public crowd sourced databases that we all use (including roon). However, from roon’s perspective that is incorrect and will cause all sorts of problems.
Of course Shostakovich often performed his own work so in some cases he is both a composer and an artist. If you are not seeing any “Composed by” albums listed then it is probably the case that you do not have any explicit Shostakovich composer tags in your library and you are going to have to re-tag or manually “identify” the albums to roon so it can determine who the composer is.
I couldn’t find any easy way of untangling this sort of mess except on a composer by composer basis, re-tagging everything so that artists like Shostakovich are explicitly tagged as performers or composers or both. Roon will then behave. It is also important that Classical files have an explicit “Classical” tag as roon uses this in all sorts of ways under the hood when dealing with Classical compared to Pop.
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So – I forgot to add that at least one other Shostakovich album is in Roon, it just doesn’t appear under Shostakovich’s page in Composers. But when I look at the metadata, it says that Shostakovich is the Composer. I’ll check out the other ideas later today.
It looks like Roon found 2213 of the 2293 albums in my iTunes folder. It’s possible that the other 80 albums aren’t really albums. Not sure how I can quickly tell.
Thanks.
Roon can also be picky about the name format. It should be “first name, last name”. Roon can equivalence all sorts of variations in spelling but not all. I use “Dmitri Shostakovich”.
Are you having a general problem with composers or just Shostakovich?
So, here’s the example. (I haven’t checked to see if it happens with other composers/albums.)
I have a 5 cd set of Shostakovich’s string quartet. When I click on his composer page, I see one album that contains only the 15th quartet. None of the others. If I search for Shostakovich, the top album result is a single album with all of the 5 cds together (I think I did this when I edited the metadata in iTunes). This album doesn’t appear at all in the Shostakovich composer page. I don’t see how to edit the composer. The “15th Quartet” album only appears in the search results if I click “more”.
You will need to ensure your box-sets are tagged using these conventions:
You will also need to ensure the composer tag is set. In principle you can do that from within roon but particularly with a Classical library you will be better off investing in a 3rd party tagger. Many on this forum use mp3tag for Windows or Yate for Mac.
Ishkabibble!
Can I use iTunes to set the composer tags? Or does it do it differently?
Yes you can. This is an old video but the principles will not have changed much:
You may find that the composers are in the artist rather than the composer field.
If you are familiar with iTunes that may be a place to start to at least get a feel for the edits you need to make for roon. The trick is to make the minimum edits so that roon can “identify” your albums. Roon will then auto-populate a lot of metadata so that you do not have to.
iTunes editing may meet your needs but there are better tag editors out there. Mp3tag for Windows and Yate for Mac are popular choices.
As noted above, when I search for Shostakovich, it returns two albums. If I look at the data for each, Roon says that Shostakovich is the composer on both. Yet when I look at the Shostakovich page, only one of the albums appears under “Main Albums.”
If Roon shows that Shostakovich is the composer for both albums, why don’t both albums appear on his page? I’m a bit baffled.
You keep on mentioning “Main Albums”. For roon a main album is an album by a performer not a composer. You need to make a few screen shots of what you are seeing otherwise no one is going to be able to help you.
For example when you go to the Shostakovich discography screen can you make a screen shot of what you see? I see this, with albums by Shostakovich the performer and Shostakovich the composer:
“Main Albums” lists albums by performers. That is albums where the string “Dimitri Shostakovisch” has been written into an artist tag/field. That could be artist, performer, conductor, pianist or any other number of fields. It is possible that Shostakovich has been written into both a performer and a composer field when he is performing his own work. Can you make a screenshot of the credits that you see. For example if I go to a Shostakovich album and press “three dots” next to a track and then “view credits”
I see this:
As you can see, Shostakovich has both composer and performer credits on this album. Can you make a screen shot of what you see?
EDIT: BTW, you also need to assign a “Classical” genre tag to these Shostakovich albums otherwise I don’t think any of this roon display logic that is specific to Classical albums will work.
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I wonder if you falling victim to the Artist = Composer trip up!!
Its common for the artist (actual) to be set in the AlbumArtist tag and the Composer put in the Artist Tag
The other thing is spelling (esp with Russian Composers try Prokofiev and Rachmanivov(ff) etc there are loads of equivalents)
As @Tony_Casey says Roon is Picky on Composer eg Shostakovich, Dmitry , Shostakovich, Dmitry (1906-1975) are not supported by Roon . Simple Dmitry Shostakovich or Shostakovich are best.
Yes. There are multiple issues here.
- Has roon created a multi-disk album?
- Has roon identified the multi-disk album?
- What spelling/format of Dmitri Shostakovich is being used. Discogs lists hundreds. Has roon equivalenced the correct composer? Roon is picky. It doesn’t like common composer formats (for example with dates) that iTunes tolerates.
- Has Shostakovich been tagged as an artist, a composer or both?
A few screen shots would help to unravel this.
So, I guess I should start by explaining that I’m clicking on Composer in the left-hand quick list, and I assume I’m getting a list of all the composers for the Classical music in my library (or, I would assume, all the files that have a composer in the metadata). When I click on one of those composers, I expect that I’ll see a list of all of the albums in My Library composed by that composer. So, if I click Shostakovich, I expect to see all of the albums of his music (including albums where he composed one of the pieces but other composers composed other works on the album). If that’s not the way Roon works, then I’m very confused.
Here are screen shots (sorry, I’m limited 5 screen shots)
Top of my “Composers” page:
Scroll down to Shostakovich and click
Top of Shostakovich page
Scroll down, and you’ll see Shostakovich the String Quartets under “Main Albums”
I have two albums of the string quartets (cause I screwed it up a bit in iTunes). One is a collection of hte 5 CDs of his quartets, missing the last four movements of the 15th Quartet. The second is the last four movements of the 15th quarter. The one you see here is the last four movements of the 15th quartet. The other album, with the rest of the quartets doesn’t appear on this page.
However, if I search for “shostak”. The results show both of the albums when I expand to show all the results. I don’t understand why both albums don’t appear when I click on Shostakovich’s composer page.
Here’s another issue I noticed. I have an album, “Korngold - Dvarionas Violin Concertos”. One work by each composer. If I search for Dvarionas and click on his name in the results, I get his page, with two “composed by” albums. Clicking on the albums, one is the work he composed and the other is the work Korngold composed.
However, if I click on Composers in the quick links on the left, Dvarionas does not appear in the resulting list:
Ok. I have the Emerson Shostakovich album so we can start there. Mine looks completely different to yours like this:
The first thing is that I have nothing at point “1”. You have “Unidentified”. What this means is that roon doesn’t know what your album is. It doesn’t know who composed it, who performed it etc. etc. It cannot relate your copy of this album to any thing in its data base.
At point “2” I have the performers, the Emerson String Quartet. This space is reserved for “album artist links”. You have two versions of the string Dmitri Shostakovich, so roon thinks that Shostakovich is the performer and that is why this album shows up under “Main Albums” on the composer page.
At point “3” I have the composer Dmitri Shostakovich explicitly tagged as the composer for all the quartets.
At point “4” I have a “Classical” genre tag set so that roon knows it is to deal with your album according to “Classical” rather than “Pop” logic.
My guess is that you have very large numbers of unidentified albums after migrating from iTunes. There can be lots of reasons for that but a common one with Classical libraries is that you have your composers tagged as artists. Click on the “three dots” next to a track and then “view credits” like this:
You should see something like this:
Do you have a composer credit for Shostakovich?
PS: There are several reasons why roon has split this album into two. Probably because of not following multi-disk tagging rules so that roon doesn’t know that the different folders in your library are part of the same album. That is probably also contributing to why roon has not identified it.
It looks as if there is a lot of missing metadata in your library that roon needs to make reliable identifications of your albums. This didn’t matter to iTunes but it does to roon. The easiest way to populate the missing meta-data is to “identify” the albums to roon. If you click on “Unidentified” you may be able to do this manually but my guess is that you need some minimal tags first like “Composer” tags if your library is mostly Classical.
Thanks, this is very helpful. I’m concerned that all of the edits I made in iTunes (Music) to the artist, album artist, etc., fields are going to screw everything up. I don’t know if I have the patience to go through it all again and fix it.
nd I’ve found that some track information just doesn’t match up with what Roon finds. For example, I purchased Alfred Brendel’s complete Beethoven piano sonatas. But when I tried to match one of the discs with Roon’s suggestion for the complete sonatas, the tracks didn’t match at all – different times, etc. When I chose a different disc to match with, most but not all of the tracks matched up. It’s very odd to me. I’m not sure Roon is worth the learning/editing/fixing curve.
Some have an easy time of it but some don’t, especially with Classical libraries. Roon does things differently than other players so depending on the edits you have made to get a previous player working the learning curve to get roon working may indeed be steep.