Showing soloists in track artist and credits in Classical music

Roon Software Discussion
1

Hi all - newbie here (just a few days old) and getting the hang of things slowly. I’ve tried to find help with this but getting quite lost and confused trying to see if there’s an answer.

I’m having trouble figuring out how to get artists to show up in the track listing of a classical album. For example, I have a cantata album of John Eliot Gardiner’s and I’m trying to make the vocal soloists show up in the tracks that they are on.

So far I have discovered:

  • a) if I edit an artist in the track’s credits to be ‘Primary Artist’ or ‘Soloist’ they will show up in the track artist, and will be listed in the credits under their respective allocation.
  • b) if I credit them a specific role (e.g. ‘Soprano’ or ‘Tenor’) but do NOT also credit them as ‘Primary Artist’ or ‘Soloist’ in a separate credit they will NOT show up in the track artist (though will be listed in the credits next to their role).
  • c) If I credit both role AND either ‘Primary Artist’ or ‘Soloist’ they will show up in the track artist but will be listed twice in the credits (once for each credit allocation) which is just annoying and untidy.
  • d) If I credit them as ‘Primary Artist’ or ‘Soloist’ in the album credits but not in the track credits, they won’t show up in the track artist, so this is not a workaround.

What I’m asking is - is there a way to have soloists in the track listing, but not listed twice in the credits? For example, by crediting Joanne Lunn as soloist and soprano along with crediting the orchestra and choir, I can achieve:

“Performed by The English Baroque Soloists, The Monteverdi Choir featuring Joanne Lunn”

but in the credits I get:

“Soloist: Joanne Lunn
Soprano: Joanne Lunn”

If I remove the Soprano credit, she disappears from the credits where she should be. If I remove the Soloist credit, she disappears from the track listing and I’m left with:

“Performed by The English Baroque Soloists, The Monteverdi Choir”

Can I achieve what I’m trying to achieve here?

2

In 8 years, I never found a way. There are long-standing feature requests to rationalise these duplicates. You can try voting for change. You never know, but you also need to remember that Classical is a minority interest for the roon user base and must compete against other higher-ranking priorities.

3

Classical music is definitely not a priority for Roon, but it’s still better than any other software that I’ve come across for classical metadata. One workaround that I occasionally do is to list the soloists without specific credits (like soprano) and put the soloist with specific credit in the Comment Section. Not great, but I haven’t come up with anything else.

4

Thank you for your response! I mean, it’s not the end of the world, it’s just annoying isn’t it? Where do I vote for these changes?

5

Thank you. Where do the comments show up?

6

Yes I’m pretty sure I’m going to stick with it once my trial ends. I’d been using Apple Music which was a nightmare. So far Roon is great with some minor niggles.

7

You can can look here or raise your own request.

8

Unfortunately, Roon doesn’t make it easy to see them. I enter Comments using the third party software that I use to edit all of my metadata (Yate). The only way I have found to view them in Roon is to click on the three dots to the right of a track title, then click “View file info”, then “File Tags”. This will show all of the tags for the file including Comments. It’s not very elegant, but it does work.