I am really trying to adopt the Roon mantra on using Focus as a replacement for traditional smart playlists (i.e. iTunes Smart Playlists). Ultimately, what I keep running into are problems like these:
Here is an example of a “Focus” showing my Qobuz library, restricted to Classical music. You can see Frank’s album in the second row, third from the left:
What in the list of displayed genre chips, which of them is “classical”?
So, I end up adding additional focus chips to remove unwanted albums, like this:
But, what if removing VOCAL also removes some Opera selections? So, I have to add/remove a chip and see what gets filtered.
I’ve also resorted to using tags to create groupings. For example, when I was building a bookmark for my collection of RCA Living Stereo SACDs that I’ve ripped, I was able to get most of them using label focus tags. But I noticed that some where missing, due to misidentified labels.
I don’t know what Roon can do about any of this, since Roon has no control over the metadata from AllMusic, et al., but there are other examples like these I keep running into and its making me feel like I am curating my collection twice.
I do understand why Roon won’t allow arbitrary ID3 tags for Focus, since that would break a design principle of making “playlists” and bookmarks function the same way with both local collections and streaming services.
I imagine because the other albums have vocal, vocal jazz, vocal pop as genres but not vocal music. At least that’s the case for my Sinatra albums.
Only Vocal Music is a subset of Classical.
Brian is correct that this is appearing this way because of the Vocal Music genre, which is a sub-genre of Classical. In this case it appears that this genre was incorrectly applied by our metadata provider and so we are reaching out to them about this and asking them to change it. We will be sure to update you once we’ve received feedback from them.
Our metadata provider has let us know that they have corrected this today. Please give this about a week or two to be reflected within Roon. Once you see the change on your end please mark this post as the solution.
