Continuing the discussion from Roon 1.1 Is Live!:
Great news. Now that the iOS app and headless server is out of the way, any indication of time to having a headless server for Linux?
[quote=“mike, post:1, topic:3200, full:true”]
Metadata Handling Features
When you add your music to Roon, file tags are extracted. These tags are stored in their own layer, and also used to identify the music in your collection. When an identification is successful, Roon’s rich metadata is retrieved and populates the Roon Metadata layer. [/quote]@mike, would it be possible to list the tags that Roon makes use of during the import process - at some point I’m going to import between 300-400k meticulously groomed tracks into Roon and the more I know about what tags Roon imports and how it uses them the better I can prepare to ensure that the import yields an optimal result (understanding of course that Roon will seek matadata from other sources too).
[quote=“mike, post:1, topic:3200, full:true”]Improvements to Tag Extraction
Version 1.1 introduces support for multiple instances of the same tag on a file. This is very important for fully supporting many of the capabilities that some file formats, particularly FLAC, offer.
Roon has added support for many file tags since version 1.0, including:
GENRE, STYLE, GENRES, STYLES-
ISCOMPILATION, COMPILATION, TCMP[/quote]There may be merit in enabling users to customise the mapping table from their own tags to those that Roon references.
Are there any plans to include MOOD tags in a future release?
[quote=“mike, post:1, topic:3200, full:true”]Delimiters within tags:
It’s relatively common for multiple values to be embedded within the same tag. This is distasteful, particularly when working with file formats like FLAC that support multiple instances of tag. The preferred way to represent multiple values is always to use multiple tags when that’s possible.
When Roon supports multiple values for a field in its data model, it will recognize semicolons and newlines as delimiters. Additionally, when parsing GENRE, GENRES, STYLE, and STYLES, Roon will recognize commas as delimiters.[/quote] It’d be great if you could provide users the ability to specify delimiters. As and example, because LMS supports it as do a number of taggers, in those instances (legacy issues mostly) where multiple values are embedded within the same tag I’ve used ‘\’ (double backslash ) as the delimiter.
[quote=“mike, post:1, topic:3200, full:true”]Personal Album Ratings
We’ve received a lot of feedback about the album ratings provided by Roon’s metadata service. It’s hard to look at your favorite album and see that some reviewer somewhere gave it two stars, or to listen to complete garbage, and see a four and a half star rating.
Roon 1.1 introduces personal album ratings. This data is stored on a per-profile basis, so different members of your household can have their own personal ratings. When an album has a personal rating, the default rating is hidden.[/quote] Please could you make suppression of default ratings optional. Having been an allmusic.com user for years I’ve come to appreciate the views of a number of their reviewers (albeit I don’t always agree with them). It’d be great to be able to see/ use their ratings alongside my own. This enables users to slice and dice according to their own tastes or pick out say all the the allmusic.com 5 star rated albums in their personal collection. Additionally, I’d love to see Reviewers become entities within Roon as well, so that I could for e.g. see all albums within my collection that were reviewed by Stephen Thomas Erlewine.
[quote=“mike, post:1, topic:3200, full:true”]Album, Track, Genre and Artist Editing
Roon now supports manual editing of many metadata fields at the track, album, genre, and artist level. You can access the editing screens by clicking the edit pencil on the album, artist, or genre page, or by selecting (right click or long-press) an album, track, or artist and selecting “edit” from the command bar at the top of the screen.
The editing functionality supports editing single items or multi-selecting items to edit several items at once. You can perform high level operations (like setting metadata preferences) on many items at the same time by selecting them in the album or track browser, and clicking the “edit” button at the top of the screen.[/quote]At some juncture it may become necessary to enable users to run update queries on metadata to get their library to appear the way they want it. As an example, a user may prefer to refer to Yusuf Islam as Cat Stevens throughout their library, whether it be as composer or performer. An update query would probably be the most elegant way to accomplish this.
[quote=“mike, post:1, topic:3200, full:true”]Improvements related to Live, Compilation, Bootleg etc.
Roon has added support for tracking live albums, compilations, and bootlegs, as well as live tracks. We are populating this data from two different metadata providers at the moment, but it’s fairly new to us, and may contain inaccuracies. Please let us know if you run into incorrectly flagged tracks or albums.
These flags are editable. There’s also a setting in Settings->General to flag albums as live albums, compilations, or bootlegs using icons in the album browser if you want that information to be a part of your browsing experience.[/quote]How does Roon go about differentiating a compilation album? A user’s own metadata could be informative in arriving at the answer on import and hopefly obviating the need to manually flag albums as compilations. Users coming from the Squeezebox world will likely have done one or both of the following:
- artist tag for each track set to the track artist, no entry for
- albumartist compilation tag set to 1 if the album is a compilation
- albums containing multiple artists on a single track, but not being a
compilation would typically have albumartist set.
[quote=“mike, post:1, topic:3200, full:true”]Minor Features
-
Renamed “Fixed Volume” setting to “Force Maximum Volume”
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Added a new volume option “Disable Volume Control”. This puts Roon in a “no-touch” mode where it just plays audio and never attempts to interact with OS-level volume/mute controls.
[/quote]Please could you explain the difference between the two? Does the absence of forcing maximum volume mean that digital attenuation is then in play?
