Can you guys pl-ease give us sort by Composer in Album view? It’s the only thing that makes sense for Classical 95% of the time. Artist may be of interest to focus on a soloist or ensemble some of the time. Sort by date for any reason is a non-sequitur basically. Album Title may be ok some of the time, but nothing beats perusing a collection by Composer (last name). There have been discussions on this and suggestions at other ways to look at it, all are more complicated and problematic. Pretty please?
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And discs with compositions from different composers then go to Various Composers? Also all discs with compositions that have more than one composer listed?
Rather fringe cases for Classical, but OK. It would still be an improvement of not having the option. The same arguments can be applied to sort by Artist, eh?
A point I’ve made in another post on this is think of the Record Store experience (and yes they are alive and well), or record shelf if that’s closer to your heart.
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Yes, all (real) compilation discs get sorted under Various Artists – even in record stores (maybe not true for classical).
The big problem here is that the album browser is album based where you have metadata for album title, album artist, release date, etc. but not for composer. You’re actually asking for a track (in classical maybe even multi-track for multi-part works) based metadata sort order for albums where the metadata is not even guaranteed to exist at all (but for classical material the chances for existence are much higher than for non-classical material).
That is why the composer and compositions browsers in Roon exist. To make use of the respective available metadata.
True, true, that’s my point, Classical IS sorted by Composer for physical media.
False, false. When I, and everyone I know, rips Classical, they are fastidious in tagging the Composer.
Many an issue with Composer view, would simply be solved by having the option I’m requesting.
This makes me wonder if you’ve looked at metadata for Classical? But nevertheless, you have stated your ideas (opposition?) to having an option that I have stated a preference of for the Roon folks to consider as a Feature Request. I really don’t want to keep bantering about it, let’s leave it at that pal.
I just tried to make you aware of (some of) the underlying problems that hindered the feature to appear in Roon until now. Unfortunately they do not disappear just because one decides to ignore them.
Be assured that I support every feature request that makes Roon a better product for us all.
This is sadly true. I would love to sort my Classical Albums by Composer, but unless I have explicitly added an Album Composer to the metadata, it is often lacking.
Roon doesn’t create metadata, it can only work with what is there.
Perhaps the answer is to show Albums where an Album level Composer exists and let the user find other Compositions using the Track version icons.
As far as I’m aware, there’s no commonly used – and thus recognized – file-based tag for album composer. So you just add the composer as an artist @andybob?
I add it as an Album level credit in Roon. Life’s too short to curate file tags.
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The big problem lies with multi composer albums which are not that uncommon
A workaround is to have the album title as Beethoven: Piano Sonatas etc. fortunately this seems to be the convention for most labels , but that still doesn’t get around the multi composer thing
Unfortunately many albums have either no Composer Tag populated or the Composer is in the Artist Tag and the Artist is in the Album Artist Tag
Maybe a better option is to change the Composer View to show albums not composition. Composition is a pain in many cases eg I have box sets of the complete works of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Brahms & Chopin
The Composer view is simply swamped , Bach is well over 1000 compositions
As ever classical metadata is cr*p and there seems littlewill on behalf of the record producers to fix it. Metadata is still rubbish on new releases
Maybe it could be changed to have both, compostion and album view, much like search results which also can show different data (like eg. albums, tracks, compositions, …) at the same time.
But anyways, this would be a different Feature Request than this one for Album View.
Good idea, a bit like Artist where you get the option of Performer or Composer
Can I add my name to requesting this feature. It’s bonkers it’s not there. I prefer to work by album rather than composers works and would much prefer Composers have a similar layout as Artist do please !! Just do it
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I second that ! Sort by Composer really is a must for any decent browsing of the collection of a Classical music lover.
Please add me to the list of people who want to be able to sort Classical (and opera) albums by composer’s last name. In multi-composer album, I’m happy to live with any compromise, which is what I do in my physical collection. (Usually, even in multi-composer albums, there’s one composer who is the reason I bought the album).
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Pls add me to this request.
Support for classical music catalog is really lacking here.
I would add “view all composers” under each genre portal just like there are options to view all artists and albums.
Mind that classical is not a single genre - classical vocal, solo piano and many more.
In JRiver, I have setup the views so under each classical genre I see a sorting by composer and when selecting a composer, i see the relevant genre albums, and selecting an album i see only the tracks of that composer and genre. that’s really convenient and cool.
Have you guys had a look at the Composer view? It isn’t bad. You can have composers, restricted to Classical only if you wish, ordered by Name, Number of Compositions or Most played. You get a little picture of each composer if you are lucky. When you drill through into a composer you get all that composers compositions. You can filter these to narrow them down, which helps a bit. Because Roon gives you compositions rather than albums you don’t hit the issue with multi-composer albums. But obviously being able to refine things by Genre or any other arbitrary set of tags would be handy. Eventually you forget what you were able to do in JRiver.
That would be great, if only there were a selection to sort by Album. That’s all I’m looking for.
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Sure, but we have to make the best of what we’ve got. In many cases, for classical, the composition is the album, and even if there are two or three compositions on an album there is often only one main one, or one you are wanting to listen to, so it’s not too bad having the list of compositions. It is a bit tedious scrolling through them all though, for sure. But really we should be able to construct whatever views suit us.
