Specific metadata & text-list GUI questions

[danny (Danny Dulai)]

OK, so first and quickly, I’m going to address your most pressing questions.

1. There is a “tracks browser” view, that just gives you a very simple list of all your artists, albums, tracks. It looks like a comfortably spaced spreadsheet. Not great aesthetics, but as you said … sometimes you just need this. It has a very full featured FOCUS feature as well, which lets you chop and dice your collection via a ton of criteria.
2. We don’t have native support for “live” albums, and this is something I think you could give us some guidance on. You could mark your live albums with our TAG feature or by doing name changing hacks like you do with your symbols, but really, we should give you a flag, and we should have an option to group live albums differently on the artist details page, and we should show a little icon on the cover to tell you that it is a live album. What else would you like to see? Maybe you need to play with the app first, and then see what you really want.

Now, I’m going to address the rest of your situation in two ways… first I’ll explain how our metadata works, and second, I’ll address each of your points with a way to accomplish your goals. Obviously there may be other ways to do this that might make you happier, but I can’t guess the variations which would make you most happy.

To understand how our metadata system works, I’ll first ask you to read some posts @brian has made. Please take the 3 minutes to read these 3 posts, as they will make the rest of this post make much more sense.

Leveraging existing metadata in audio files

I’m wondering how Roon will deal with existing metadata in files … If in any way leveraged, what fields will be read? Everything that we know how to extract is extracted and preserved in our databases. If something new arises, there’s a facility that allows us to go back to the files and re-extract the tags to grab it. I could fill a medium sized book describing what we do with each of the many fields we support, and all of the subtleties involved in how they’re used, and ultimately, I’d stil…

Customizing metadata

The databases are built to support comprehensive editing functionality. We have basically made every entity and field in the database editable. So, this case will be possible, along with many, many more things that you might want to do. Full editing functionality will not be available not immediately at launch. With such a rich metadata model, the editing user interface has a immense amount of surface area–getting that UI built and polished just didn’t fit in to our launch schedule. Until that…

What can I do to improve my metadata matches?

I’ll continue where Danny left off. There are two phases involved in getting metadata for your files. The files are first grouped into clumps that have a high likelihood of being a complete album. Then we use the filenames, tags, and track lengths to identify each of the clumps. Your question pertains mostly to the clumping phase, as identification results will vary as a consequence of how the files are clumped. For example, if you have the Pink Floyd Discovery box set, which is just composed o…

That should give you an idea of what’s going on… but I’ll summarize here:

1. if you keep your complete albums nicely organized with tags and in a directory per album, we will never break up your stuff
2. once we’ve clumped tracks into albums, which uses folders, tags, filenames, etc, we will start to identify that album’s “improved” metadata. I put scare quotes around “improved”, because right now, you believe your metadata has huge amounts of value to you, and we may screw it up if we were to change it even slightly.
3. because the database is layered, even if we “screw it up”, you can always go back to your file’s data. at the moment, we have an easy way (next week’s alpha build!) to revert back to the tags for the entire album. Later, when we have deep data editing, you can do this on a per track per field basis.
4. Our metadata can be very rich, and in many cases, we have more the stuff you see online. We do a lot of learning and digging about your library’s metadata to find a lot of connections and information you won’t see explicitly out there. In many cases, we improve the metadata in slight ways in our own databases, which gives us a radically better data set. We also report far too many errors in the data we purchase, which gets fixed weekly. Many of these reports are due to the fact that we can catch errors in automated ways, because we are constantly tweaking the quality of the data. I will give an example of this below with your Knockin’ example.

will the GUI display non-std text symbols such as the ones I am using in the examples above?

We use OpenSans for the core font, and back off to many other fonts installed on your system for other scripts like Korean, Japanese, etc… If that font has your char, we will display it. Try out your chars: http://typecast.com/preview/google/Open%20Sans – both the dot and the infinite look fine to me. We don’t support the right-to-left scripts like Hebrew or Arabic, but we pretty much got everything else.

it’s not clear that the initial release of Roon will allow me to “ignore” Roon’s guided metadata discovery process (folder-based ID’ing) in favor of my own internal metadata

As I stated above, not only do we always “overlay” our data on top of yours, but we allow you to turn off our data. The user experience for doing this requires touching each album manually right now, but this will improve to allow for multiselect + disable/enable.

Here’s one more example of what I like, and want. All songs (in entire library/collection) sorted shows me all the different versions of Knockin’ that I have, but still sorts the way I displayed earlier when I was just within one artist.

We all do this, and the reality is that this is just sad. What a terrible way to find different performances of the same song (same artist or other’s covering the song). Roon supports sort by track name in our track browser, but it’s not how I recommend doing this. Roon can find a song to be an “interesting composition”, whether that be Beethoven’s Für Elise, or your example, Bob Dylan’s Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door. Many things can cause a composition to become interesting, but you can also edit them to be interesting (once we release full editing). Here is what happens when I see Knockin’ on my Eric Clapton album:

ERIC CLAPTON - THE CREAM OF CLAPTON
(image scaled to half size)

and here is what I see when I click on “11 Performances”:

KNOCKIN’ ON HEAVEN’S DOOR
(image scaled to half size so it’d fit nicely here)

(there are some bugs involving some missing data as well as some duplicated performers that you might see in those images. I was running and older build for testing when I took these screenshots. Sorry!)

The result is much better than the tracks browser sorted by song name, and with a lot more information too. When was that performance? Who was that with? If it was classical, you’d see even more data. We are looking at sourcing song reviews and even more data about individual popular music songs. This would all be here, and your library’s metadata will automatically update in the background (in our layer) when we add the new stuff.

I’ve got 2 versions of Busted Feet, one of which is a vinyl rip

Not only will we automatically identify duplicate albums, along with a little “version note” (that we pull from your tags), but we stack them so you only see 1 album in the browser. From the album details, you can quickly see and navigate to the “other versions” using information like file formats and audio quality, that “version note”, and any other relevant information is there.

If you don’t like our duplicate detection, dont worry, just mark them as non-duplicates. If you find that we missed something, you can do manual marking of “another version”. If you don’t like the behavior where we hide duplicates from the album browser, you can show hidden items too, or unmark them as “other versions”.

I hope my adamant-stance needs and such aren’t seen as sniping – this is an exciting looking product!

We welcome your feedback, and we understand you completely. We all had our own crazy systems back in the day. That’s why we built Sooloos, and it’s we are continuing to do this with Roon. This is our obsession as well.

I really do hope you try us out when we launch next month, and be patient with our growing pains, and don’t hold back from giving us strongly opinionated feedback. We only use it to make the product better, and we have thick skin so don’t worry about expressing your own obsessions here