This has long been a bugbear, but it is not the usual complaint that the public databases and consequently roon get it the wrong way round (should be Staatskapelle Dresden rather than Dresden Staatskapelle).
In the import of Deutsche Grammophon Mozart 111 Masterworks roon behaves quite inconsistently.
On disks 42 and 43 DG catalogues as expected “Staatskapelle Dresden” (rather than Dresden Staatskapelle). But I know from experience that “Staatskapelle Dresden” has no bio in roon and becomes a performer rather than an artist. So prior to import I would commonly re-tag to “Dresden Staatskapelle”.
On import, however, in the credits roon creates a primary artist of “Dresden Staatskapelle” and a performing orchestra of “Staatskapelle Dresden”. This means that there are inconsistent primary artist and album artist attributions being made by roon. The consequence is a messy album screen with lots of duplicates, unexpected search results and I am seeing impacts on radio/discovery as well as my experience improves the more of this type of artist name consistency checking and grooming I do. But it is a lot of work. I find this a lot. Roon will assign one version of the artist name for the primary artist and another for the album artist (different from my tags), even creating album artists that roon doesn’t seem to classify as an artist (classifying them as performers instead). Another common example Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra (primary artist) and Berliner Philharmoniker (album artist). But I see this a lot.
Is this normal behavior? Am I doing something wrong? Either way it creates a lot of work.
And I have just noticed that the primary artist is “Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart” rather than “Various Artists”. It’s a small thing. But it is yet another manual step and they just seem to mount up.
I know that it is off my own topic but it is a good illustration. Despite all the manual grooming involved the box set is still to all intents and purposes unusable. The only reason I go to the trouble of manually tidying up the tags with these box sets is so that individual compositions can then show up in other roon searches or radio or discovery etc. If I actually want to explore a box set I get the pamphlet and put on a CD or alternatively I simply browse windows folders, pick what I want and right click to foobar.
This also raises the interesting question, whether all ensembles should be anglicised… In german its Staatskapelle Dresden. Dresden Staatskapelle is just wrong
Should the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra be rather called Göteborgs Symfoniker as they are called in their native language? You would not translate modern music bandnames in other languages, would you?
I’m all for synonyms here, but I’d rather have some original name as “main” name for the ensemble. I probably would accept kyrillic transliterations into english, but only because I can’t read kyrillic letters
I also have lots composers as primary artists coming into Roon from its own metadata… It’s a pain to clean these up. It also messes up search results and album assignments (composer assigned as performer, because they are not only tagged as composer but also as primary artist.
That’s just bad metadata to begin with and IMHO a herculean task for any software to clean that up based on string recognition and rules.
Yes, for living composers. But surely a sanity check for dead ones would be straightforward enough.
I know there are dead composers that survived into the recording age. I have a few of those myself. Elgar and Shostokovich come to mind. But I could settle for a few miss-assignments instead of almost everything.
Aging Pop and Jazz artists will become tricky in the future but a start could be made with classical. As I understand it a “classical” tag already triggers other roon behaviours.
Yeah, it makes sense to have some composers as performers to like Bernstein and Britten, but only in cases where they are really performers.
These “wrong” perfromer composers come from metadata where the composer is maintained as the artist, not the composer. There is no way Beethoven could be a performing artist…
In general that is what I would prefer. Because in general that is what I did. Just copied whatever was on the back of the CD, and if native language showed up on an EAC or CueTools search that was the one I used as well.
But I can also understand that not happening. What drives me nuts is why on earth does roon on a routine basis credit 2 or more versions of an artist? Surely it knows internally it is doing that and a simple sanity check to normalize names consistently is possible. I have lost count of the number of Sergei’s I have to change to Sergey. Why can this not be automated?
I have see four different versions of an artist name in the roon credits and just didn’t say anything and tidied it up as this all seems to have such a low priority at roon. But what got me going is that I was sent a special “badge” you earn after 1 year as a member of roon community. That was when I realised I must have started importing my library into roon from JRiver this time last year and it is still a mess. Maybe 30% through. It’s a combination. Poor identification rates, inconsistent tags, poor grouping of multi-part compositions, compositions not grouped, poor choices of album art, no support for cue, ape or iso. It’s a mess. But the single biggest problem I find generating the most manual effort is this problem of artist vs. performer. I have absolutely no idea what roon’s logic is. Is an artist an identified entity and a performer is an unidentified entity? I really don’t know. Maybe someone else knows?
But as you say unless you do this nothing in roon really works properly. Searches, radio, discovery, focus etc. etc. With clean data roon does thing’s that the others can’t. But getting there seems to involve a much higher level of manual intervention than I ever bothered with before. I think a lot of that was that a folder view is very forgiving of fuzzy logic so insane levels of tagging was not necessary. But no folder view in roon . . .
