I am a lifetime subscriber and want Roon to be a great experience for the Classical Music Lover. However, I feel Roon needs to improve in the following areas:
Treatment of box sets: This is one of Roon’s weakest features. Frequently the metadata isn’t very good, and has to use my files to populate the fields. In addition, Roon needs to allow the use of separate album art covers for each of the albums in the box sets.
Ability to view pdf files with in Roon. Most new (and many past downloads) include a pdf file for the album booklet. Roon’s current implementation of pdf file readings is very primitive. I know its possible to do better, because JRemote and Qobuz player handles these much better.
Ability to incorporate back cover art as well as album liners
Links to classical music reviews. The reviews from Rovi are generally not very good, and I often enjoy reading reviews from sources like Grammophone, music web international, etc. I wish Roon would include links to these review sources.
Ability to customize information on the “Now Playing” and “Playlist” screens. For most albums, Roon has alot of information – engineer, soloists, etc. I would like the ability to show what is of interest to me.
One of Roon’s key mission statements is the enhance the music lovers experience. I feel that these suggestions, if properly implemented, would enhance the experience for me.
I welcome other forum members comments and suggestions.
I’m not an avid classical music listener, but I enjoy doing that form time to time.
It happens that your suggestions are also something that I’ll like to see in RONN. I may add to your list some possibility to see multiple reviews instead of links to reviews (for all the music not only for classical).
Moving the post to Feature Request category it may be a good idea.
We’ll probably go off topic, but I believe the more important thing is what is ROON for you. For some, even a professionally promoted mock-up will satisfy their needs.
There are a few Feature Requests out there already with ideas to improve the classical experience and it’s hard to tell which ones will get addressed the one way or the other. So discussion on this may not get too much traction. Still it’s important to point out that there’s still room left for improvement.
With box sets - especially those with a lot of discs - my biggest problem is often not so much the metadata but the out-of-the-box browsing experience. If a boxset consists of previously released albums - not a new compilation or a dedicated multi-disc publication - I usually try to split the set into the original albums and only use a tag in Roon to mark the original boxset. Works much better – even though it now forced Leslie Howard (his 61 albums which make the Complete Liszt Piano set) to grin at me three times in the genre browser which can be kind of unsettling . If Roon would provide this “split boxset” functionality because it already knows from metadata what the original albums were that would be cool.
If the back cover is a picture in the album folder you can view it inline already. What’s missing is image extraction of file embedded cover art.
Like asked for here:
An interesting feature idea for classical music I remember’s this one:
I have seen this request several times, and not just for classical.
But I don’t quite understand why.
As I see it, there are two kinds of box sets:
Those where each album (one or more disks) in the box correspond to an original album — the kind you are talking about.
A set of disks that bear no allegiance to original album boundaries, with tracks just packed as debpnsely as possible onto disks in the box. In this case, there is no affinity of an album cover to any album, there aren’t really albums.
For case 1, which you talk about, why bother considering the box set as anything interesting at all? You have acquired a set of albums, each should have its cover as you say, but the publisher’s choice to sell these together, presumably at a discount, why is this interesting at all?
The box set (collection) has his own artwork. I would like to have a way to group all the discs in the collection under just one item in my library and to have displayed only one image in my library (under albums for example). When click on that image to see the collection content. I found a workaround using focus, bookmarks and whatever, but it will be nice to have a better way to manage collections. Maybe one more level for the multiple discs, now you have album > discs, maybe collection > albums > discs.
Yes that is a perfect illustration of my question. I have box sets like that.
The individual albums represent artistic intent: Cohen put together albums with one cohesive message, they were not just “all the songs written in 1969”, so the albums matter from the perspective of navigation, and play as a unit, and cover. (I am very Album focused in my play, I never do playlists of individual songs.)
But the green box cover? It represents the label choosing to sell the together at a discount — why does that matter to you? It also represents your acquiring the albums at one time, but there are other such groupings that have more personal value, like the blues albums Annie gave me for my birthday or suggestions from @RBM in the Roon forum or stuff I heard at the 2018 Seattle jazz festival.
So I acknowledge that extra groupings are useful. Tags is our only mechanism for that, and I agree it would be good to have more flexibility there.
I’m just thinking that labels’ merchandizing decisions are way down the list.
What can I say, I doesn’t really matter to me if it make sense or not. And it has nothing to do with the merchandizing decisions, sometime I find useful to group albums in a collection by my criteria.
In the end it is just something that I’ll like to have: a way to group albums together under a generic collection name and artwork, same as you can do with multiple discs for an album, and to have these collections shown either as a separate menu item (beside Albums, Artists and so on) or inside the albums view.
This doesn’t mean that I’ll get what I want but… let me be!
Oh, I absolutely agree with the value of arbitrary grouping, I have asked for it for years. And putting a graphic on it.
I think the issue with the box sets is that the metadata that we get by default focuses on the box, not on the albums. So we ask for cover art for the albums as an improvement. If the default metadata focused on the albums, then the box would just be one more example of arbitrary grouping.
I also prefer the albums because sometimes I have other versions of individual albums, but not of the entire box.
What I’m not seeing in this thread is any input from Roon. I’m new to Roon, but did spring for a lifetime membership so I’m very interested in seeing the same improvements. Is there a mechanism or procedure in place other than this, which seemed to quickly deteriorate into questions of philosophy and personal preference?
Roon have already stated in numerous threads over months of elapsed time that they are reworking the meta data system and have classical as one of the areas for improvement.
Search before posting could be a thing.
Thank you! Very useful information and reassuring to know that everything is being absorbed and addressed. Looking forward to seeing future improvements!
…and you can. Admittedly, Roon hands off the opening of the PDF to your default PDF reader, rather than opening the PDF directly in Roon, but the function is there.
I am a lifetime subscriber and generally very happy with Roon which I am using with HQ Player.
The vast majority of my collection is classical. Included are about 10,000 albums that I have ripped from vinyl and tape, all to hirez 24/192 files. I also have scanned the front and back covers and inserts of the 10,000 albums. Roon has picked up all the scans and I use them to read the liner notes as well as see the albums covers. I use a large flatbed scanner and the images are in high resolution.
Several improvements I would like to see.
The ability to zoom in on the scans more than just one step. I can barely read the liner notes from my 24" monitor, and it would be very helpful to zoom in. My workaround has been to use my ipad and hold it very close to me to see the liner notes.
I would like to see more than 1 lines in the title display of each album. I categorize my albums by Label, Catalogue number, Composer, Piece, Performer. Not enough room in one line, even with no Label and Catalogue number.
On the Edit function for title, can there be a way to use the current information displayed as a default, rather than having to type in the entire information from scratch. For example, often a very simple change is needed - changing J.S.Bach to Bach, J.S. for example, so the alphabetical listings don’t split the composer information. into two different parts of the alphabet, or when the performer is listed before the composer.
In the album editor there’s already a way to copy the content of the currently used title (Roon or file … Green Arrow) to the Edit field by clicking on the “copy content icon” (orange arrow):
browsing experience. If a boxset consists of previously released albums - not a new compilation or a dedicated multi-disc publication - I usually try to split the set into the original albums and only use a tag in Roon to mark the original boxset. Works much better – even though it now forced Leslie Howard (his 61 albums which make the Complete Liszt Piano set) to grin at me three times in the genre browser which can be kind of unsettling 
. If Roon would provide this “split boxset” functionality because it already knows from metadata what the original albums were that would be cool.
