Suggestions, requests for improving Roon for the Classical Music Lover

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! :grinning:

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.

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An interesting read about the “mechanism”:

Thank you! Very useful information and reassuring to know that everything is being absorbed and addressed. Looking forward to seeing future improvements!

and many albums (not just classical) have a ‘digital booklet’, usually in pdf and in fact in the album folder. I’d like to be able to see that please.

…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.

@Geoff_Coupe and one does that by…?

See here:
https://kb.roonlabs.com/Gallery

:slightly_smiling_face:

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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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

Thanks for a great product.

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):

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I am a lifetime subscriber to Roon and have enjoyed it from day one, I would buy it again in a moment. With that context, I have some thoughts on the recurring questions related to quality of metadata, handling of boxed sets, reviews, etc.

It seems to me that the ultimate issue is not simply how Roon chooses to source and present meta-data, but also the quality and completeness of that data in the first place. Obviously, Roon’s supplemental information will be only as good as the data source. I believe that even were Roon to present metadata perfectly and in a manner to everyone’s liking, many of the issues cited by members of the forum would remain as the metadata source is incomplete & imperfect.

If there is not a 100% reliable and complete metadata source, perhaps the solution is to create an added and integrated layer of crowd-sourced metadata accessible across Roon subscribers. For example, I may take time to do my own grooming of a boxed set in such a manner that Roon can better present the set to me. I would be perfectly happy to share that revised metadata with any other Roon customer. Similar perhaps for reviews etc. Think of it as a Wiki for Roon customers.

One could see interesting uses of the data on the back-end. Perhaps Roon could sell a subscription to this data back to its existing metadata provider? Going further with the notion of shared data, it would sure be cool to see real-time aggregated data from Roon users: most owned album, playing now, total albums owned, genre distributions, etc.

Speaking for myself, while I am very sensitive to privacy concerns, I am a real fan of music (and Roon) and would be more than willing to contribute my metadata and library stats to make for a better music-listening community.

If my recall is correct, this is how Gracenote started – it was created by users and eventually it was purchased by Sony (I believe Nielsen now owns it).

I think instead of creating & maintaining yet another closed / gated community sourced metadata pool it would be better and nicer too to push more into the musicbrainz and maybe critiquebrainz direction. Roon already uses some metadata from musicbrainz, more hopefully being on the way.

If you want to bring an album or a box set into Roon musicbrainz already kind of works for this – if one’s willing to add the data to musicbrainz that is. :wink:

As long as each album in the box set is given the same album name (ie the name you want to use for the box set) and the individual discs are correctly numbered in the source files, this will appear as a single item with multiple albums in Roon.

Don’t know if this has been mentioned yet, but here is my complaint/feature request.

On the album page, in the column of “By This Artist”, for classical music more often than not this results in more selections by the performing symphony, etc. Wouldn’t the composer be more appropriate?

Maybe a drop down list for this column, that lets one specify the criteria for display? Either on a per album basis or as a dynamic choice.

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I would (presently) expect to only see the performing artist(s) in this column. If you are sometimes seeing the composer then this suggests you have a mix of composers/artists in your artist tags. Many here will have gone to a great deal of manual grooming effort to ensure they do not see this.

I do agree though that this column should be configurable. Some will prefer to have a handy link to other albums keyed on composer whilst others will prefer performers. The important thing is that the display should be consistent. I can even imagine a configuration drop down to display both as long as roon is making it explicitly consistent that is what it is doing.

No, I want to see the composer rather than the performer. That’s my complaint.