Taggings vs Roon Db

Dear Roon team,

I’ve been pulling my hair for two nights trying to find a workflow of how to catalog my music correctly and I feel I’m stuck and need your help. The background to this is that I realized that my matched albums often contained incorrect information (wrong labels, catalog numbers, missing composers etc etc) which also screwed up the “Performances” label.

After some testing, and trying to edit this manually in Roon I gave up. I run Linux, so the only option for me to correct things is using my Android phone which is just too inconvenient. I came to the realization that if you want to get it done right, you need to do it yourself through expanded file tagging. I’ve been playing around with MP3tag and a Discogs script , and have now a good tool to help me along the way. I used one album as a test case, but I’m still having issues and would love your input.

UPDATE: First topic below is probably not an issue, continued with 4 albums and it seems to be working just nice. See new post below.

I can’t figure out how to combine file tags with data being fetched from the album lookup database in a good way. For instance a lot of the information found under “Credits” would just be too tedious to put into tags (if even possible), so being able to fetch that from the Db is much appreciated. However, let’s take the COMPOSER tag as example. I tagged each track in MP3tag with the COMPOSER tag, but it seems to be completely ignored by Roon which uses whatever it fetched from the Db instead. I can’t seem to find a metadata setting for this particular tag, but just for testing purposes I’ve set everything to “Prefer file” but with no changes. I seem to be able to change this manually under “Credits” in the metadata editor, but that’s basically redoing it again and having spent time tagging that information in the first place then seems pointless. I had similar results with the PERSONNEL tag. Am I missing something fundamental here, can’t data from these two sources be combined?

I have a lot of Jazz albums, which often get reissued by another label. For instance Analogue Productions and their Blue Note reissues. During the tagging process I add both labels, as I want the album to be matched to both, but I can’t get Roon to show more than one label. For instance:

LABEL: “Blue Note;Analogue Productions”

In Roon this shows up as “Analogue Productions” only. I’ve tried with different seperators, but nothing seems to work. Adding another label manually in the meta data editor works just fine by the way.

Thanks in advance!
Patrick

Quick update:
So I went on tagging 4 new albums, which previously were not in Roon. Followed the above workflow, with extensive tagging to each file. And guess what - all 4 of the albums recognized perfectly without me having to do anything! Yes, there a few things missing, but that’s all in order and I have of course no issues adding that manually. Right now I have to say this is ideal for me. I’m wondering if perhaps things got screwed up in the Db for that one album I was using as test case, because that was showing all sorts of weird inconsistent behavior. Is there an easy way to remove all entries from the Db for one specific album, without deleting the actual files?

The problem with multiple labels is still there though.

What’s the problem album @Patrick_Jakiel?

Hi @joel
The album was “Memorial Album”, by Clifford Brown (Rudy van Gelder edition).

HI @Patrick_Jakiel. The source metadata for this album is split into two…

I’ve taken a look and half of the albums are called “Memorial Album” and the other half are called “Memorial”; so perhaps trying just Memorial might yield something positive? (and you can always edit the title once it’s been identified)

Or was the problem that you couldn’t find the specific Rudy van Gelder edition?

With regard to the labels, you can always add a label via the album editing functionality within Roon. And you can do this across multiple albums if necessary (to save time).

Hi @joel,

I realized I was all over the place with my first post, sorry for being unclear. Let me give you two scenarios:

Scenario 1:
A new album, previously not in Roon. I take the time to tag (all the regular tags like arist, track name but also composer, barcode, catalog number etc). I add the album to the music folder, Roon matches it without issues. The result is almost perfect - my tags are visible, but Roon seems to have also extracted additional data mostly seen under “Credits”. Any error I’m happy correcting manually - all is good and I’m happy!

Scenario 2:
Album already exists in Roon, is matched but missing a lot of data, for instance the composers. I take the time to extend the track tagging (using MP3tag, for each track indivudually just like scenario 1 above), adding the composers. Back in Roon, I can’t seem to be able to get the new tags visible. The tracks still show as having no composers, the changes I did to the catalog number are not there. I’ve tried all the options given (Re-scan, Re-identify and Re-analyze), but nothing makes Roon pick up the newly added tags. That’s why I asked if there is a way to completely delete an album from the Roon database, without actually deleting the files, and rescan.

These two behaviors seem consisten over at least 5 albums I’ve tried this with. If a album is new Roon matches it almost perfectly, combining my tags with additional data fetched from the db. If already existing in Roon, Roon seems to ignore my tags and I can’t get them to show.

Regarding the labels - I’m aware of being able to add them manually. It’s just a inconsistent behavior. If I add two composers:
tag COMPOSER = “Composer A;Composer B”
… the result will be two composers seen in Roon. If I do the same with labels, only the last one is seen. Since I haven’t been consistent with the order of the labels in my tags (didn’t see a need for that), it’s hard to do a batch edit as well.

Patrick