Interface is horrible for classical music. Does not organize composers or performers in a usable manner. For example, select any composer and his or her works will not appear under one name.
Also, it requires you to know the performer to retrieve a performance. For example, try to call up the mosaique quartet recordings of Beethoven’s late quartets.
Classical music fans apparently are marginal users.
I think “classical users” here are aware of various problems in Roon with classical collections.
That is quite often discussed here in the forum.
I think that point is work in progress…
I for myself have organised my classic collections due to these problems in “folder” views.
I have a folder structure with Classical Music: Composers - Beethoven- Piano Conertos or Symphonies, etc
Then I have asecond structure: Classical Interpret.- A to Z. Interpret. in alphabetical order
and etc…
I keep that structure as long the classical metdata problem in Roon is not sorted out.
And with that structure at this moment I can find everything anytime…
I assume you are new to Roon (No offence meant)
You are right Classical does come across as a poor relation. You will find there are several die hard classical fans plugging away at feature requests if you go digging in the forum
Just my experience
Use Album Focus and select a Composer – you get all Beethoven as Composer etc and anywhere Beethoven shows up in a title
Change your first approach from Composer first to Artist First (I know its not logical , I always want Composer> Genre> Album – This is a feature request)
Composition is reasonable useful if you filter by Composer then Form etc
Composer is useless (I have Bach 2000 in my library hence I see an impenetrable 1400 + Compositions
Join in the fray asking for better
Keep reading this forum there are lots of us quite experienced by now how to tame the beast
Mike
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Sure, many problems with classical music metadata … I have to spend considerable time cleaning it up.
But Roon is composition-centered which I find very important. Do you know a software that is better at it?
Best case scenario should be not having to spend considerable amounts of time to adapt Classical Metadata for use with the software. That should be an automatic software driven process.
I am sure Roon will get it done.
Not sure I understand this. If you’re looking for a specific recording the search function works just fine.
Otherwise, if you’re looking for all recordings of a specific composition, that’s quite easy to do too. Search for the composition, scroll down to the bottom of the search results where the compostion results are shown, click on the icon that shows the number of recordings in your libarary or Tidal and you have a list of all recordings of that composition.
I have found it quite useful. I’ve got about 1500 albums, 90% classical. And I’ve found new music in my own library that I always had but not heard for years / forgotten / or not liked when first heard, but now appreciate.
It’s been a great discovery tool for my own library.
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Bottom line is that as with any new software there is a learning curve
I swear a lot less at 7 months than I did At 1 month
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Also, classical users are, in music sales terms, marginal anyway. Software development follows the major use case then the next priority etc. My take from the various classical music threads is that the interface can be made to work but not easily for those with huge collections with multiple versions of compositions. Even my very modest 100 odd classical albums throws up some oddities.
On the plus side the roon team have acknowledged the problem and are drastically changing the experience, though with no delivery date.
Will it be quicker to attack the structure and metadata of a large collection or wait for roon…??
First of all, my collection of classical music in digital form is modest.
However, i have yet to see any classical music collector explain, in understandable lingo, how a good, structured library would look like, what is the main sorting element etc.
How do you classical lovers sort vast collections? Is it by period? Composer? Performer? Soloist? Any one of these would be fine in my book, but there is never any consistency…
Its easy when composers create something new, but this is 98% covers…
I regret characterizing Roon as “terrible” for organizing a classical music collection. In truth, I enjoy my music collection much more since installing Roon.
I have been confused by it on occasion. For example, a search for “J. S. Bach” will bring up Johann Sebastian Bach as a composer. I became confused when I clicked the superscript “all” above the box containing Bach’s name. This brought up multiple variants such as “Bach, Johann Sebastian” in addition to Johann Sebastian Bach.
When I clicked these variant listings, I found that albums were
parceled out among the variant listings. I did not understand that by clicking the containing “Johann Sebastian Bach,” instead of the superscript “all,” I could bring up my entire collection of J.S. Bach’s music. Also, I now understand that I have to pay attention and choose between performer and composer folders.
I very much appreciate the cordial responses from other Roon users.
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I find using the focus tool in album view very effective. For instance:
Focus offers many sorting options, including what seems to me the best way to browse by composer currently in Roon.
If you want to sort your library on a more granular level, try playing around with the filters in “Compositions.” Selecting a specific composition will bring up a page with every performance in your library (leaving metadata issues aside).
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It’s the standard put 10 classical lovers in a room you’ll get 13 opinions of how to do it
I spent a lot of time setting Genre, Sub Genre , Composer And Album Name correctly so that I can go
Beethoven>. Piano music.> Piano sonatas > Complete sonatas Brendel etc then choose from the set. Album Focus does close to this without the Sub Genre
Composition is really too granular for picking a hours listen but has some virtues
Just my way of doing it
Mike
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@Mike_O_Neill, that made perfect sense to me!
I haven’t used it much but switching to the Compositions-view and then using Focus is also useful, at least to me:
This is the Swedish translation but i’m sure you’ll figure it out.
So, you’d select Bethooven as composer, and sonatas as form and you would achieve something similar?
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My old system got to the same place in 5 taps and no typing that to me running it all from an iPad is the ultimate in simplicity
Just a quick mod to the Composer screen …
Mike
that’s what I always advocate: make use of these composition attributes in Roon. They are much more useful than Genres in my opinion.
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Roon’s composer work lists sorted by Opus number are a dream come true. Whoever had that idea is a genius. 
Clearly there are gaps in Roon’s classical use case, which the team are working on, but that shouldn’t distract from the appreciation of things like this which are already there.
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And this is the crux of the problem. There is no general consensus around how a classical library should be catalogued, nor will there ever be. If there was, software would have cracked it years ago.
The best one can do is chose software whose schema mostly matches our own subjective opinion of how classical should be indexed and run with it.
Sorry @Mike_O_Neill, I wrote this before reading your reply which kind of makes the same point.
What improved search AI could do in the future, and what Roon should probably focus on, is making search better at interpreting what we are looking for based on the underlying metadata.
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Yeah, it’s great. Was also impressed when I discovered this - really quite some work the Roon team has put into metadata already. When all the data one day will get unleashed for exploration everywhere in the UI it will be a big big thing. 
Something to wait for, indeed.