The Elephant in the (Metadata) Room

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Based on the posts to this, now correctly located, thread, there seems to be quite a few lines of thought on this issue.

Team Roon markets its product, aka Roon, as this super duper digital music library management and organization program, that is the master of metadata. Fetching metadata from various online sources and building a complex yet very user friendly presentation of the metadata with many different ways to dig deeper into the music and artists in one’s music library. And when the metadata is readily available, as for most well known musicians, Roon does exactly what the marketing promises.

The issue is what happens when the metadata is not available.

All Roon users have to PAY to use Roon. A product promises to do something, one pays for the product and if the product doesn’t deliver as promised then the user should, at least, make a complaint, which I am doing with this thread.

And now we’ve reached the point were opinions start to differ.

I’m in the the camp that fells that the lack of useful metadata on most new releases by non “superstar” musicians should not have to be “fixed” by the user since that what the user is paying Roon to do. In other words, the lack of metadata is Roon’s problem and Roon needs to fix this problem.

If Roon were a free program, like Logitech Media Server, and required the users to help build the metadata then things would be different.

In addition, quite a bit of the metadata missing from Roon is available in various forms on the internet. Jambase has lots of information, as does Bandcamp, to name just two. Roon should be finding ways to incorporate this information into Roon instead of throwing their hands up and saying it’s too hard to do or it’s not our problem.

By the way, for those Roon users willing to edit the metadata sources that Roon does rely on, please continue to do so and I will continue to complain to Team Roon. :grin:

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It sees vastly unreasonable to me that a payment of £20 a month is supposed to pay for the product as is, it’s support, new feature development, new hardware onboarding and to fix the metadata woes of every release in the milliions across the three streaming services that Roon incorporates.
I’d say pie in the sky but I don’t think it’s as reasonable as that.

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And I think that’s unreasonable to not at least make an effort to improve the metadata. At the very least Team Roon can they are aware of the growing problem and that they are working with the three streaming services to rectify the problem.

It is unreasonable to have people pay for something that is promised but not delivered. Oh, and to then blame the shortcomings on others.

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But I think your reading of promised is completely different to mine.
I’ve never read into the marketing the degree of absoluteness that you have.

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I’m not asking Roon to provide me with for full discographical information, like one would get in a fully annotated discography, but rather just a few of the basics, like the members of the group and the composers of the songs. Sure, more information would be welcome and very useful but not really necessary.

By the way, I purposefully did not provide specific examples since then someone would say "oh the drummer is so and so and the bass player is so and so, etc. I’m not looking to fix this issue on a case by case basis, rather I’m looking at the bigger picture.

Now that Roon is owned by Harmon they should have greater resources available to tackle this isue.

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I’d like to see that pitch for funds.
We could spend ££ and add this cool new integration with the Samsung line or we could spend £££ and fix metadata issues that a few people on our forum Witter on about…:rofl::rofl:

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I read that an just laughed. That’s how one keeps discussions like this from turning into flame wars and getting nasty.

By the way, with so many new pieces of audio gear coming with either Chromecast or Airplay built in, integration with Roon is very easy. My LG soundbar has Chromecast and the new streaming box from my TV provider (Verizon Fios) also has Chromecast and they both work with Roon.

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Yes, I bought a wiim endpoint that had really good squeezebox built in as well as airplay and Chromecast.

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when one browses Tidal or Qobuz catalogues w/in Roon, one should be seeing the Roon metadata, not the Qobuz/Tidal data. it may be the case, that in many, many instances, these are the same, or similar. it may also be the case that for new releases, the data from Roon’s 3rd party sources has not yet been edited/provided, which could account for the paucity of data.

I primarily look at genre info, and there are far too many recordings that are simply classified as either Jazz or Classical, and nothing else.

one question, if you import the album to your library, does the amount and quality of the data improve?

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Short answer for almost new releases: NO

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