The Hassle of Editing Classical Albums via Roon

[anon47919701]

Album Names
The only sensible approach to classical albums is to make them composer focussed by prefacing each album with the composer surname. The great advantage to that is that “Sorted by Album Title” automatically gets all the Bach, Beethoven etc albums together.

Objection :

If there’s a better way to do it or get it done I wouldn’t resort to work arounds. Since the composer information is available as a dedicated metadata value why would I add it to the album title and this way duplicating data and messing up the original album title? The album title should be as it’s on the cover (physical or digital media). If a “sort by composer” feature is missing in a Roon view where there should be one then it should get added to that view.

Now I know there’s no “Sort by Composer” option in Album View. Also, there’s no “Classical only” switch there. The latter can be circumvented by for example focussing on “Classical” as a genre if all classical music is genre tagged as “Classical” or one of its sub-genres. Before I go into details here (*) two more comments:

Artist
The frustrating aspect of classical fare is that composers like Bach, Handel etc often feature in the artist slot by net databases which Roon accesses. In editing the artist(s) I always list the conductor first with orchestral works but feature the soloist before the conductor with concertos. Similarly, famous soloists like Janet Baker are listed ahead of the conductor but, if the singer is not well known I assume the album is more easily detected from the conductor so he/she receives prominence.

Comment No. 1:

While a scheme to identify the role of an artist from its position in the album artist field is OKish it will never really work - as you point out. Actually the identification of a conductor should always work using the metadata value for conductor, same for orchestras (ensembles).

I’d list the primary artists as on the front cover of the album but it would be necessary to actually have data for conductor and ensemble and preferably also in the personnel tags.

Tags
I find the Roon tags confusing and unhelpful so have opted to compose my own. E.g. a concerto could have the following tags “Orchestral”, “Concerto”, “Violin Concerto”; a Haydn piano work “Chamber”, “Instrumental – piano”, “Baroque and Early” etc etc. Roon then allows me to play from a selected tag.

Comment No. 2:

Genre tags (not “Tag” tags) are somewhat unsatisfactory for classical albums. Unluckily Roon

1. has made it quite clear recently it will not support genre tags on a track level. For properly genre tagged tracks as part of a work this would have allowed for assigning genres on a work level.
2. does not support genre tagging works - yet?
   So on the one hand Roon puts albums in the centre of its presentation model but on the other hand it cannot properly deal with genres for classical music albums (and probably some other genres). It’s unsatisfactory.
3. offers no way to import values into its “Tag” tags - like a mapping from “Grouping” tags or “Mood” or some other (custom) file tag.

But for some stuff you mention there’s a way to have this information stored in dedicated Roon metadata fields like instrumentation and form.

(*) Back to what an Album View for classical music should probably be able to show - some of it maybe being of value for other genres too. I’ve already mentioned “sort by composer” might be nice. But there’s a problem here Roon already struggles with for artists(**): how to sort albums with works by different composers. “Various” is a simple approach but it contradicts the purpose of Roon to find (discover) all what’s there. Actually, it would be better to show albums multiple times - for example if I’ve got an album with works by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff that album would be listed under “R” and “T” if the sorting is done alphabetically by composer. This would mean the number of albums (in the top of the view) would be different to the number of albums shown in the view. Would this now confuse users? I don’t know. Probably I’m confusing the readers here already.

Roon may say for the above there’s already a Composition View. But browsing this view - to quote the homepage - feels “Meh.” to me.

So something like an Other Album View with the ability to show the and sort by Composer, Conductor, Ensemble and Primary Artist would be nice. And I could focus on instrumentation, form and maybe period in this Other Album View. How to achieve this I don’t know - it would require UI work. But then Roon teases us with an update to the UI now and then and something like this is already in the works…

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Update: Another point for this Other Album View for classical is that – if the album isn’t a compilation – the artistic intent often present in the works composing an album remains intact and I can discover that too even if I browse sorted by composer or ensemble or focused on a certain form. That’s lost in the Composition View somehow or only available after a lot of click work.

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(**) To explain: if an album has two primary artist entries sorting will only respect the first primary artist. So if one jumps to the letter the second primary artist (sort) name starts with it will not be shown there. Not perfect, I’d say.