The Metadata Blame Game

[Susan_Tyler]

I think I will have to give up. I found the “merge” function. There are 50 artist circles for Carlos Mena, including a rap artist and someone else. I merged a few obvious circles with the obvious main entry but it had no effect on what comes up under the tracks when I play the album. I cannot get rid of the African artists. There were also a lot of things like this:

It is all one piece after “performed by”.
I most definitely did not introduce this and I didn’t edit the data for this album at all. I do think extremely little has to do with me. These things came over from Qobuz. Under edit there is nothing to edit–it looks all fine, just the three “artists” separately, not this whole line of stuff.
I am grateful for your help and did learn things!

[Arindal]

@Susan_Tyler

I merged a few obvious circles with the obvious main entry but it had no effect on what comes up under the tracks when I play the album.

That looks much better already. Maybe it is necessary to merge the fake Philippe Pierlot entries as well and check if more of Carlos Mena are assigned to the albums.

I agree that this ´metagarbage´, how I call it, most probably came from Qobuz. If there is one such artist assigned to an album, there are most probably more of them as it hints to a wrong method of uploading metadata by the record labels who have put it up on Qobuz.

This ´performed by´ is mentioned under one or several tracks solely, but not the whole album? Which means editing the primary artist of the album would not make it disappear as the primary artists you have seemingly fixed already by merging. You would have to edit the artist per track (which I am not sure is possible at all if these are sourced from Qobuz). This is how edit credits per track looks like, in this case the ´remove credits´ option could be a way:

The last line is a typical example of metagarbage similar to what happened to your countertenor. After removing that credit from all tracks, the ´Royal Northern Sinfonie, Orchestra, MainArtist´ disappeared.

[Geoff_Coupe]

@Arindal

You would have to edit the artist per track (which I am not sure is possible at all if these are sourced from Qobuz)

Just to jump in here with a clarification - @Susan_Tyler has purchased these albums from Qobuz - she’s not streaming them. So it is perfectly possible to select multiple tracks and edit their metadata in Roon.

[Arindal]

@Geoff_Coupe

@Susan_Tyler has purchased these albums from Qobuz - she’s not streaming them.

That would even leave the possibility of replacing the faulty metadata in the local files by useful tags. An editor like MP3tag sourcing metadata from MusicBrainz should do this job and it is even capable of fully solving the multi-part composition issue.

[Susan_Tyler]

@Arindal

MP3tag

Thank you Geoff and Arindal. I managed to squeeze most of the Carlos Mena into one. So I have learned to do that! I went to

which I listened to last night with much pleasure. It is annoying because there is so little info, either with the tracks or in the credits. I like to see the soloists. (Of course, I have the booklet and can scroll back to the beginning to see who is who, just this tidiness again) I added Anna Lucia Richter as an artist; I failed to add Florian Boesch because although on a separate search he comes up, with a picture, he doesn’t come up if I type in his name when trying to edit. Maximillian Schmitt does come up, however, he comes up with “tenor” after his name only. I edited a track to add the soloist’s name and looked at how long it would be to do all of the tracks. So then I looked up tagging software. I have Kid3 on the machine from the time of ripping CDs right at first. I’ll think about that. I can’t use the new ones because they are up to date with the system and I am not. I am in Monterey because I talk to a Mini and it can’t go beyond Monterey. I tend to feel tired even looking at something like Kid3… But I am really grateful for the guidance.

[Geoff_Coupe]

Can you post a fuller screenshot of the album page that you see? I ask because when I look at the album on Qobuz (added to my library), it looks different to the snippet you posted…

The credits tab:

[Susan_Tyler]

Thanks again. I discovered that I bought the album from Highresaudio. They had a sale. I tried downloading again but it is the same. The Qobuz file does also include the soloists under the credits if you go to the three dots. So, missed that one!
Thought I might do better by identifying the album, so I found the only one listed and identified it with my album. Now the title and artist credits are good!!

The info under the tracks is a bit odd–why both German and English for the choir? Is this because I identified it and confused it?

However, it IS better and I will now know to look for an alternative ID.

[Michael_Arones]

For me "genre" issue has mostly been important for the traditional data relationships needed in folder hierarchies.
While popular music, artist → album → track/song works OK. But for Broadway musicals, Composer → Show → track/song works better. Soundtrack need to distinguish betwee n ones that are movies of Musicals and ones that are just a “various artists” collections of songs and compo0dsed soundtracks that are almost like classical works. And “classical” has even more complex hierarchical relationships.
It is the genre that an algorithm can key off of to select the type of organization and a very broad high-level grouping.

For categorizing the multitudinous "style"s of music, “genre” is totally overloaded.
Instead, AI provides a potential future ability to directly analyze the musical content and create a complex mapping of musical characteristics. It can map influences of prior artists and suggest musical works that are similar to one another. It would be able to suggest grouping of styles. without the need to pre-tag.styles.

[Arindal]

@Susan_Tyler

Thought I might do better by identifying the album, so I found the only one listed and identified it with my album. Now the title and artist credits are good!!

So the album was not identified by roon previously? That would be of course a common reason why there is not proper metadata or tags from the files cause a mismatch with roon´s own artist names.

Maybe you might want to check if there are more albums bearing improper metadata or missing assigned artists are simply not identified by roon. It is easy to list them in the album overview focussing on ´Identified´, subsequently negating the focus filter by clicking on it so solely unidentified albums are shown:

I did the same going through all the unidentified albums using the ´Edit album > Identify album´ feature. In most of cases the first suggestion by roon is the correct one but has not been assigned to that album due to minor inconsistencies (such as wrong track durations, mismatching primary artist´s name and alike). Confirm and the problem should be solved in most of cases.

@Susan_Tyler

The info under the tracks is a bit odd–why both German and English for the choir? Is this because I identified it and confused it?

Probably yes, there are still 2 separate artist entries for the same artist. You completed the identification process successfully, but roon is not getting the matching of the different artist names in the tags with its own metadata. Again the cure for that is merging artists, so if you search for

`bavarian´

you should be getting the list of artists with similar names which roon failed to identify as congruent. You might want to do the same with ´Antonini´ or ´Armonico´ later as the last one also seems to be a bad one.

Just noticed the same problem with an album recently added:

And here we go to merge the genuine one with the fake one probably originating from tags:

[Susan_Tyler]

Thanks so much! I will be able to do better!

[woodford]

@Michael_Arones

For categorizing the multitudinous "style"s of music, “genre” is totally overloaded.
Instead, AI provides a potential future ability to directly analyze the musical content and create a complex mapping of musical characteristics.

DSP can already do this, and has been able to do so for 15 years. sonic similarity data is widely available.

[Michael_Arones]

I would love it if there is currently available software that does what I only envisioned as a future possibility.

What I envisioned was the ability of AI to (based only on the music audio content) recognize & describe the style differences & similarities between various tracks (both in composition & in the musical textures that are used).

For example, even recognize the common British Music-hall traditions that link The New Vaudeville Band’s Winchester Cathedral and many of Paul McCartney’s musical creations?
Or the musical similarities between Stevie Ray Vaughn & George Thorogood (Texas blues/rock)perhaps as contrasted with grunge-rock bands.
Or the relationship between recordings of Jelly-Roll Morton & Fats Waller!
Or a swing jazz combo vs a latin jazz combo?

It might even be able to determine if a tract’s basic musical composition is significantly plagiarized from a different composer.

I realize there is software that get a hash of the content that can be matched to a hash of a track in a database that already has related metadata.
And some software does basic analysis on tempo & energy level & key (very important for DJ segues).

I know there has been research into using DSP analysis to distinguish Rock vs Classical based on the overall musical dynamics signature (without understanding the musical composition elements); but, the granularity of style classification seemed rather crude. Would it distinguish between a piano etude, prelude, polonaise, nocturne, mazurka, or waltz? Between a Brahms vs a Debussy piano composition?

Is there a specific DSP software currently available that can distinguish sub-genres?

As regards roon’s DSP - I gather that its content analysis is primarily for volume leveling / cross-fading.
Does it do much more?

[Susan_Tyler]

I have questions still. When I group miscellaneous versions of an artist under the artist with the picture, is that just on my system? I have been thinking that it must be but should check.
And, if there is another artist with the same name is there any way to separate out the one (without main entry or picture) that doesn’t fit under mine?
Also, if there is a string of artists and I group it under mine, does it mess things up for other artists in the string?

[Suedkiez (Just a fellow user like you)]

@Susan_Tyler

When I group miscellaneous versions of an artist under the artist with the picture, is that just on my system?

Yes

@Susan_Tyler

And, if there is another artist with the same name is there any way to separate out the one (without main entry or picture) that doesn’t fit under mine?

Not in Roon. You can post in Metadata and Roon staff might get around to report it to the metadata bases (or fix an issue in Roon if it is the cause), but otherwise you would have to edit yourself on Musicbrainz or Allmusic.

You could add the artists to your library any manually rearrange the albums that are assigned to them, but it’s too much work to be practical.

@Susan_Tyler

Also, if there is a string of artists and I group it under mine, does it mess things up for other artists in the string?

I don’t understand, what’s a string in this context?

[Susan_Tyler]

This comes up if I search for Roberta Invernizza

There are actually 84 circles with another artist who sometimes appears with her, Sara Mingardo, and some of the entries are like this. What do you do when you want to merge one of them, Sara Mingardo or Roberta Invernizza, for example, with the main entry?

In any case, thank you, I feel safer if it all only appears in my system. I would be happy to spend an hour a week sorting metadata on Musicbrainz, but I think I would have trouble figuring it out, and also would make mistakes.

[Arindal]

@Susan_Tyler

What do you do when you want to merge one of them, Sara Mingardo or Roberta Invernizza, for example, with the main entry?

It is a pretty common thing that tags which contain several artists in a wrong syntax will not be recognized as several artists, leading to numerous unidentified artist entries in roon.

You can just merge these lengthy multiple-artist entries with one of the correct artists, it would not mess up anything. It is only in your system and not uploaded anyhow. I had had a lot of such cases and have usually chosen the conductor or orchestra as the original to be merged with the false group entry (as I have a lot of opera and oratorio recordings which are sometimes causing such errors). You might want to make sure the other ones are separately assigned to the album which usually is the case.

I wonder if these albums in your library causing such problems are properly identified by roon and the metadata preference for artists´ names is set to the source where these problems are NOT originating from (either roon or file).

[tripleCrotchet (Tony)]

@Arindal

It is a pretty common thing that tags which contain several artists in a wrong syntax will not be recognized as several artists, leading to numerous unidentified artist entries in roon.

Roon calls these compound artists, and yes, they are extremely common in the metadata sources roon is using, particularly with Classical. You will get much better results by splitting them. By default roon uses a semicolon “;” as the artist delimiter. This is controlled by global file tag delimiters that you can find in settings → library → import settings

But be careful. Many classical ensembles have a comma “,” as part of the artist name so I wouldn’t add a comma as a global delimiter as roon will then split artist names in unexpected ways.

E.g.: Orchestra of the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden

Other problematic delimiters with Classical artists include ampersand “&” and “and”.

Personally, 7 years ago, I used mp3tag to batch pre-edit all artist, album artist and composer tags replacing anything other than semicolon delimiters and also roles such as (conductor), (tenor) etc. with blanks. Mac users can do something similar with Yate.

Subsequently I would say that I pre-edit pretty much every classical upload in some way. Normalising artist and composers with roon friendly delimiters is probably the most common edit.

As far as merging artists are concerned, I think there is a trick many roon users are not aware of. In order for artists to appear in the artist list they first have to be made “primary artist links” so that they can be merged at all.

For example, roon has two variations on “Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana”, one with a single “z” and one with a double “zz”. So add both as primary artist links:

Now they will both appear in the artist list and they can be merged:

Normally you will want to merge under the artist with the more complete artist art, bio and discography but I have found that on occassion it makes more sense to merge in the opposite direction.

.

Roon does try and catch as many of these “equivalences” as it can when you import an album but there can be hundreds of name variations for Classical artists and many slip through. You can find them on discogs:

One downside if you split your compound artists then you will have to go through this procedure to merge artists with their name variations and equivalences as nine times out of ten roon will not be filing the split artists as primary artist links in the same way as it is filing the compound artists. The upside is that roon will be much more accurate in terms of the way that it is surfacing the structure of your library and the links between its components.

[paultaylor]

I havent read the whole thread in detail but wanted to clear up two things about MusicBrainz. It doesnt get data feeds from the record companies, they experimented with that many years ago with Universal but project was abandoned.

They don’t charge for access to their data it is freely available as both a download and through their api. They do request commercial entities sign up to monthly payment but its not mandatory, I dont know if roon actually pay for the data or not.

The income they get pays for servers and a modest salary for a small team of developers, they are a non profit.

If you add new albums to MusicBrainz it will eventually make it to Roon. And added bonus is other MusicBrainz editors may well make further changes to improve the metadata added.

So for me by far the best way to improve roon metadata is for everyone to add a few albums to MusicBrainz.

[paultaylor]

I also think that now Roon has this major investment from HARMAN it should be employing a few people to add releases to MusicBrainz, this is the most effective way of improving the metadata, and by adding it to MusicBrainz they offload the ongoing responsibility for the data and any licensing issues.

There are many scripts available to semi-automate the process

https://wiki.musicbrainz.org/Guides/Userscripts

so it is easy to add a release, but it is still time consuming to add many releases

[tripleCrotchet (Tony)]

@paultaylor

So for me by far the best way to improve roon metadata is for everyone to add a few albums to MusicBrainz.

I would if I could but I don’t think those that come from a technical background realise just how alien and counterintuitive tools like Musicbrainz are to those that do not. I’ve never been able to figure out how it works and gave up some time ago.

Maybe I would try again there is some kind of more intuitive wrapper or frontend?