+1. Track-based genres are extremely important to me. Please include this in your next update. Thanks so much.
Renewing my request for this feature!
1 Like
+1
Totally agree with all previous posters.
+1 - Being able to add genres to individual tracks would be great!
+1 - Had no idea this was an issue, until recently playing my Christmas genre and having non-Christmas songs play (since Roon tags the entire album as Christmas if there is, say, 1 track on the album with the Christmas genre tag). Need this!
Since the question pops up now and again here’s a cross reference to what to expect in this regard:
Especially this (emphasized by me):
I still haven’t found a way to deal with (or get used to) this particular design decision. It affects the classical part of my collection the most since it’s quite common to mix different sub genres on a classical album, even more so when it’s a box set focussing on a composer. In the latter case the way Roon handles genres becomes quite useless. Only the top level genre is what’s left to play with.
If Roon would let the user import a ROONTRACKTAG (or whatever this Roon custom tag would be called) there’d be at least a way to copy over track level genre assignments to Roon track level tags. Since Roon doesn’t show genres on track level it’s impossible to do something inside of Roon to somehow get around this design choice - or in certain use cases: limitation.
1 Like
Agreed! I never use the Focus filter or browse my music by genre because of this, as it gives me too broad results, including tracks that don’t belong. Shame really!
Currently the only way forward seems to be to tag everything manually, but tags are also lacking in functionality (no nested tags or possibility to use AND operators) so not sure the time invested would be worth it.
Well that’s sad. 
As is, playing by genre is useless. 
A couple thoughts:
-
Like others on this thread, I would benefit from track based genres. That said, I’d estimate that my library has something like 2-3% of albums with multiple genres (or materially multiple, at least). I occasionally get an inappropriate song choose when listening to roon radio, but it’s comparatively rare. For me, it’s a minor inconvenience, at worst.
-
While I understand the developer’s point about track-level data not being common, in my case, I feel confident that nearly 100% of my tracks are genre-tagged. It’s probably a safe assumption that this is also true for a fair number of other roon users (only the roon developers would have accurate insight on this). A preference setting to enable track based genre usage (default set to “off”) would put the onus on us users to decide if we have sufficient track-level data to benefit from this. That said, the data model (and queries) may be far too complex for a simple preference setting kind of switch.
For what it’s worth, I’ve recently found a way around this issue by embedding my personal track-level genre tags within the composer field for all of my music (as this field is not useful to me… being generally a pop [e.g. non-classical] music fan) and using ‘focus’ on composer. Works like a charm.
1 Like
Interesting work around.
I’m tempted to try that, but I have a lot of albums that would need the composer tag modified. Is there an easy way to do this “en masse”?
Why? Have you tagged it yourself, or is it something with your music preference?
I check the meta data of all albums before adding them to a roon monitored directory. Genre is among the tags that I make sure all tracks include.
I can see that for most albums, tracks are consistent with the Album’s genre.
However… Roon is among the best at managing Classical music. It’s “Work” tag is working very well and takes Classical music management and the listening experience to a higher lever - esp as it is applied to Composers.
If ROON strives for further innovation (obvious baiting here), please allow for Genre to be at least id’ed by Work/Composition. In contrast to most albums, classical albums often include works of different genre and people like to listen though genres.
I do the same. I’ve yet to run across a track that didn’t have a genre tag already (though sometimes I change it to something that makes more sense to me).
I use MediaMonkey exclusively to alter metadata. It would work well in service of applying genre or composer tags to any number of albums or folders with just a few keystrokes.
Thanks for the info. 
1 Like
Question… when you focus on a particular “composer“, does it only play tracks by that “composer”, or does it play any track from an album that includes the “composer“ you picked (and includes other composers), in which case it may play a track not by the “composer” you focused on just like it does when playing by genre?
The former. For instance, I may want a mix of acoustic music only, in which case I may only tag one track from a given album with ‘acousticmix’ as the “composer”. When I focus on the composer ‘acousticmix’, the mix will contain only specific tracks tagged as such. Hope this helps.
Sweet!
I appreciate the info. 
1 Like