Track Based Genres

I will chime in here as well. Out of the few basic things I would like from Roon which is missing today, this is one of them.

I’m not sure I understand the request…why don’t your songs have a genre attached or am I missing something here?

@Chris_Heilig

I get that, but how would Roon work to enable you to listen to an album tagged as a soundtrack, but then categorise certain tracks differently e.g. hip hop? I get we can all change our own metadata to suit our needs (which I do), but never thought of having individual/different tags within a certain album. If you were to have Roon shuffle or radio through your collection of soundtracks, there’s always going to be a likelihood that some of the music won’t match in terms of mood, style etc.

It is an interesting concept, I just can’t get my head around how it would be implemented (keeping in mind I’m not a software person).

Cheers.

Yes, I‘ve requested this before, in fact its one of these feature requests pending since almost 5 years.

Genre at Album level makes zero sense in classical. It should be on tracklevel and/or compositionlevel. A piano concerto is a piano concerto and will remain to be a piano concerto.

But I am not too hopeful this will come as it would require a major redesign in how Roon handles Genres.

Reply to Nostro - my hard drive of 45k songs includes songs assembled over 10+ years that when I burned them, I went through each SONG and assigned each song it’s own genre. Take an old Neil Young or Ryan Adams album that has Folk, Mellow Rock and Rock songs - each song labeled accordingly. and then multiply that through the entire music collection. my understanding is that if I play Rock genre on Roon, it will include all albums that include a song with the Rock genre assigned and then play any song within that album, regardless of what that specific song genre is. not sure if this answers your question but the way Roon handles genres I can be listening to a specific genre and it will play a Neil Young song next to a Sex Pistols song next to a Michael Hedges song next to a Bob Marley song. so it is essentially useless for me.

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Thanks Alex,

Makes sense…I had no idea that Roon can’t see the individual tags within each album as such. I’ve tagged my own music also, but I’ve never tagged within albums. So, when I play per genre, I’ve found Roon to be fairly solid.

Cheers!

I’m guessing that enabling track based genre is beyond the programming skills of the roon staff, otherwise we would have this by now. This is certainly the most requested missing feature since day 1 of roon and we know that software companies are responsive to important customer requests if they are capable of doing so. Oh wait, this is roon, where customers never know what they actually need, only the roon staff does.

Anyway, just to keep this active. We need track based genre.

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I’ve long given up on waiting for this. Roon seems to have an Album centric view and my guess is they do not want to stray from this.

Sigh………:slightly_frowning_face:

Edit: I should note that using ROONTRACKTAG can give us something resembling track level genres, but in my experience it was a pain to set up and requires every added album file be edited to add the appropriate ROONTRACKTAG.

How would you use ROONTRACKTAG to get you track based genres?

Using a tag editor, like mp3tag, you would create a ROONTRACKTAG tag. Then you can fill in the ROONTRACKTAG field for each track using whatever label you like, such as the genre name if your choice. However, Roon doesn’t like some tag names being the same as genre names. For example, Roon doesn’t like a ROONTRACKTAG being labeled “Classical”. “Jazz” works though, go figure. You’ll have to get creative to get around Roon’s idiosyncrasies with this (for example, instead of “Classical”, I used “Classical_” )

Once you labeled the ROONTRACKTAG for every track in you local library (eek!), you should be able to go to My Tags in Roon and see your ROONTRACKTAGs grouped by however you labeled your tracks.

For example, you have a bunch of tracks with the ROONTRACKTAG labeled “Jazz”. You should see Jazz on the My Tags screen. Click on that and you will all your tracks with that tag. You can play them in order or shuffle play.

This can only be done to music files in your local library. It cannot be done with track from Tidal and Qobuz.

There’s a thread somewhere around here about this. I’ll try to find it and post a link.

I hope this made some kind of sense. It’s been awhile since I’ve done this.

Edit: Here’s the thread I was thinking of, but there isn’t any real discussion on the steps to do this. Hopefully, there’s a helpful tidbit in there somewhere. Genre of compilations - #15 by John_V

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roon also claims to be composition based for classical music, yet one cannot attach a genre to a composition, either. And that presents problems. How is one to set the genre for a recent Harmonia Mundi release on which Isabelle Faust plays Eötvös Violin Concerto No. 3 with Orchestre de Paris and then the orchestra plays Le Sacre du Printemps. Surely these require different genre, but as far as I can see that cannot be done within roon. Why not?

Compositions in Roon have the attributes Composer, Date, Period, Form, and Instrumentation. I believe Roon takes the view that Genres are intended for Albums, which hold recordings of compositions, or Composers, who work in different Genres. For example, Peter Eötvös:

This is the root of the problem, IMO. Albums often contain tracks from different genres. Roon’s position makes Play/Shuffle Play by Genre useless.

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Yeah, it would be nice to address those situations. Numerous modern blues albums have tracks I’d call Rock.

Before i moved to Roon i used the very old “Logitech Media Server”, which supports the genres stored as attributes in a flac file.

My disappointment is endless to see, that Roon does not read the genres from the files. Actually Roon supports genres in “my library” not at all.

Navigation through a library using genres is basic, really basic.

Please add support for reading the genres from the music files.

Thanks!

Hallo Martin, I’ve moved your post into this existing Feature Request for track-based Genres. At the moment, Roon only considers Genres to be Album-based.

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Going to add my voice to the many already here - coming from J River i have spent a long time tagging individual tracks with genres and then like to shuffle-play a genre. Disappointed to find Roon has just taken the genre from the 1st track and applied it to all the rest.

Please please add it to the roadmap!

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I’ve requested this feature multiple times over years. Add me to the list of those begging for track-based Genre ability since 100% of my 45,000 track hard drive are assigned a Genre by song, not album. Artists like Lyle Lovett and Neil Young have albums with very different style (genre) songs on each album - so if I play Country genre, it should pull only Lyle’s country songs, not his folk or jazz vocal, etc. “Jukebox” from like 20 years ago did this, but Roon still cannot,…

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Has there been any development or updates in regards to this FR? I am quite disappointed in the direction Roon has gone in the past couple of years, with quite a few very basic but necessary features still missing and no indication from the team if they are even considering adding these. Feels a little bit like having a car with a faulty engine, and instead of getting it fixed insisting investing in a new coat of paint each year…

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Quick update on this subject. I’ve looked into the possibility to use the ROONTRACKTAG to introduce a track based genre tagging, and in all honesty I think it will work well for me. It does require you tagging your music, but I’m personally fine with that and it’s my preferred way. This feature is however currently buggy:

Not having track level genre support is a deal breaker for me. Think of a sampler album that might have five or six different genres on it. If it’s not Christmas time, I do not want “Holiday” music playing. Genre by track is a must-have. I’ve spent hours categorizing my collection. Have no problem doing this with JRiver Media Center or MediaMonkey. I’d like to switch to Roon and will gladly give them my money for many of the advantages that Roon has but NOT if this isn’t changed.

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