I have a question.
I have noticed that in all my albums (at least, in all the random ones i have inspected):
-i can see album credits produced from roon metadata
-but if i select a single track and via the 3dots menu look for track credits, i just see composer and primary artist.
-on the other hand, IF i tag the files with credist (in PERSONNEL tag), then proper credits are shown for the track.
am i missing something?
thanks
Here’s more than you want to know about How Roon uses tags:
https://kb.roonlabs.com/File_Tag_Best_Practice
If you want to see “raw” embedded metadata for a track, you can select the track and, in the “three-dots” menu, go to View File Info… > File Tags.
I’ve found that by comparing what’s displayed with what you see in File Tags, you can often get an idea about what’s going on in this respect.
I did forget of this post of mine.
I did forget it, and rediscovered it. So, I try here to be more precise, and i’d like a staff feedback (@joel?)
I’ll make an example:
First of all: PLEASE remove GUITAR VIRTUOSO as a genre: I don’t think that this can be regarded as a genre in any respect (and then why not piano virtuoso, violin virtuoso, and what virtuoso should mean in any case?)
then, if I inspect the album credits i get:
While I would expect so see the specific credits for this track, for example who are the performers, as individual performers in general play in one or another track, not all of them.
Another example:
Finally, if in the file tags there is a PERSONNEL tag, specifying the roles for each track, I get this:
So, here individual players and roles are displayed. And I think this should be the correct behavior. As far as I understand, roon (metadata) know who is playing in every track, in fact when you search a performer you can choose to visualize albums with that performer, or TRACKS with him/her.
And I think that the track CREDITS window is the only place where you can see this.
Am i missing something?
A final consideration: visualization of track credits is (i think) quite important, but not straightforward in roon. i think there should be a direct way, by clicking the track (menu appearing with play and queue and so on). but, ok…
Hi, @Niccolo_Terzi, thanks for sharing your observations with us, much appreciated!
About Genres. One or more genres come from Rovi and sometimes one genre from TIDAL if we have no Rovi genres, so the best possible solution here so far is to edit Genres, which you suppose are wrong, manually in the Album Editor.
About credits. On the album details screen, we do pull track credits up to album level, so the credits tab includes everything, but we do not always know who played on every track, unless metadata source page has such info. To be more clear, an album credits and track credits are some kind of different objects in terms of metadata., so for example metadata service says tells that on Help! by The Beatles, Paul McCartney played bass, John Lennon played the guitar, etc. But on the track level we do not have such info, who played this particular track, because it’s absent on the metadata source page. I see what you’re trying to say here, the system that we have now is not perfect, unfortunately. Roon’s trying to improve constantly, so maybe in the future it might get better.
Thanks for patience and feedback!
–
Ivan
hi @ivan
it sounds strange to me. in fact you (i mean, roon) have a category which is PERFORMER. i thought that performer was a TRACK information. in fact, when you search for an artist, you get for that artist various lists:
-main albums, albums for which he/she is tagged as primary artist (actually, only if there is a primary artist link)
-collaborations and appearances: for albums where the artist is a primary artist (but no link) or where he/she is a performer
-but you have also access to a “view all tracks” list… that i thought would show only tracks were that artist is actually participating (in one role).
so i have a couple of questions:
in cases where you (roon) do not have track-level roles… what the “view all tracks” menu shows? all the tracks of an album where the artist is credited as primary artist/performer? i guess the answer is yes.
more important: what happens if there are FILE TAGS with per-track artist roles? i mean, most (not all) of my library files are tagged (quite maniacally) with artists playing in every track. actually, they are present, but not all yet converted in the format required by roon. anyway, when these tags are present and in the right format, they are shown in the track credits window. and that’s ok. my question is: if i now look at the “view all tracks” menu, will roon consider these additional infos coming in my tags and show me only the right tracks?
i suppose the answer i no, as i’m slowly finding out that roon reads the tags, and show them, but DO NOT consider them in the internal links that connect artists/albums/composers and so on. that’s what happens for composers and compositions.
but maybe you can give me a deeper insight in what actually does with file tags? i would really appreciate some clarifications from roon staff about this topic which (seems to me) is not well explained in no place.
i add a question: in library settings, you can choose to prefer roon data, file tags o merge them, for “other performer credits”.
just as an evaluations, would it make sense to you to prefer file tags, if the roles at track level are present only in a small part of roon metadata? how small is it?
@ivan, after a little study and trials:
if track credist are missing (in roon metadata) and i add them in file tags, then the artists are correctly linked to the tracks in which they perform.
the exception is when an artist X is credited as primary artist for the whole album, even though X plays in only one or more specific tracks. in general this can be ok, but in a couple of albums (…) i’ve inspected there were errors.
i think in general that the way artists are credited in albums is quite illogical. there are artists credited as primary, as guest, both, and then credited for the effective role. i think… too many credits. that could be ok if it was done in a very coherent way.
but in roon metadata this is not the case. so, why going this complicated way?
anyway, for the moment for me it’s enough that file tag credits are considered by roon.
