When I bought Roon I was hoping that the metadata capabilities would work some magic. For example, for Abbey Lincoln’s “Abbey is Blue” I was hoping it would be tagged with “jazz” and “vocal”. Or Monica Zetterlund’s “Monica Zetterlund Early Years” would be tagged “jazz” and “Sweden”. No such luck. In fact Roon’s tagging capabilities were completely useless to me.
So I have turned off “Use genres from Roon’s metadata database” and turned on “Use genres extracted from file tags”.
There’s at least one genre that I used, “New Mexico”, that does not appear at all at the topic level of genres. It cannot be because there is a space in the genre name because genres such as “Gypsy Jazz”, “Hong Kong”, “Central African Republic” and “Cuba-Buena Vista” all show up in Roon. (I have a lot of music from all over the world.) For some reason Roon says it is a subgenre of “Latin”. Roon also unhelpfully includes two other subgenres: (1) Cuban Traditions which has nothing in it but a couple of radio stations, and (2) Son which includes one album. I didn’t ask for these subgenres to be created. Where are they coming from? How can I turn this off?
And before you ask, I have “New Mexico” (genre from your files) mapped to “New Mexico” (genres in Roon).
Roon does not apply metadata from a “Roon source”, it uses commercial databases as the source (Tivo & MusicBrainz) the quality/accuracy of that metadata is what you see. Sometimes Genres are misleading or simply too broad . If Roon managed its own it would have to have system comparable to TiVo, its not Roon’s core business.
Take classical music where there are clear definitions of Orchestral, Chamber etc they normally get Lumped into a generic “Classical”. Not being a jazz aficionado I can imagine Jazz gets the same treatment
Genre assignment has become such a personal thing with music collectors it would be impossible for Roon to manage without complaint and acrimony. As an example “Monica Zetterlund” would be labeled by most as Jazz but Sweden would mean nothing to me and clearly useful to you. Likewise I can’t imagine New Mexico as a genre and it would irritate me if Roon assigned it to some of my music, but it clearly means something to you. Like you I’ve turned off Roon’s genre assignment and just use my own. I only use top level genres. The plethora of sub-genres is bafflingly useless to me, but I realize other people really like to dig in. To each their own.
Clearly musical genres are a mess. What I’d like to figure out is to make Roon put “New Mexico” as a top level genre and not stuff it as a subgenre under “Latin”. Any suggestions?