Hi,
I cannot find a single album from which lyrics can be displayed in roon and often composers are not listed either. Example: the new album Parfum by Christiane Karg lists the performer as composer but with no mention of the real composers Ravel, Debussy and Bartok. There are no lyrics that I can find. Does Roon include lyrics? What am I doing wrong?
Currently I have the core on my iMac from which I also play Roon using a usb dac. The sound is fine but Roon adds nothing to the experience.
Hey @David_Chappell – metadata in Roon is improving every day as our metadata providers update their information and feed it back into Roon’s metadata service. As new information is added to Roon’s database, it’s automatically updated in your Roon database, whether the content comes from TIDAL, or local media.
We source a lot of great metadata from a variety of sources, but all of that said, none of our metadata sources cover every album ever, and so metadata coverage will vary. Some albums will have deep information about the composers, compositions, and performers involved in the recording, and some won’t. Lyrics coverage can also vary quite a bit.
This is a good example. Generally speaking, much of our deepest metadata comes from the same source as AllMusic, and you can see their coverage of this album is pretty thin.
Our coverage of this album may improve in the future. This albums appears to be quite new (not even released for a few weeks, according to AllMusic), so there’s a good chance the data will improve.
For albums where good metadata is available to us, you should see something closer to what you’re expecting. For example, if you add this album you’ll see that composers are listed, many compositions are linked to hundreds of other performances, and lyrics are available for a few of the more mainstream compositions (like Danny Boy and Ave Maria).
Again, the metadata we get from our sources is always improving and we’re always working to make Roon’s metadata even better, so thanks for the feedback.
Hi,
Thank you for your reply but you do expose a central problem with Roon and streaming for classical music. Firstly texts and lyrics are often important in songs and operas because without them the experience of the music is diminished. Thankfully nowadays most recordings are issued with texts but these are absent in Tidal and Roon, not occasionally but overwhelmingly, absent which means that Roon does not enhance the listening experience at all. I have yet to find the lyrics of an opera present in Roon for example.
Secondly, Roon and Tidal do not provide access to the original documentation that comes with most CDs, only the cover is present and the back cover of the CD, which often has useful track information, is entirely absent. This only exacerbates the problem of streaming services that use the Performer/track format for metadata meaning that they cannot cope with composer information. This produces gnomic entries like: “Allegro Moderato - track 1” which keeps the listener ignorant as to the nature of the work and the composer. Sometimes this can be worked out from an opus number but with unfamiliar music that is often not possible.
Finally, I return to the new album by Christiane Karg entitled Parfum. I listened to this album on Tidal and via Roon and then tried Qobuz for which I have a free trial. I listened to The album on Qobuz via Audirvana 3 and there discovered the album booklet with full lyrics and colour photographs available within Audirvana which integrates with Qobuz in a way that Roon does not. Qobuz has a number of albums like this which in itself is far from ideal but a world away from the information famine of Tidal and Roon. In short, I wish to leave Roon because it is simply not up to the job of enhancing my music streaming experience.