Understanding Valence and Classical Music

Roon Software Discussion
42

So the 1.8 enhancements, especially focus beyond the local library, are much appreciated. However, the Compositions view - the most fundamental way to navigate a classical library - remains very problematic. In particular the inability to easily batch edit the “Form” and “Instrumentation” fields makes those fields worse than useless. Only a masochist would spend days editing each individual composition in a large library to fix the missing or odd/wrong values (which is almost all of them). The “Prefer file tag” option for these does not do what it says, making it impossible to fix these with an external tag editor.

One step in the right direction would be to allow selection of multiple compositions and then edit values which are common across them - form and instrumentation prominent among them. Adding a couple of user-definable fields to the composition view would help a lot as well. At that point, I might stop being constantly tempted to just give up and go back to JRiver for local library listening …

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43

The significant gaps in the period/form/instrumentation metadata from roon’s metadata suppliers have been pointed out to roon for many years. Instrumentation has never been a user editable field, so that was always a problem.

1.8 doesn’t solve this basic metadata gap problem. The gaps are still there making search on period/form/instrumentation very hit and miss and disappointing to anyone other than a casual user that might be interested in this. All that 1.8 really does is expose this very incomplete metadata on more widely used “album” views compared with the rarely used “composition” view. Nothing much has changed though. Searching on these incomplete properties still doesn’t work. A few more people will realise I guess.

44

Not to beat a dead horse, but Karajan has popped up a number of times in suggestions (in “collaborators”, for example), despite him being “banned”. I haven’t really tried with radio (well, I did launch Radio from a Qobuz recording of the Horst Wessel Lied, and Karajan didn’t goose-step into the picture, so I guess that’s something… maybe Furtwangler and Orff would make him happen), so I’m not sure how solid it is there. I also realise how, as long as it doesn’t monetise, it isn’t a big deal, but still feel like having the choice of not having to think about these guys would be nice.

45

It sounds like a few avenues haven’t been closed off in Roon. Worth raising in Support (because it smells like an oversight bug) or Feature Requests, I think.

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46

Will do - I’d done it before IIRC, lemme see if I can find the thread and resurrect it.

47

Somehow I fail completely to match this statement from 9 days ago with the realities found in the released (beta?) version of Roon 1.8. But I do see a lot of good intentions burried below the poor execution.

I hope the fixed release will bring those to shine.

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48

With regard to the danger of the “crap creeping into one’s collection”, I’d like the possibility to “ban” certain albums.

Example: In the discographies displayed for older conductors (try Ansermet, Walter, Horowitz), you get lots of cheap pirate reissues (on Quboz also the plethora of BnF releases, which are mostly mono LP rips).

I hope that Valence somehow learns to avoid these, but I’d appreciate the possibility to ban them manually.

49

I hope so also. Frankly, just bewildered for now.

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50

Brian,

I’m afraid the Valence engine, for popular albums of recordings of a selected composer, needs work. A lot of work.

For the discography of a composer it’s pulling up many compilations albums with a single track (usually a single movement of a complete work) by that composer.

Take Haydn for example.

The first 5 selections are as follows:

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The first album has one track composed by Haydn (out of 19)
The 3rd and 4th are entirely Beethoven.

Similarly, for Chopin, one of the top 5 is a trumpeter’s album with a single track of a transcription of a Chopin Prelude

For Brahms, of the top 5 : 4 are compilation albums Christmas Adagios, 100 essential classical , 50 Greatest Classical and an album showcasing Decca’s Analogue years…

Then there’s this Lang Lang album that must be on top of some chart that shows up at the top for any of the composers whose music is featured in it - and there are many - all single movements of larger works.

And so on for many composers

This makes the recommendation of popular work for a composer mostly useless.

You mentioned Opera

The first Recommended Album is an album entitled Rhapsodies of music conducted by Stokowski - nothing to do with opera and with a terrible, if entertaining, review.

The 4th album is one of the Boston Pops conducting various marches/rhapsodies and 1 opera overture.

For more see: BUG 1.8: Totally meaningless "Top Performers" for Classical Compositions

And also: What determines "popularity"?

Hope this is something that can be worked on and fixed.

That Lang Lang album is particularly irritating.

Mehul

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51

Roon seems to be corelating composers against their appearances in general non-composer specific box-sets. For example, large compilations like the 111 Deutsche Grammophone box-set contains works from every major composer you have ever heard off. That’s the point of box-sets such as those.

What this means is that when I do a search on “Claudio Monteverdi”, in my case roon is recommending popular works by Mendelssohn, Brahms and Gluck! The reason seems to be that all four of them, Monteverdi, Mendelssohn, Brahms & Gluck and dozens of other composers are on the 111 disc Deutsche Grammophone set. I have many large general non-composer specific box-sets like this, so that just compounds this basic error of search logic.

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I am bewildered by the polarised response to 1.8. It’s almost as if we are all using different software. Of course that cannot be the case so all I can think of is it is the roon use cases that are polarised. There really does seem to very different segments that such basic functionality failures as this are beyond annoying by one group but acceptable, or perhaps even unnoticed by another segment.

So I’m not finding much use for this new functionality either I am afraid.

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52

Lang Lang seems to be getting recommended for everything. And the other day, Roon told me that Chris Thile was one of the top 3 performers of the Bach Violin Sonatas. He plays bluegrass mandolin! He may be very good, in his field, but he is not one of the top 3.

I agree with all the rest of your succinct and pertinent comments.

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53

At least it’s not recommending Hooked On Classics! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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Just a little levity after a long week with 1.8.

54

The piano guys? :rofl: it’s all about context and I guess 100% data driven can gives wonky machine learning results. Perhaps some human curation is still required.

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55

Valence can be a genius… but we had an old saying when I was writing software. GIGO… garbage in, garbage out. The problem is that while Roon may employ an army of ninja code kittens, and Valence may be the greatest thing since Pong, it is at the mercy of data quality from a third party provider. And the quality of that data is very bad. The deeper you go, the worse it gets.

I saw a hint here upthread that sounded like a possibility that Valence will/could continue to evolve to be maybe less dependent on that single source data and more reliant on the wisdom of the crowds so to speak. If so, that would be very interesting to see. Seems like we are in early days for Valence still. Looking forward to continuing developments there.

Once again want to express my appreciation for the work that has gone into the classical experience with 1.8. It has really moved the needle.

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56

What are the Classical plusses you are seeing?

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57

:rofl: 10 characters

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58

Roon told me that Chris Thile was one of the top 3 performers of the Bach Violin Sonatas.

I am certain he is, at least by streaming count.

59

Hi Brian, how do you select the Opera genre? I have Genre set to use Roon. If I Focus on Classical, I have to select Opera as a sub-genre and it shows me 39 albums in my collection, but only those albums and no other options. If I look at Genres from the main menu, there is no such category.

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60

@rcaudio Opera is a sub-genre of the Classical genre which is on the Main Menu Genres screen. Once you select Classical, head down to the bottom of that page to see all of Classical’s sub-genres.

61

If you wanted to make Opera visible on the Main Menu>Genre page you could make it a Top level Genre.

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