@joel, it would be a lot nicer not having to scroll down a couple of pages to weed thru a lot of (often irrelevant) “Remommended…” “Top…” and “Popular…” stuff and get to the Sub-Genres pretty swiftly after the Main genre.
For me the “Genre” section is mostly unusable for this reason and the fact that it lists Genres that I dont even have in my library and that I will never listen to.
Just a suggestion…
When I look at the Opera genre, I see the following (local library only)
It doesn’t show me the most important operas, only some albums with Operas on it. List seems rather arbitrary
Doesn’t show me any composers, vocalists, only conductors.
Since Valence requires a streaming subscription to work I switch it on and this is what I see in addition:
call me underwhelmed… the recommended albums are very hit and miss for someone wnating to explore the genre. Top Composers are OK, da Ponte is a librettist.
Notable compositions is not very inviting with only 2 entries for opera, that I need to scroll horizontally…
To be honest, I don’t need this anyway. I know my operas and have the means to explore stuff on the internet. But for an opera novice I don’t see the big value added either, compared to directly to go to Tidal or Spotify.
This has been a long standing issue with Roon that Librettists and Lyricists (for Lieder etc.) are being classified as „Composers“ - even if they are correctly tagged!
Ah, thanks.This is cool.
This is a very annoying bug which is pervasive across all Classical vocal music and sub-genres.
there is also no way to view “all” composers or Operas…just “popular” ones.
Again, it should take no more then a handful of lines of code to fix this:
If Tag = „Composer“, THEN >>> Composer!
If Tag = „Text“ OR „Poetry“ OR „Lyrics“ OR „Libretto“ THEN >>> NOT Composer !!
I can only guess what level of carelessness lets these things slip thru, and then even a greater level of carelessness not to fix them within a years time !
Totally pathetic but: „We understand Classical Music“…
@mike any views? Maybe this skipped your attention only by accidence?
Agreed. Where is that “More…” button when you need it? You should be taken from here to the Composer screen with a “Genre” Focus on Opera.
As a further example: I am getting 15 names listed as “Top Composers” on my Opera Genre screen. 7 of them are Librettists!! (Schikaneder, Piave, Giacosa, Illica and the likes…) So Roon is creating a whopping 50% error rate on the most simple - and the same time most important - task there is in classical music: Indentifying a composer!
So all I get to see is a meagre 8 “real” opera composers. When I have 126 of them in my collection?
On “Your Artists” for Opera, there are 12 artists listed. Only two of them are opera singers (Domingo and Sutherland). The others are conductors and orchestras that could generically show up just as well on any symphony, concerto or orchestral Genre.
Not good at all. My simple UPNP control point gives me much more (and more accurate) insight here.
Slightly OT. On release I didn’t have any real problem with 1.8, I’m not a power user at all, more find and play. The failure to improve search was the only thing that irked me. A week or 2 down the road and it’s the inconsistencies in the interface features that are wearing slightly. “Where is X, Y or Z when you need it” is becoming a regular cry here.
There seems to be an awful lot of words being used interchangeably in the UI. Search, find, browse, discover, all, popular, recommended. You never really know what you are going to get in any particular context.
When I search “all”, I am expecting all, not some arbitrary sub-set decided by Valence. It reminds me of the old Google, “feeling lucky” button. That has a place as long as you really are looking for something tangentially related rather than anything specific. Google probably doesn’t put feeling lucky there for reason anymore (or is that controlled by a switch?).
I also find this a huge problem when searching for many classical works, but it looks like that is starting to improve.
Have you found the “Only Complete Recordings” toggle?
It’s hidden away a bit at the bottom of the sort order menu (to the left of the filter icon) when you get to the section that displays ‘All Recording’ of a selected work (see screenshot below). (To me it would be more intuitive if the toggle were under the ‘Filter’ menu - I keep forgetting where it is and having to hunt around for it.)
Unfortunately it still seems to be a work in progress. It will reduce the number of excerpt/compilation/highlights albums but still doesn’t focus exclusively on complete work yet.
Still, it is a much needed and very welcome feature, and hopefully it will improve over time.
That appears to be the reincarnation of that Google „lucky“ button @Tony_Casey mentions. If you are lucky, it may work here and there. Most of the time it just cuts the number of my complete recordings in half. They just disappear for no apparent reason. They are complete recordings! I promise 
As Boulez, Previn, Bernstein, Tilson Thomas and a handul of other performer-composers have already vanished from view, I am not using that toggle for now in fear that there might just be nothing left to browse… 
Could be funny if it wouldnt be such a sad showing.
NB: Has somebody already created a bug report on that one?
Off listening to Goethe‘s Faust-Symphonie now.
On the bright side - there IS a toggle button there.
So at least Roonlabs know it is a needed feature and is on their roadmap for future development.
In the meantime… I feel your pain.
Try searching for an opera, then wading through the mess of search hits of compilation albums that have that one aria/duet that gets abused to death 
I believe the Composer/Performer one has a formal bug report
It is a mess , Add Wilhelm Kempff to the MIA list
When you go to a Composition the sort order is a mess, the old version Sort By Album actually sorted by Artist, now it does as it says by Album title
I can see no way of sorting by Artist , in some cases that can be 30 (moonlight Sonatas) randomly ugh
Am I right or missing something?
Yes, it has, thanks.
Your not missing amyting. Unfortunately no way of sorting by artist, which to me would look like the most obvious and useful way to sort, followed probably by recording date.
That screen has been completely messed in 1.8. If you try to sort by recording date, it doesnt behave the way it did in 1.7, ie picking orig. release date for sorting if recording date was missing. Now it dumps those with missing recording dates straight to the bottom of the list.
I‘ve done a bug report on that behavior as well.
Has anyone tried a search on Glenn Gould? Some very odd results. I got no recommendations for his numerous and seminal Bach piano recordings. What I got instead was a lot of obscure recordings of his String Quartet, Op. 1 composition. But there was never an Op. 2 precisely because he was never considered a performer/composer! Certainly not in the same sense as Bernstein, for example. I also got a few entirely talking to microphone recordings of television documentaries he did for Canadian TV. He was apparently a very prolific broadcaster in his day.
I don’t think I understand how Valence works. It seems a big stretch that the roon user base is listening to records like this when they are listening to Glenn Gould. How is Valence surfacing odd records like this? Gould was such a one trick pony. His Bach was something else but most will find his strange tempos and interpretations of much of the rest of the piano repertoire no more than curiosities. So what listening patterns is Valence picking up?
Any roon listeners unfamiliar with Gould’s keyboard Bach will be missing out with the Valence recommendations here. Just to be clear I am talking about what you get when you click on Glen Gould the artist. If you just do a simple search in the hour glass the first thing that pops up is Glen Gould’s Goldberg Variations (Bach), which is as good a place as any to start. So the question really is why does a simple search result in a good starting point whilst I assume a much more sophisticated Valence drill down into the artist does not?
Could that be that bug that I believe @bbrip reported that all classical performers are only listed as composers as soon as they composed as little as just one cadenza, or in this case: one work, and no longer appear as performer?
Looks like it. I hope roon finds a solution.
Interestingly, on the same list of Glenn Gould album recommendations, roon gets it wrong in the opposite direction with Friedrich Gulda. He is a Classical concert pianist from the same generation as Gould but he arguably could be considered a composer.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUb8z724pbU
He also had a Jazz career and ended up on one of the Prog Rock, Emerson, Lake and Palmer classics from the 1970’s I cannot remember now. By coincidence on the Gould album recommendations there is a recent release of a disk with both Gould and Gulda compositions. From there using roon of course you quickly get to Gulda’s page but looking at his album recommendations, it is all performances, no jazz and only one disk of compositions, so the balance of recommendations is the opposite problem. The recommendations are not giving a sense of the breath of the man although it is discussed to an extent on his bio. Roon also has links to several of his compositions from the Gulda artist page, so that is good but I think you would need to be quite determined to get that far. Better if the discography was more balanced I think.
More minor niggles are that Gulda’s “prime” is 2005-2009 which seems to have more to do with the re-release dates of his more famous albums than his prime. Also his photo is terribly cropped and pixilated, something I am noticing more and more. Is this related to trying to fix the cropping in the circles?
PS: I can see the embeded youtube link does not work, but just click on the youtube link and you will get there.
That is very likely. Gould has written his own cadenza‘s for some piano concertos, so he probably is now listed as „Composer“? Have’nt checked it yet. Will later.
