Understanding Valence and Classical Music

… the reason for the Roon recommendations.

Don’t blame Roon, blame Sony for putting all his recordings in one box.

Sorry. Still not following. I just cannot see how you draw a connection between the labels packaging and roon recommendations? This is a general problem not particularly related to Sony even. It appears to affect all artists with multiple performer/composer roles. It doesn’t matter what label they are with or their release history. Gould is just an example.

At the moment Gould is categorised as a composer rather than a performer.

Roon have actually acknowledged they have a problem dealing with artists like Performer/Composers with multiple roles on another thread. For example, it is not the same but Bernstein behaves in roon as a composer in certain views when it would be better he behaved as a performer, and vice-versa. There are many other examples with a similar root cause that it matters to roon whether an artist is a composer or a performer as that will alter the way they are handled in certain views. For example, many top performers are often going to get a cadenza credit as well so its all a bit unclear.

Problems seem to arise when artists have both roles. Gould is just another use case it would seem. So in the Discography view you will see “popular” discs by both roon the performer and roon the composer. They are buried but with a Qobuz account I can see the String Quartet Op. 1 discs in the Discography view. On the other hand roon is only displaying Gould the composer and for some reason Gould the broadcaster in the recommendations on the Overview page. I do not know if they are the most “popular” disks of Gould the composer. That is, are these the disks that roon users listen to when they listen to Gould the composer? Seems unlikely,

I haven’t had time to check but I suspect there will be similar issues with modern living composers. Many of them have to earn a living for example conducting or performing.

When I did a Roon trial years ago I chose some music, may have been Beethoven or similar, and it recommended Pink Floyd. Fortunately that is no longer the case.

Maybe I’m easy to please, but Roon’s data management together with my own limited knowledge of recorded music allows me to have a very good user experience without wanting to throw my computer/mobile out the window.

Maybe there are issues, but then the world is not perfect. At a meeting between Felix Mendelssohn and Queen Victoria (who is usually classified as Queen or Empress, rarely Pianist), when asked her favourite piece of music she responded naming a piece that was probably written by Fanny Mendelssohn. Was that a metadata or user error?

As you appreciate, classical music is complicated. If I want recommendations for Daniel Barenboim, are they in his role as performer (piano) or conductor (opera or orchestral)? I’ve just had a look and it gives sensible recommendations and the discography is nicely ordered with more recent popular stuff and his older famous recordings. He is called “Artist”, which is quite sensible for someone who does so much.

I rarely post on this forum, but I listen to classical music a lot and I’ve posted because I find this version of Roon really very user friendly and it comes up with sensible, useable organisation of music files.

Maybe not Pink Floyd, but you still get trumpeters and mandolinists as Top Performers of Chopin piano works. You get Goethe, Klopstock and Hölderlin listed as “Top Composers” and much more. So not all is good - by far.

But all that’s been recognized, so there’s hope.

Did you see someone’s workaround

GOTO Composer Edit there is a Check Box is Classical composer , uncheck the Albums appear, worked for kempff at least.

Not a fix but mends the odd cadenza situation, maybe not Bernsthink who was actually both

That works for some, but not for others. I took that Check Box off for Süssmayr, so he is “not” a classical Composer. But he still shows up. Even as Top-Composer.

And then I dont really want to tick off Bernstein as a classical composer just to see his Mahler recordings… Its just a bad Eff-Up

I know it’s not the fix but at least it mends some

Problem is you don’t know who to mend, I just do it as I see it

I suspect the fix is a bit of a rethink around the classical changes

Or bring back the Composer Performer toggle

You wonder who is the “classical guru” over in that shop… Not even a Guru required, just base knowledge.

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I‘m skeptical this can be properly solved without adressing the root cause: crappy inconsistent metadata where performer and composer credits are not properly assigned.

And yes, I know that Roon does not do metadata. Personally, I would not be having this problem at all with my metadata, because I have not mixed up composers and performers. I do understand that it gets tricky as soon as streaming libraries are integrated. But for a file based library it would already help if Roon would not imposer primary artists which are not in the file tags.
This is what’s bringing composers into my Roon library at places where they are not supposed to be… I can‘t confuse Bernstein the performer with Bernstein the cmposer because my data is correct…

Honestly, I dont think that’d the core reason / root cause. It worked pretty well for me in 1.7. Its broken since 1.8. Dunno…

it worked in 1.7 because you did see both views, right?

with 1.8 they seem to have just changed the filter for the views. I have the feeling that this composer/performer improvement was not thought out properly. They wanted to please the „show me my Beethoven albums“ crowd (no pun intended) and did not test for all the consequences.

Yes, and those need to come back in some shape-or-form. Nothing has changed in the world of classical music just because of Roons poor design choices. :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

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Maybe Roon could or should hire a human curator for classical music? Since automation and machine learning is never going to solve the problems mentioned in this thread.

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yes, can we make this post a “feature” request?

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Either that or drop their silly claim to know anything about classical music.

I“d prefer the first option.

I had a quick look at Barenboim and that’s not what I see, so I am puzzled. I assumed roon was presenting us all with the same view but from what you say that doesn’t appear to be the case. Surely everyone sees the same thing? What I see is quite a bias to more recent recordings. So what I see in the recommendations on the Overview page, for example, is a 2012 disk with Barenboim conducting Elisa Weileirsein on Cello, but no earlier work with Jaqueline du Pre to balance that. I’m pretty sure a human expert would not have made the recommendations that way.

If I then go to the Discography I do see a Barenboim conducting du Pre disk and that even gets a higher billing than the Weilersein disk, so the machine learning seems to even have the data but roon chooses not to use it. Of course I can use my own experience to fill in the gaps and make sense of it all. But that isn’t he point of the thread.

The question we are discussing is does a machine learning approach really work where you don’t have any knowledge of your own to compensate if things go wrong? There are two use cases here. There are casual listeners who want guidance on the core repertoire. There are also more expert listeners who want guidance outside the core repertoire where they may also have little knowledge.

I like to think mine is the second use case. So, my real interest in this is I wanted to find what confidence I could have in the recommendations for artists/composers I have little knowledge of. I am using familiar artists/composers to see what confidence I could have. Personally I am seeing two issues. Performer/Composer’s as has been mentioned several times now but also a second case of less well known artists outside the core repertoire. It’s a guess but roon probably has much less data here and that is affecting the reliability of the recommendations.

Very well said, @Tony_Casey. Does the AI approach work for something you don’t have (acquired) sufficient knowledge about yourself? We probably have the answer on that. No, it doesnt. It will always need human guidance.

Even huge corporations struggle to get their AI working properly. A recent example: Apple introduced the use of articles in their Siri voice control for Homekit in iOS 14.3. What is a rather simple exercise in english (“the” is never too far off…), turned into a nightmare and the subject of many jokes in Spanish, French, German setups (to name just three):

Die Fernseher ist eingeschaltet”, “Ich habe der Stehlampe auf 50% gestellt”…and so on. Some it got right, so it was just lacking sufficient training for potential ‘gear’ on which it would need to know/get trained the fitting article. Apple being Apple, having a grown culture to correct mistakes, reversed course and took the articles feature off again in 14.4 for further ripening and grooming.

With that in mind, how would a company of the size of Roon want to seriously tackle AI? I had Maurizio Pollini (one of the greatest living pianists) showing up in a “Collaboration” with a Danish Soul Singer. Probably the result of some rotten metadata (or she collaborated with some other guy called Pollini, not an uncommon name in Italy). But how would/could AI know without a human telling it that this cant be and is just bullocks?

The other thing to consider is probably to introduce a two-tier model: Once you add a bunch of “curators” (not sure one can handle this), you of course get the valid question from those with somewhat more simplistic requirements in their respective Genres: Why should we pay for that?

Would I pay USD 150/160 a year for Roon if everything would really work as advertised as compared to USD 120? Of course. The added value of having someone weed thru all the Spam albums that clutter the available recording sections would already be worth some of that.

Would classical curation really fit into the Roon culture? I have some doubts about that. But in the end its only throwing out some ideas and thoughts …

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I find this baffling as as well, It was easy in 1.7 to switch between a performer and composer view.

André Previn is another one of these conductor/composers. It is not as if these are edge cases. So on the recommendations you get just composition discs and on the discography you get everything (composer/conductor/pianist/classical/jazz). It just looks as if you are getting only conductor/piano albums because that is mostly what the roon user base is playing and they rise to the top of the popularity sort.

Anyway, an hour or two ago roon was recommending a Poulenc chamber music album that happened to have a Previn Trio (did you even know he composed chamber music?). Now that is gone and replaced by a lot of Anne-Sophie Mutter discs of Previn Lieder. Another surprise. Personally I find it quite interesting but I cannot imagine why a human curator would be recommending these discs? Surely they would focus on the 1970’s LSO material?

Also I had the Previn recommendations window open in a browser and I was surprised to see how quickly the recommendations rotated. Its almost as if single plays affect the rotation. Very strange to me. Anyone else noticing this?

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I looked up Kalevi Aho. A fine Finnish composer, conductor, writer, professor. One of the few composers to write a sonata for 2 accordions.

Lots of albums, good recommendations (no weird ones), an excellent profile page.

Frankly, it would take you hours to get as much information about Kalevi Aho and his recorded works that you can get from Roon in seconds.

The more I look, the better I think 1.8 is and how useful it is for getting to music to listen to. It helps to come to the table not completely uninformed and ignorant of the subject matter. I’m sure it is possible to build a nuclear bomb from an instruction manual, but some knowledge of particle physics would probably assist and make the process a whole lot easier and more satisfying.

I get the feeling you are trying to prove 1.8 a failure. It is indexing and referencing data from millions of tracks and albums with heaven knows how many plays. What does it learn when I play Bach followed by John Coltrane? How can it possibly order 337 Barenboim albums in a manner that pleases everyone, including you?

In my experience, Roon 1.8 has yet to do anything really stupid, like recommending Pink Floyd from Beethoven. Nothing is perfect, metadata is not perfect, people are not perfect, Roon is not perfect. But it’s the best thing out there and I enjoy using it tremendously.

  • Calling Franz Xaver Süssmayr a “Top-Composer” of Choral music is really stupid
  • Listing Poets, Librettists and Lyricists as “Composers” is really stupid
  • Wiping out the Albums of an entire army of notable Composer-Performers in their Role as Performers is more than just really stupid

Maybe your definition of stupidity is slightly different from mine, but thats ok.

Kalevi Aho is a good guy btw. Like his music. :+1:

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