Using custom tags, again, in Classical music

Support
1

Since potentially related posts are many months old, I’m starting a new thread.

My music library was ripped and tagged before Roon came about. It has the usual tags, plus some added, all stored in file metadata.

My library uses broad genres with several custom tags to narrow things down. A lot of music is classified genre=“Classical”, and as an example of the problem, a few of those discs are also tagged subgenre=“Solo keyboard” and Instrument=“Fortepiano”. The two are custom fields (tags) used throughout my music library.

I can search in JRiver under “Mendelssohn fortepiano” and the relevant albums show up. I can also find such music easily on my DLNA system using MinimServer and BubbleUPnP. But using Roon, that search turns up only a few Tidal albums.

Is there a way I can get Roon to use these tags in searches? I do not want to edit the Roon metadata track by track!

2

Hi Mike,

This KB page sets out how to prefer your own file tag genres to Roon genres.

3

Thanks for the reply, @andybob. The KB page seems to deal with genres only. It’s not clear how I would use that information to have roon do something with my “Instrument” tag.

4

At the moment you can create Roon Tags from your custom file tags which will enable you to Focus or Play albums with those tags.

Unfortunately you cannot currently Focus on custom file tags in order to conveniently create Roon tags for the group with a series of clicks. Once you can get to a screen full of albums with the same custom file tag then you can Select/Select All/Create Tag.

One way of currently conveniently tagging albums with custom file tags is to use a temporary Work directory. Use a file tag manager to Move all albums with a particular custom tag to the temporary directory. In Roon enable the temporary directory as a Watched folder, Focus on the albums in that directory with Focus/Inspector/Storage Location and then Select/Select All/ Create Tag. Move the files back to your Music folder. Rinse and repeat.

There is a lot of work being done on this functionality in 1.3. I don’t believe the process I have described above will be wasted by the changes in 1.3, but there may be changes which will make use of custom file tags easier.

5

Thanks for the elaboration. This seems like too much work. I think I’ll wait for 1.3 and see if there might be a method of doing this quickly.