Using Roon for tagging

Thanks Geoff.

I understand Roon’s principle. It’s just too bad that
Roon is not meant for tagging, nor is Roon meant for browsing by folder structure (in a separate thread.)

  1. I don’t use “organized folders”, the use was meant for experimentation to see if file names get changed, wlll Plex recognize it easily. The answer was no.
  2. I know Roon is not meant for tagging, that’s why I was hoping it could be provided as an option.

If these option were provided, I will live in the Roon world when playing music. With these features lacking, I have to use other software to browse, tag, play music.

I hope one company one day will be able to provide such immersive complete user experience.

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OK. Roon is sufficient as a complete immersive experience for me.

Personally, I see no point in wanting to browse by folder. That’s down at a nuts and bolts level from my point of view. It strikes me as wanting to keep horse reins and a buggy whip when you drive a car (auto). But, to each their own… :slight_smile:

+1

I access my music collection from both ROON and MinimServer (I have Astell&Kern DAP that supports OpenHome) and I wish I could use ROON metadata for tagging my files.

There is lots of excellent software for tagging - foobar, mp3tag, tag&rename to name just a few plus there are heavyweights like jrivers mediacenter. I feel there is absolutely no need to add tagging to roon. In fact that would mean bloating the product and loosing focus on the main purpose, which is exploring and discovery of music and relations between music and musicians.

Having said that it might be an option to call third party software so execute tasks like tagging. Allowing this one could use applications optimized for a task at hand.

Does anyone use Bliss?

It’s useful for tidying things and getting consistency in your library. Great at finding missing stuff like year, artwork etc., spurious genres and so on.

Yes, and one of the most awesome aspects of Roon is that it preserves the original metadata and any edits that one makes get stored in the Roon database, not in the file tags. But nevertheless, there are times when the Roon data is superior to what is in the tags (and sometimes the files might be completely untagged), so it would be awesome if one could, on a case by case basis, explicitly cause the metadata as currently displayed in Roon, to be written back to the file’s tags. I had thought that Export would do this, but it doesn’t seem to do that for me. All that happens is that I get a copy of my files in the export destination with the metadata untouched. Is there a way to capture the Roon data in my files? And what, exactly does Export do?

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I agree with Robert. One of Roon’s most powerful features is the promise that we don’t have to work at filling in all the tags. For me, this is not yet true for classical music, but they are clearly working to achieve it.

I appreciate that Roonlabs isn’t eager for us to use Roon to fill in tags, then flee to another program as our standard player. But most of us play some music on phones, iPods, or other portable systems. That’s where an export function that does populate the tags would really help.

-SK

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[quote=“Esskay, post:12, topic:6888, full:true”]
I appreciate that Roonlabs isn’t eager for us to use Roon to fill in tags, then flee to another program as our standard player. [/quote]
I doubt very much that this is a valid assumption. It’s much more likely to be that Roon is focusing its limited developer resource on what are seen as the key product differentiators of Roon.

Roon becoming yet another ID3 tag editor is not the best use of that resource.

Geoff,
Agreed. But an export option that maps its metadata into tags wouldn’t make Roon another tag editor. It would make Roon a more complete music management system. I think Roon should try to make tag editors irrelevant for its users.

After identifying the albums, and after (a little) editing by the user, Roon has the information to properly tag the files. Why should we have to do that manually in order to properly use the music on portable systems?

-SK

Is there something specific you’re looking for that the current export functionality doesn’t do?

The biggest issue I’m aware of is with how multiple versions of the same album are handled, meaning multiple copies end up in the same folder. We have a ticket open to get that resolved.

There are also times where the subtlety of Roon’s metadata can’t easily be expressed in file tags. Other than that, basic Roon metadata should be written to tags on export.

@mike,

Sounds good to me. I was relying on Robert’s post in which he said that export left tags untouched. I’m still setting up my audio system, so I haven’t yet tried exporting to a portable player.

-SK

Organized folders leave tags untouched, but we are likely to deprecate that feature soon.

I wasn’t talking about organized folders, but the “Export” feature. I thought that it was supposed to make a copy of the exported tracks with the metdata as shown in Roon. It doesn’t do that, at least in my system. Am I missing something? What I want to do is to (a) create a second version of my Roon library with metadata identical to what I currently see in Roon while eliminating all duplicate albums. This is to create a second Roon system in a second home. (b) Convert files created in (a), as necessary, to MP3 to play on my iPhone. For what it’s worth, although the Sooloos export system was really glitchy, when it worked, it had all the functionality I’m looking for.

Hey @rbienstock – can you be a little more specific about this:

Other than the issues I mentioned above, this seems to be working.

I just found an unidentified album in my library with a messy album title, exported it, fixed up the identification, and exported again to a different folder. The “before” and “after” exports reflect the updated metadata in Roon, but let me know what you’re seeing and we’ll take a look.

I’m away until next week when I’ll try to reproduce, but when I do, I’ll report back. It didn’t work for me when I tried it, but that was a good while ago, definitely before 1.2, so maybe this has been fixed. I had files that had been ripped from DVD Audio that had no metadata and the tracks were called “Title 1 Chapter 1,”, “Title 1 Chapter 2,” etc. When I exported, it fixed the file names, but the metadata was unchanged when I opened the files in dBPoweramp in order to convert to MP3. Does this mean that I could use export to make a copy of my entire Roon library by exporting to a new destination? I have lots of metadata that could use cleaning up.

Out of J. River, dbPoweramp, foobar I have yet to find any media software that automatically pulls down composer tags for FLAC. As lacking as Windows Media Player was it at least used to automatically pull down missing composer info on my Windows Media Audio Lossless files.

Does anyone know of media playback software that pulls down and sets/embeds composer tags for songs? The majority of my stuff is FLAC then after that DSD files. (I transcoded all my old WMA Lossless files over to FLAC using J River) I wish Roon could embed tags like this as it’s excellent at simply displaying composer info but that’s it.

Most of my collection is Jazz and classical so a lot of times I really want to know who the composer is which is not always obvious with Jazz. I interact with my music on multiple devices that are not Roon compatible (Sony HAP-Z1ES, downloaded music to my Pixel XL phone on the go, music served locally to multiple Chromecast Audios, various speakers with Chromecast built-in and a NAD Chromecast amp throughout our home, as well as music served remotely via BubbleUPnP and AssetUPnP) that I’d like to see the composer info displayed. Having it only show up in Roon is frustrating. I’d actually be willing to pay more if I could get automatic tagging of missing info embedded from Roon.

You can Export your Album files which will create file tags based on the Roon metadata. It’s free with your Roon licence.

Can’t speak for the others, but dbPoweramp will certainly pull down and insert Composer tags into files - assuming that the information is there in the metadata sources that it uses. Admittedly, my main music genre is classical, and the composer is more likely to be present than for jazz.

Thereby hangs the tale …

The reason software like JRiver doesn’t auto fill Composer is normally the some “thoughtful person” has put Beethoven as the Artist … WHY ?

What a thrill to hear Beethoven as a performing artist

What was that acronym SISO sorry GIGO

As. JRiver user I always check what I import , there’s no way round it…,

Mike