Versions of tracks - not Performances

Touched on in other threads, there seems to be some important track information missing from or stripped-out of the titles when you (Roon) scan the albums :-

In this case, the whole point of the album is that there are several remixes of the same track, so simply showing two / three “copies” of the same track name isn’t very “helpful”. I know (sometimes…!) which of the mixes is the one I want to listen to, or to rate / tag as more preferable, but the scanning has removed all differentiation. Sometimes I don’t know which one is the one I want, so how will I choose / remember if there’s no (textual) differentiation ?

I have a lot of examples of this through my largely Rock / Pop / Electronic orientated collection, and I appreciate that there are also complexities with versions / performances in Jazz & Classical too, but I think the simplest answer is to just keep / maintain the complete track title from the already embedded metadata, with a perceived higher validity rating than from your database (just a suggestion). You could then perhaps flag any mismatches / queries, check your / Allmusic / MusicBrainz data, and make corrections accordingly.

Let me know if you need any more examples : I have CD’s which are literally just different mixes of the same track, and they’re not giving me any chance to differentiate between them…

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Here’s another example.
Actually, I can’t select / edit / search for the correct version of the CD at all within Roon (I would really recommend you build Discogs compatibility into your search engine ! http://www.discogs.com/Everything-But-The-Girl-Missing/release/64064) but in this example the track titles are “all over the place”… Every track on this CD should be titled “Missing” by Everything But The Girl, but they’re all alternative mixes from various DJ’s. This has to be specified & clear somehow, otherwise it’s just…well… :flushed:

However, I understand that this is really complicated : building an engine for all eventualities is a very involved task, so these are just examples of where it’s falling down - just another challenge for you !

Keep up the good work & let me know if you need any more examples ! :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

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I’ve noticed the same thing and have hundreds of albums where this is the case and I find it kinda annoying. I know Roon are working on a fix, but I would like to see it corrected sooner rather than later… it’s one thing that’s preventing me from getting a lifetime license (also seeing the iOS app in action).

This is usually a problem that traces back to Rovi. Check the metadata on Allmusic.com and see if it is the same as above.

We have been asking for a notes field for albums, works, performance, tracks, artists, for some time. That would be one solution.

I’ve noticed the same thing and have hundreds of albums where this is the case and I find it kinda annoying. I know Roon are working on a fix, but I would like to see it corrected sooner rather than later… it’s one thing that’s preventing me from getting a lifetime license (also seeing the iOS app in action).

Aside from critical issues like crashes and the like, iOS and providing a reasonable experience for people with pre-existing clean/groomed metadata are our two highest priorities at the moment.

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@Ludwig : Or adding a meta source that is a) free and b) doesn’t have these problems in most of the cases in comparison to Rovi who have 100s of these problems. There are just a few people now here who were kindly asking for discogs because the data quality is very high regarding tracks and releases. I think they also hope for that in the future like I do.

This really doesn’t make one happy :

while this does …

The list of such issues is very very long. For me it’s great if Roon soon supports people with highly groomed metadata in future releases like @brian mentioned, because my metadata is full, but this would also help people who don’t have rich metadata.

From my talks to @brian I know that Roon doesn’t produce eye-candy software but rather has visions of something really great. But correct track naming / versioning / remixing info etc. should be really core functionality. In these cases the functionality is absolutely there (Roon side) but the data provided has not the quality like other providers have.

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I agree, Rovi is doing bad here. I thought that maybe we were stripping the strings, but I looked into this one, and it’s not on our end.

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, we are looking into incorporating Discogs data, which seems to do better at this kind of thing. This is a solvable problem.

I hope that Roon will be able to up the game regarding Rovi and others by demanding improvements on this sort of thing.

I doubt that we will be able to “fix” Rovi on this point. While they have been receptive to our corrections in the past, the scale of this problem is too big for our development team to report them one by one.

It’s more likely, we’ll attempt to solve this data on our end by mixing data from different sources.

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[quote=“brian, post:9, topic:1996”]
the scale of this problem is too big for our development team to report them one by one
[/quote]This is why we need Roon “trusted users” crowed source input being feed back from Roon directly to Rovi … to cut out your team.

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Yup. We have the very beginnings of user-generated-content-gathering infrastructure sitting around half-finished…needs to be finished once a few of the big-ticket items are crossed off the list.

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