No, technical support will not solve metadata. But, crowdsourcing (analogous to valence) could. If your edits were visible to me automatically, or if there were a set of genre “moderators” who accepted or rejected edits for broad distribution, we could collectively make up for the shortcomings of the publishers and labels. I know there was a lot of sturm und drang about valence, and those concerns are still there, but I’d argue that my overall visual experience of Roon is far far better than before, with very little effort from me. Together we are stronger. And individually we are all (or at least many of us are) investing a lot of time. If we harness that energy, the value proposition of Roon gets better and better. And, theoretically, it could be much more “passive” (eg you wouldn’t have to go into another interface, or might have to less because you’re already doing the editing).
I mention this despite the fact that, as you say, it’s off topic, because support for the “functioning” of Roon is very different. People need their systems to work as advertised, and though mine works perfectly (fingers x’ed), the absolute number of people for whom it does not is growing. You make a good metaphorical point that metadata is part of the functionality, but I’ll argue that in a Maslowian sense, you need the music to play before you care about the metadata. At least I do.
A while back I suggested some form of crowdsourcing as way to improve metadata and I was quickly shot down by someone from Team Roon. I’ve also been asking for the ability view simple text files within Roon, similar to the way one can view image and PDF files and that idea was also shot down. One would think I was asking for Roon to able “scrub” metadata from a (properly formatted) text file and insert the metadata into Roon. Now wouldn’t that be something useful, as I have lots and lots of info.txt files just sitting in my music folders waiting to be viewed or transformed in metadata within Roon.
I guess that I wasn’t quite clear in my previous post but I agree with you 100% - first and foremost the music has to play properly, then comes the metadata, artwork and all those other Roon goodies.
This is something that also has occurred to me and I think it would be a great way to improve metadata, which regrettably is very much lacking, especially with the less popular and maybe also more complex genres ‘Jazz’ and ‘Classical’. But maybe from a marketing perspective the negative visual impact of lacking images was just deemed so much more important than incomplete or even false metadata.
Art Director was created because MusicBrainz lacks the same idea. It’s been hugely effective.
It’s too bad people don’t contribute to MusicBrainz as much. Maybe our Marketing department should be promoting that too! It’s clear the people in Marketing that wrote up the Roon Mastery Series are good at riling up people!
I will look into Musicbrainz, although that still does little to address the metadata missing from many new releases, particularly new jazz releases. I’m well aware that this issue is not due to any fault of Roon but things are steadily getting worse instead of improving.
Absolutely. Short of creating a Roon based tool, if MusicBrainz is where Roon consumes from then pointing your customers to them to fix data for them and you is a win-win.
I looked at using Musicbrainz myself, but frankly the submission process is pretty ugly (IMO) and Musicbrainz has some really odd rules, such as insisting that a classical composer should be registered using the Track Artist field. Style / Classical / Track Artist - MusicBrainz
If the barriers to submission were lowered and oddities were ironed out, there would probably be much more uptake.
Yeah, if you could make a submission to MusicBrainz directly from the Roon app, umm, that’d be amazing. Or if you could collect all the edits that Roon users have already made and contribute the “best of” (highest confidence) to MusicBrainz automatically, that’d be epic. (This small aspect of) the world would get better mighty fast.
[Edit: I should say @danny that this aspect of crowdsourcing is pretty much I think the power that could create lock-in / a moat; contributing all this data to MusicBrainz is awesome as citizens of the world, but you could do much more for Roon if you keep that data that users have contributed to yourself and the “best data” comes from being a Roon user. For now I do contribute a few times each month to MusicBrainz but almost exclusively when I find an album that is not in it, not when I’m frustrated by mistakes.]
Yeah, or have someone who is an expert on this collect the user contributions from Roon and submit them, like it already sometimes happens in Metadata, just more organized and reliably. I am happy to contribute but whenever I try to submit something to MB or Discogs and are not aware of the million arcane (and probably necessary) rules, I get scolded or there is an argument about this or that. It’s exhausting and currently I rather edit locally and spare myself all this.
Great, love that I can see things I knew are there but never used. While flip book style presentation forces me to go over all of them (and it is clean) I would use also another way to browse them. There was that layout for blogs, “cloud” if I remember correctly, where you have the list of all keywords and the size of the font for individual keywords was related to the number of times that keyword was being used. Or have links to them laid out over roons interface (I’ve always used mouse hover tips)
The Mastery Series is fine, however, I don’t always have time to explore the tip, and so it sits in my inbox. Is this series available on the Roon site? Or do I have to save each email and review when I can. Thanks.
