What is optimal classical metadata structure for Roon?

Support Metadata
41

Perhaps a KB article on File Tagging Best Practice might help answer your question?

42

Perhaps, indeed!

Thank you, Geoff, I will take a look.

43

This does not give me warm fuzzies:

You’ll get much better results if you stick with the likes of the following:

* Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
* Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky
* Paul McCartney
* Richard Rodgers; Oscar Hammerstein II

than if you use:

* Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus
* Ludwig van Beethoven (1770-1827)
* Rodgers and Hammerstein

This seems like exactly the kind of drudgery I was hoping to avoid.

44

I read that with a wink. I have around 250 DJ mix albums (global underground, balance, fabric. Etc) and used the album artist as composer originally in iTunes.

45

Yes, I definitely agree. Especially because MusiCHI (I’m guessing I’m not the only one who has used it to standardize a classical library) defaults to one of the formats that is not recommended.

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46

Bear in mind guys that you may get better results simply letting Roon identify your music. Where Roon can’t identify, that’s probably when you want to step in with file tagging. Roon has no requirement that you edit your tags perfectly. :slight_smile:

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47

in fact only glitch I have is “Performed by” showing the composer that, for classical music, I placed in the “Artist” tag too

48

Don’t put the Composer in an Artist tag.

You can put the word “bananas” in all your file tags too if you want, but don’t be surprised if Roon gets confused and displays it sometimes.

49

too late: been doing it (on purpose) for 15+ years :grin:

btw: found I can fix “Performed by” showing, in Roon, the Composer too (because it’s in my Artist tag) by editing credits and unchecking it as “Primary Artist”

but looks it can only be done track by track :suicide:

50

This is the thing here - isn’t the idea generally that Roon identifies the album based on the metadata / the original disc TOC and pulls in information from their suppliers via the internet. The main issue here seems to be the quality of data for classical music.

Maybe Roon could be a little smarter with unidentified albums - say sensing all versions of 'Beethoven’and grouping them together (and displaying them the same way) - and if it sees ‘Beethoven’ and ‘Symphonie Nr.9’ in an unidentified album then it should twig that it is Symphony No.9 Choral Op. 125 (or whatever), tag it with suitable genres (classical, symphonic, romantic etc.) and show it in the library. (?)

For those who want to continue to curate their own collections, maybe their should be a ‘display only’ option with the option (through a setup screen) for users to match Roon display fields with their metadata fields. One done you can still ‘focus’ and search as normal. This could be restricted by genre, so you could choose to let Roon do its thing for the rest of your music.

51

btw… just found this:

from: http://blog.musichi.eu/post/3617245298/the-zen-of-classical-music-tagging-part-2-with

52

No: that’s the good thing in Roon 1.3 – you can do it for all tracks at once. This is explained here:

It seems that you can edit only about 500 tracks at once, but that’s better than one-by-one.

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53

oh, wow, thanks a lot: giving it a try right now :slight_smile:

54

Oh dear god - how to screw up the quality of your metadata - what on earth were they thinking of with this “recommendation”?

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55

actually since “Album Artist” tag was “universally” adopted… only choice about what to put in “Artist” is duplicating “Composer” or duplicating “Album Artist”

for Clasical I opted for duplicating Composer and to duplicate Album Artist for everything else

a Roon global option to consider/ignore “Artist” would truly be great :wink:

56

Nope - for compilation albums, where the Album artist should be “Various Artists”, the Track artist (i.e. the Artist) should be the individual artists on that track…

2 Likes
57

It’s too bad that producers, artists and labels of classical music recordings during the last 100 years did not think of how to organise their labelling so we don’t have a problem with meta data. As we cannot change this fact, I organised my classical library very simply:

Track: the name of the piece or movement (without the full text of the work, Symphony # 2…) because this information is in the album title.

Album Artist: That’s the name that is common to all tracks. If the album contains only work from one single composer, I put the composer (Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus) there. If the album contains pieces from more than one composer, I put the performing conductor there (Herbert von Karajan), but if there is an important soloist, it’s this name (Anne-Sofie von Otter). Note that with composers I list family name first, with conductors and other performers, I prefer the full name, first-family. That’s like with Jazz/Rock artists.

Artist: For me this is the actual performers (and never ever the composers) because performers (soloists, e.g.) may change between pieces. So a typical entry would be George Solti - Chicago Symphony, name of Soloist.

Album: I hate to have miles of text in the Album tag. So I shorten it accordingly.
Händel - Rinaldo - Hogwood, Bartoli.

Composer: Georg Friedrich Händel (1685-1759)

Genre: As I am not such a specialist able to clearly discern styles (romatic etc…) I prefer periods, like Classical Old (e.g. baroque), Classical (for the classical classical period), … Classical Contemporary (for the living composers).

Comments: Anything important

…my 5 cents

58

sure: one and only scenario where it doesn’t duplicate an existing tag :wink:

59

If you read the rest of the article (or series of articles), I think the scheme they propose makes sense. It’s not as though they are not capturing composer, artists, performers, etc. It’s just a question of where in the ID3 tag they are putting the info.

I think the recommendation is actually a good idea, based on how legacy devices and programs handle tags. If I’m going to copy my files to a portable device that does not support the composer tag, I would prefer to be able to navigate to an “artist” named Bach and then choose an album accordingly, rather than having to sort through the dozens or hundreds of classical performers. And, back in the day, many devices/software (including iTunes/iPod) did not support the Album Artist tag, leaving you with pretty much only Artist and Album.

As an example, take BWV 248. Here are the people/entities involved in one of my recordings of it:
Gudrun Schmid; Gerhard Rehm; Graeme Nicolson; Elisabeth KĂźnstler; Kammerorchester Collegium Musicum TĂźbingen; Wolfgang Herrlitz; Balinger Kantorei; Charlotte Lehmann; Ulrich Schaible; Georg Jeiden; Stephen Cleobury.

Now it may be that sometimes you really, really want that Ulrich Schaible sound. But if I’m on a device where I can only look at one field to identify who is “responsible” for the music, I’d rather have a bunch of entries under Bach than a long list of performers. But, hey, different strokes …

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60

exactly the reason why, 15+ years ago when I started ripping my CDs, I opted for composer in the “Artist” tag (for Classical music): iTunes and an iPod where all I had for digital files :smiley: