I’m a new user and have been moving my extensive library to Roon. I’m trying to figure out what to do with unidentified albums. Asking it to re-identify doesn’t help; it can’t find anything that matches really.
For example, I have a 20-SACD box set of Wilhelm Furtwangler’s Radio Recordings 1939-45 released by Berlin Philharmonic last year. (I’m ripping them in DSD form.) It doesn’t recognize any of them and doesn’t have any information on the compositions and the credits.
So how do I update the metadata? Can I? It seems to say that if it doesn’t know about it, just rest easy, it’ll be added soon.
Thanks for any help. I looked for a guide for this but didn’t find any.
You can flag @support. They can then ask for samples and see if they can get Roon to identify them. If they can, they can feed how back to you. If they can’t they can approach the metadata providers.
I tag unidentified albums with something like mp3tag or jRiver. Then my tags show up in Roon. When you tag the track name, make sure you use the exact same wording allmusic uses for the composition movements. Then you have a good chance the composition will show up as well as your tags for artist, composer etc.
A bit of a chore, but it works (well most of the time).
The issue is that tivo / allmusic more often than not cannot be bothered to put niche products such as big box sets into their database (which is where Roon get most of their metadata).
With an unidentified album, one can still identify compositions. I modify the WORK and PART tags with the canonical form of names copied and pasted from AllMusic. Most of the time I can get all the album’s tracks identified if not the album itself.
My tagger and identifier of choice is Yate for the Mac.
Tagging your songs before you add to roon will help roon to identify them, and also provide roon with some metadata it can use to better display your albums that it still failed to identify.
BTW you say that you are ripping your files to DSD, I would recommend you use DSF instead because DSD does not support storing metadata in the file itself, whereas DSF does.
Thanks for all the help. I’ll try updating the metadata myself. Allmusic is pretty crap. They have one entry for the entire box set and it just has the conductor and the title. That’s it!
Unfortunately, this is a good example of a niche taste (historical recordings) on a small very specialist label (Berlin Philharmoniker Recordings) with little or no public metadata that roon cannot (maybe never will) identify. In those circumstances if you are going to the trouble of manually tagging a 22CD box, allmusic is a good source of cannonical composition names. Cutting and pasting these, although you cannot get an album identification you can usually get composition identifications as mentioned by @John_V further up. Really helps with search and integrating the box into the rest of your library even though it is unidentified. It’s a very big ask but some, if they are going to this trouble, post on Musicbrainz so others can benefit.
If you want to get the compositions identified, you need to look up the compositions themselves on allmusic and then concatenate the composition and the parts names as track titles, such as:
Symphony No. 9 in D minor (“Choral”), Op. 125 - 1. Allegro ma non troppo