Who are you, Roonie?

Credits, dates, etc.

Roon doesn’t get metadata from the streaming services AFAIK, it’s from TiVo and Musicbrainz.

Nothing changed for me in this regard whatsoever. If you are losing hyperlinks, somethings seems wrong.

Can you give any examples of links that have gone?

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@Suedkiez @DaveN

So I’m guessing that neither of you listen to much jazz. I picked a somewhat well known jazz musician, well known within the jazz world that is, for I have some older and some newer recordings in my library, both local file and streaming files, to show how rich metadata makes for a worthwhile Roon experience and how the lack of meaningful metadata makes for worthless Roon experience.

The musician: Jamie Baum


Discography:

Recording with real metadata:





Each musician’s name is hyperlinked and one can do a deep “Roon” dive on each one and discover all kinds of wonderful things.

And now two recordings with no meaningful metadata:





Nothing to click on, nothing to explore, nothing to discover.

As I said, lack of metadata kills Roon.

Yes I fully understand most, if not all, of the metadata missing from these two recordings can probably be found on the internet with a little searching but then one would be “leaving” Roon and that is not the same thing as discovering everything within Roon. Besides as a Roon subscriber one is paying for the wonderful Roon experience obtained with rich metadata and not the dead-end experience obtained when there is no meaningful metadata.

Team Roon needs a game plan to address this worsening metadata situation and so far I’ve not seen any indication that Team Roon even cares.

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You made it seem as if you were losing metadata that existed previously when you wrote „my Roon library is quickly losing most hyperlinks.“

That’s what’s not the case for me.

Jazz or not, the metadata is often missing or incorrect and this sucks, but it’s nothing that’s new to me. Try any other minority genre.

This is precisely why I prefer making extensive metadata edits in Roon only for albums that I have locally.

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And that presents yet another issue:

I often list the musicians playing on a recording within the file tags (under “artists”) only to have Roon “over write” them with less information, as in no musicians listed, after the recording is identified by Roon. Again, I know that are very time consuming and very involved methods of editing the metadata within Roon but if I’m going to be doing all this work then why am I paying Roon? I feel very strongly that the lack of meaningful metadata for many, many new releases is really Roon’s problem and Roon should be the entity working to resolve the issue. not the paying Roon users.

Roon is a classic example of modern American capitalism: I pay you for something but I get next to nothing.

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Like @Suedkiez I thought you meant that you were losing pre-existing metadata, but clearly that’s not happening. With respect to your first example (Bridges, by Jamie Baum Septet) it’s clear that the data has been missing since 2018, i.e. it was never added by the metadata providers, so doesn’t indicate a “worsening metadata situation”. In the case of your second example (released 5th April 2024), it’s only been out for a few days so the data may well be added shortly.

I agree with your general point - it would be great if we had rich and copious metadata for everything - but I see no evidence that things are getting worse.

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As far as I’m concerned Roon is the metadata provider - that’s how they advertise Roon and that’s what I pay Roon do to. Putting the blame for the lack of metadata on others is a very lame excuse and completely unacceptable.

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IIRC we discussed the exact same thing in the past. My opinion back then was that even if we agree on this, there’s just no way that Roon staff is going to fix metadata of 100 million releases The problem is so big that I don’t think that even Samsung can fix it

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“Finds and displays”. It doesn’t say they create or curate it. You can complain about it, and most folk would agree that more/better metadata would be a good thing, but to put this back onto Roon as a “lame excuse” and “completely unacceptable” seems to indicate that you don’t really understand the scope of the problem. There’s absolutely no way, as @Suedkiez just mentioned, that Roon have the capability to fix this.

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Danke. Sie bestätigen damit meine Erkenntnisse.

Ich habe vor eigen Tagen aufgehört Roon zu nutzen. Es ist nutzlos und zeitraubend sich weiter mit fehlenden oder falschen Metadaten zu beschäftigen. Was mich neben den hier genannten Problemen störte, sind die Platzhalter (nur Albumname und Albumartist).

Translation:

Thanks. This confirms my findings.

I stopped using Roon a few days ago. It is useless and time-consuming to continue to deal with missing or incorrect metadata. What bothered me, in addition to the problems mentioned here, are the placeholders (only the album name and album artist).

And I could not agree more!

Das war es für mich schon immer. Trotzdem kann man in diesem Fall Roon nicht alleine die Schuld geben, da es hier um die Infrastruktur geht und nicht um den Inhalt. Wenn es keine sinnvollen Daten gibt kann man sie schlichtweg nicht finden. Das gilt für jede Musik Software. Vielleicht hätte man besser schreiben sollen: “Searches and displays”, aber das klinkt natürlich nicht so gut :wink:
Ich benutze Roon daher nicht nur wegen Metadata sonern auch zur zentralisierung meiner Musik im Haus.

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You are correct on all counts. Nonetheless without rich metadata for Roon to find (since Roon clearly doesn’t lift a finger to actually provide metadata), one’s Roon music library becomes nothing more than a simple listing, which is already available from any of the many music streaming services.

If Roon doesn’t address this metadata problem then many present Roon users will become former Roon users, as like Helmut (as above).

@Suedkiez @DaveN Please understand that I have no issues with you or your opinions. My issue is with Team Roon.

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That rises for me the question: how bad is it in your case? It sounds like you have quite a lot of albums missing meta data.
I don’t know how much it is in my case but not as bad to think about not using Roon any longer.

I agree that it’s a problem, but no one entity is going to fix it. The labels are usually in the best position to enter metadata into MusicBrainz or TiVo, and if they can’t be bothered my issue is mostly with them.

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For jazz recorded prior to 2000 it’s not all that bad, i.e. there’s usually lots of metadata available.

For jazz recorded this century it’s pretty bad and getting worse with most new releases.

For recordings by Taylor Swift or any other major pop star it’s not an issue at all. There’s enough metadata available to choke a horse.

There are lots of errors in these, though, if you look closely, like name equivalence etc.

I’ve Roon Lifetime and have almost 30 Roon Ready devices. I’ve never been into the metadata or ever compiled a playlist. I use Roon for its multi-room and grouping capability and my wife uses it much of the time in her clinic. In my main 2-channel system I use Innuos Sense with Qobuz native and NAS files. I don’t ARC because I prefer to use public transport and read a book.

I have a strange way of choosing music. I go to concerts, hear people play, come home and search them. I buy things called magazines that come in the post every month, I read the reviews and articles and select from there. I suppose you could call it an analogue approach to digital music selection.

For me Roon is too much information most of the time, the most important thing for me is album booklets and I sometimes get a little irritated if they are missing.

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I created a new topic to try and address the metadata issue: Blame Game

Certainly true, but in case of the latest album published just a few days ago, I would give that a bit of time. If there is anyone being interested in that music contributing to MusicBrainz, I would expect more data to appear sooner or later.

For the 2018 album ´Bridges´ I found pretty consistent and more or less complete data on Discogs:

It shows how valuable a roon connection to discog´s database would be, being aware of the enormous difficulties when it comes to legal issues as well as identifying valid metadata on discos from duplicates and metagarbage.

I fully understand your dissatisfaction but I prescribe a huge portion to the fact that you are referring to albums which are not sold in mass quantities, published by record labels who seem not have interest in complete, consistent metadata. Don’t know why this is more widespread among Jazz labels and some minor classical ones.

I think roon team absolutely cares, but they might also have data indicating that this is not necessarily an issue concerning a large fraction of their subscribers.

Would not say that. Some genres like Electronic, Prog-rock, even hiphop for example, these artists seem to have a pretty loyal fanbase caring for metadata on MusicBrainz even if they sell small quantities as well. With classical music, many labels have been pretty keen on delivering metadata to libraries and other sources in the past so it is not a widespread problem (it is more the questionable quality of metadata in this case).

Jazz unfortunately is somewhere in between and artists seemingly not selling huge quantities miss to have a fanbase being into extensive information crowdsourcing.